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Germany’s chancellor warned of a “fundamental change” in the transatlantic relationship, and said Europeans should act as if the “decades of Pax Americana” are “largely over.” He argued that Europe is “not at war,” but “no longer simply living in peace,” and warned that if Ukraine falls, “Putin won’t stop.”
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How do sane people read this and compare it to the printing press or people’s fear of technologies?
That is mere duffus barking! This is different. It was possible to get away from those technologies.
No one became addicted to their wrench, sewing machine or their refrigerator or their lawnmower. These technologies did not have the capacity to give some unknown person or system access to one’s life and nor have they capacities to manipulate one’s opinion on nearly every aspect of life. The scale of the impact of the automobile, the telephone and the airplane was they they did not replace everyday repetitive or creative tasks; with the capacity to retain personal data.
Social media and Artificial intelligence are different in every respect and represent both opportunities to build a good society - as my colleagues Daniel Schmachtenberger, Tristan Harris and Audrey Tang are trying to do - and yet because of the power relations of our social, political and economic models, they pose a virulent existential risk; if only because we are stupid enough to misread the doltish pleasures it gives us - for now - whilst ignoring what it’s done already, what it’s doing and will do.
Social media was not designed by techies - who are often brainless about psychology and sociology - it was designed by cognitive neuroscientists and game theorists on the psychology of girls 13-27. (This is not new as sociologist Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber and Edward Bernays built the social and legal models for the Industrial Revolution).
Now at one end: it’s Peter Theil, Mark Andreessen and Curtis Yarin and at another Nick Bostrom, Josha Bach and the social media and AI Leviathans.
Why did they premise the psychology of girls and young women? Because that demographic is the most powerful, most attractive, most consistent seekers of attention in human history. Anything pitched to that demographic sells.
Mothers dote on them, fathers adore them…all men - even wicked ones - want them and they become promiscuous attention seekers almost naturally.
Get them to adopt a trend and it becomes a fad that is monetisable.
In the attention economy, they all get to act like celebrities talking bogus nonsense about “boundaries” and “my followers”, 80% of whom are BOTS!
At universities, we are seeing psychological derangements and dissonances…a child at 18 gets 25,000 followers for nothing; no talent, not gifts, no accomplishments. She naturally thinks it’s her essence, when she has none!
One or two such “influencers” get “brand deals”, and lots more get meaningless package giveaways…and material greed merges with dopamine rushes to entice and enthuse these female youth into an obsession with social media, now powered by AI…not merely to engage…but to capture their psychologies and render than automatons for the social media companies.
This heralds two things in general:
1. For girls, every day there is another 10 million 18 years olds who awaken and are prepared to get naked in social media, so at least for a time, gaining popularity over the previous 18 year olds. Moreover, social media is one massive dating site in which 80% of the women - convinced that they are 10 (tens) - their term, not mine - prefer only 3% of men, who want none of them, except for “hookups”; this generating unfulfillable expectations, leading to anxieties.
Additionally, take ONLYFANS. Of the 10 million 18-25 year olds in America, over 1 million are on OnlyFans; so 10% of marriageable aged women, with 80% of the audience as white married males.
That means those marriages are suspect and also means, amongst many things a range of society that’s raising the next two generations of children are engaged in an anti-social building practice: Lawnmowers can’t do that.
These predilections have initiated new human protocols: young women awaken in the morning and go directly to social media and start speaking as if they are speaking to best friends or actual fans. They engage with comments as if these BOTS/Followers actually care for them.
Imagine you live in a home with someone obsessed with and by social media: you do everything to make your home loving and peaceful. But that person engaged with some unknown and probably unreal person OUTSIDE YOUR LIVES, brings the tensions and disagreements with that person or thing into your private life! Think upon that: you private life is constantly subject to the nothingness of some unknown aliens interloper with the power to change the mood of our loved one…and alter the mood and focus of your home.
I believe in deep listening to those about whom we care, but don’t think I could bear listening to the digital rubbish from some social media ghetto and not think the person trying to explain it to me has lost their cotton picking mind!
Worse,when the fake digital crowd leaves the obsessed for the next batch of 18 year olds…they crash psychologically…and depending on what they’ve done online, they may recover only in their mid-30s, now having emptied their youth for nothing without learning, practising or developing proper social skills.
2. For young men, because social media actively promotes a false sense of value for women, young men are bereft of meaningful female interaction, or they face imperious arrogance fuelled by social media delusions. Now that’s changing? Why? Because - whilst many of their fathers are on onlyfans - AI is building sexual companions - both online and as robots - and these young men are adopting these fake relations and preferable because they satisfy a single urge in an unlimited manner.
In one episode, a company made a sex robot with docile and “grape” settings. The latter was preferred. This makes for a society where young men from 16-27 may learn their basic sexual interaction for interactive porn and robots…which makes for a dangerous world for actual women.
All these modes are fed and feed from clinically tested additive processes deliberately manipulated by social media companies, in addition to colonialising private data, to a point that will make democracy and the nation-state impossibilities.
