AI's 3 Pronged Attack on Society
- Fred
- Jul 21
- 5 min read
Do you know why people want to drag Billionaires into the streets and beat them, Mussolini-Style?
Because once you make so much money, you become consumed with making MORE money.
All right kids, it's story time. As we have mentioned a few times before, we used to work at the mind-numbingly banal corporation, Iron Mountain. Why use the word "we?" Because Beacon of Speech co-founder Ted and I worked at the Mountain together and he can verify my accounts.
The man in charge of our little slice of heaven was Steve and his title was a Data Storage Manager. Compared to the other Corporate Lackeys, he really wasn't that bad of a guy. Steve's problem? I don't think he really understood how business worked. If Steve didn't die from gross obesity, he would have countered that I didn't understand how the working world functioned.
Whenever employees stepped out of line, he was quick to blurt out that he couldn't wait to fire us. But here's the ruse, he didn't want to train new people either, it was his own private version of a Catch-22 Hell. His dream, which he would share with us often, was to have a full warehouse with no employees, just well-behaved customers that came and went as business needs dictated.
Ironically, no one really knew what Steve did all day. He touted that he answered hundreds of emails, and dealt with people throughout work hours, but whenever Ted and I went to his office, he was watching YouTube videos.
As a typical Middle Manager, Steve thought his bosses were geniuses and his employees were morons.
Why bore you with the minutiae of the mundane?
In our corner of Iron Mountain, we didn't create any new customers. Since our business line was data storage, every time a multinational corporation opted for the cloud, Iron Mountain would downsize through attrition. If any other competitor became too strong, Iron Mountain would simply buy them out, take their customer base, and then spit out the carcass.
But not unlike a vulture that has its place in its ecosystem, Iron Mountain continues to run on the strategy of Managed Obsolescence.
Steve, though, thought his paycheck would continue as he eliminated business lines, like there was a magical spigot that supplied his paycheck.
It's rudimentary accounting, once your column doesn't exist, your cash flow doesn't exist. You better have an escape pod to another column.
Steve didn't comprehend that once there were no workers, no customer base, or no building, he thought the company would keep him around, like an overpaid court jester. He thought of Iron Mountain as a multi-legged corporate octopus, he would just find another appendage. His loyalty was seemingly more important than others' loyalty...
....until it wasn't.
These are the 3 Fronts in which AI attacks Society:
Religious: Quietly, just last month, Pope Leo XIV released his treatise against Artificial Intelligence called MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. "Paragraph 59. Recognizing that every man and woman possesses an inalienable dignity, together with rights that no human power can betray or nullify, requires us to shape the way we live together, including our economic and political choices, and the makeup of our cities. From this arises the first major principle of Social Doctrine that I wish to highlight: the common good. We can describe it as the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person. When Benedict XVI referred to the non-negotiable values that the Church must always defend, he included among them “the promotion of the common good.” [75] For a Christian, going beyond the narrow confines of one’s own interests and committing oneself, within the limits of one’s ability, to the common good is a non-negotiable value, as is the promotion of life." I have nothing to add to the Pope's sound reasoning.
Occupational: Now the Pope came at AI from a humanistic angle. Mine is more jaded, yet pragmatic: "AI is the collective mind...so you don't have to pay to individual minds." What exactly do I mean by that? Every time I read a story about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or their ilk, they all have the same basic mindset, THEY worked hard to get to the top, but their employees were a bunch of sewer rats that held them back. Unlike billionaires of the by-gone days, today's billionaires, not unlike Middle-Manager Steve, were convinced that the biggest problems in their companies were the employees. Your counterargument is that Henry Ford or John Rockefeller would have downsized their employee base if they could? I don't doubt that for a second, but it's not 1920. Now Steve was a bit delusional, thinking that sending funny memes to his bosses would keep him employed, but for those at the top of corporations in 2026, they are convinced that AI will keep that Money Spigot flowing at the expense of human beings.
Environmental: When I worked at Iron Mountain, I went to Data Centers every single day. They are the most boring places on God's Green Earth. Most have false floors for the miles of cable that run underneath and there's a constant, low-level hum of cooling fans. Some bigger data centers have a loud hum of around 95 decibels, which is about 10 decibels above harmful levels for human hearing. There's no art or plants, nothing that makes the place even remotely human, only row after row of servers. The only color in a data center is in the color-coated grids on the walls, or color-coated wires. Colors don't exist for sensory resonance, simply for practical reasons. A Data Center is really just an oversized representation of a computer, with a bunch of smaller computers inside. On an existential level, it is ominous that computers, that used to get smaller, are now getting bigger again. That giant computer needs constant maintenance and upkeep. A generation ago, everyone touted solar and wind as the future, no one told you that solar panels had a short life expectancy and needed to be rotated constantly, or that wind turbines broke down all the time. Data Centers can't be left alone for a day and are monitored at all times, not unlike a nuclear power plant. The infrastructure demands, in terms of natural resources, for today's Data Centers are alarming.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, workers banded together and formed unions to force the rich to give the worker better working conditions and better wages. Why did the rich eventually capitulate? Because they didn't want to be strung up by their entrails
AI is simply a scam run by the rich so they don't have to pay white collar workers or copyright fees.
If the United States flips to Socialism, guess what happens to the rich? I may starve, but my intestines will be intact.
And, the funniest part of all this is, what if Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al., really AREN'T the smartest guys in the room? Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States, despite BILLIONS in investments across dozens of companies, are now falling behind the Chinese in AI capabilities. What happens if Chinese AI breaks through and achieves the singularity? Intuition is that an AI created with Chinese values may not translate to American Soil, and we couldn't do anything about it.
Also this week, the Atlantic reported that if AI companies in America don't start generating huge revenues soon, it could capsize an economy driven by the stock market.
Over in Russia, Vladimir Putin, like many Tech Billionaires in America, is trying to live forever.
This is a general rule for billionaires: Medical Science still hasn't advanced far enough to re-assemble the parts of the human being on the receiving end of a FPV Kamikaze Drone.
Watched 4 (out of 4) Star Movie about AI while I was working on this article:
I highly recommend.
Comments