These are not - by any measure - and not by orders of magnitude anything like ANYTHING we’ve ever known. Beyond these personal psychological corruptions is broad structural catastrophe that is underway already.
For those who say, but AI would generate new jobs - part of the daft unthinking galloping nonsense oft repeated - think sensibly, a job is a value or earning proposition: if humans make new jobs after AI takes their job…AI would just take the new jobs too, since that maximises income.
Why would AI companies allow humans to earn money when they could and AI could make new AI to take any new job ‘ad infinitum’!
Let’s stop talking nonsense and recognise existential threats to our civilisational models.
Finally, social media has been successful in dividing humans through psychological manipulation and the undermining of facts. Keyboard Idiot barkers argue with research professors and think themselves informed by google searches and confirmation biases; which they can’t grasp even when explained.
Yes, we all know social media allows one to connect with cousins, old school friends and to see whether one’s high school love has gotten old and fat. Meanwhile AI has made stupendous medical advances. But actual knowledge teaches us the gradient logic of the “double edged” sword: just the energy demand and AI business model will mean:
1. It undermines the labour/wage economic models
2. Even as its makes medical and educational advances
3. Therefore, if you’re jobless, you get nothing from those advances
4. Those advances are distributed to a new super elite class, as the wealth gap widens and political systems become more useless than they are now.
It’s astonishing how people convince themselves that society will suddenly do a good it’s never done, because technology has the capacity for that good.
LISTEN: nearly 90% of AI will aim at building surveillance, control, and weapons.
Why?
Because those generate power…and power grants dominant status…and despite the Old and New Testament and all the loving talk and wisdom books of history…..power and dominant status - I tell you - have been the only sustained ambitions of humankind!
Governments should have begun 5 years ago to take emergency measures through high level technical task forces: social media and AI impacts are not collateral to national well being…they are central. The world is being divided…and countries that lack control over their digital architecture, social media, AI deployment, systems construction and maintenance will become digitally colonised.
There is zero option now for partnering with tech giants….since they are already richer than 80% of the world’s nations. Countries like China, Estonia, India, Singapore and Norway are the last best hope to gain a ready-made solution that does not compromise national security completely.
A hint to the wise!
Today the Department of State is taking steps to impose visa restrictions on a Haitian government official for supporting gangs and other criminal organizations, and obstructing the government of Haiti’s fight against terrorist gangs designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This action is taken under INA 212(a)(3)(C), which generally bars entrance to those whose entry or proposed activities have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. The Department will revoke any currently valid visas held by this individual.
This policy, first announced in October 2022, targets individuals (and their family members) who provide financial or material support to gangs and criminal organizations operating in Haiti.
The United States remains committed to supporting Haiti’s stability and expects measurable progress toward free and fair elections. The Haitian people have had enough with gang violence, destruction, and political infighting. The Trump Administration will promote accountability for those who continue to destabilize Haiti and our region.
The critical infrastructure sectors in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) face growing challenges that threaten their efficiency and sustainability. Roads, power grids, water systems and public transportation networks show signs of aging and obsolescence, increasing maintenance costs and reducing the quality of services.
Against this backdrop, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to infrastructure. For example, in public transportation, route optimization algorithms are helping reduce travel times and congestion. In water and sanitation, predictive models make it possible to detect leaks and anticipate outages in distribution networks. In energy, AI is used to forecast demand and facilitate the integration of renewable energy at scale.
These advances and lessons are covered in the IDB’s publication “AI from the Ground Up: Challenges and Opportunities in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean”, which presents real-world cases, recommendations, and practical guidelines on how AI can become a key tool to strengthen the region’s critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure in the region faces challenges such as aging physical structures, accelerated urbanization, population growth, and the impact of climate events. The consequences include disruptions in essential services and rising costs of use, which lead to unequal access.
However, technology can help reverse these trends. IDB estimates suggest that a 15% reduction in infrastructure service costs through the efficient use of digital technologies could increase the GDP of Latin America and the Caribbean by 6% over the next 10 years.
Although more than 40% of public agencies in transportation and energy in LAC lack a clear digital transformation strategy, any entity can implement AI-based projects. In critical infrastructure sectors, the implementation of machine learning models is already within reach for many governments and organizations.
Some concrete examples show this potential in the region across three areas:
The report offers the following recommendations to unlock AI’s potential in critical infrastructure sectors:
We invite you to explore these recommendations in detail in “AI from the Ground Up: Challenges and Opportunities in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
The aim was to both to gain and to explain the actual state of affairs of the coming techno-centric human future:
It’s necessary to state hard facts that are beyond mere opinions or positive or negative perceptions:
1. Only 7% of world’s nations produce any AI tech. This means 93% have little to no say in AI architecture, design or deployment. Our definitions of “keeping pace with innovation” usually means someone else’s innovations!
2. In today’s world, that “someone else’s” will be increasingly a non-state actor: Google’s “Gemini” or Anthropic’s “Claude” - Facebook or NVIDA are all larger that 90% of the worlds nations in valuation terms and there is nothing small states can do to get them to alter their technologies for our benefit.
3. Of the 93% of nations left, about 1/3rd are role model states - Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand etc - with exceptions like India, Singapore and Estonia. These states don’t manufacture enterprise technology, but they have the means to acquire and manufacture components of enterprise tech, which gives them leverage.
4. The rest are spilt in two; neither of which has leverage: first are mere consumers of tech, whose systems and infrastructure will change to conform to the tech they commune. Second is the abject “digital divide” where they they will have to make do with dregs and second-hand tech. They will - by current structures - live off the scraps.
5. The Promised Balance is Eroding: AI has had diagnostic breakthroughs in health and public-facing innovations in immigration and eGovernment in Singapore and Estonia, for instance. But the innovations are outpacing the very concept of the nation state, as technology is developing faster than societies, economic and legal systems can adapt.
6. Social Media now enhanced in impact and speed-of-spread by AI, is producing distortions of reality and neuro-cognitive atrophies; which has reached crisis levels amongst young people and crisis levels in schools and universities. More than 2 dozen nations have banned social media access for children at school or between 7pm and 7am; with China limiting social media to 2 hours per day for children.
7. At the heart of social tech is personal identity: Estonia solved this by declaring that a citizen is now the unity of one’s Biological and Virtual self; a unified identity. Estonia also made internet access a Human Right in their Constitution; additionally, Estonia held their last 8 General Elections online for 1.3 million people. In Estonia, AI does not replace people but is structured and used to enhance human life and social systems.
URGENT PRIORITIES:
1. We need humane technologies that prioritises humans and enhances human living systems rather than render humans useless. Some sociologists argue that we are too divided for to generate the needed solutions. But I find that people are not divided: “they are being divided” for the benefit of a few tech companies.
2. Social mapping, Economic Mapping, Health and Payments tech, Plurality Systems aimed at enhancing political participation are the best uses for AI and enterprise technologies.
3. The problem - AGAIN - is, small nations in the 93% don’t create this tech and it’s being designed by those creating it for human control rather than human enhancement.
4. Small nations must urgently align and cooperate to ensure tech deployment at a pace of social absorption, without the ill-effects of limbic-colonialism or dopamine lust!
5. Small nations must convene a global congress aimed at setting new rules that will change our economic models across the world more in the next 3 years than the last 1,300 years.
6. But there are additionally two main crucial matters:
a. Even if managed well, AI will induce massive labour destabilisation. It’s not enough to say it will create jobs because AI companies will create AI to take those jobs too. Some advise a switch to Universal Basic Income (IBI). But UBI can’t be universal: manufacturing nations would have no UBI whilst non-manufacturing nations would have it, so as to create a market for transactions. This needs to be mapped out immediately.
b. There isn’t enough power in the developed world for deployment of these new technologies for even 50% of population, much less al countries. Energy is the impediment that will drive the geopolitics behind enterprise tech and AI dominance.
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Citizens in Latin America and the Caribbean often associate corruption with economic crises. Since 2016, survey data show that individuals who believe their country’s economy has worsened are significantly more likely to say that most politicians are corrupt. But are politicians actually more corrupt when the economy is bad, or are citizens just more sensitive to misconduct during downturns?
In a new IDB study, we explore how economic conditions influence corruption and the willingness of citizens to hold politicians accountable. Combining theory and experimental evidence, we reveal a surprising pattern: politicians become more corrupt during economic booms, not because citizens stop caring, but because good times make corruption harder to detect and less likely to be punished.
To study this phenomenon, we designed a theoretical model where citizens fund public goods through taxes, and politicians decide whether to allocate those funds honestly or siphon some off as private rent. Citizens can then choose to punish politicians, at a personal cost, such as joining a protest or pursuing legal means, if they believe corruption occurred.
Good economic conditions are modeled as reductions in the cost of creating public goods. This is equivalent to what happens in many countries in Latin America when local authorities receive additional funds because the price of abundant natural resources goes up or when exchange rates make it cheaper to buy inputs. When the cost of producing public goods falls, politicians can offer more goods for the same level of taxes. That makes it harder to detect when politicians skim money. Moreover, citizens may be less inclined to punish them, even when they suspect foul play.
To test these ideas, we ran a laboratory experiment with 800 university students in Colombia. Participants played the roles of either citizens or politicians, making decisions across several rounds that mimicked the incentives and uncertainties of real political life. The citizens received money with which to pay taxes, which were then transferred to the politicians. The politicians then had to decide how much to allocate of those funds to provide public goods (and how much they could pocket). In some rounds, the cost of producing public goods—manifested in real money—was high (bad times), and in others, it was low (good times). Once citizens observed the public goods provided, they could decide to punish the politicians by reducing their salary if they believed the politician had been corrupt, mimicking what would happen in real life if voters decided to vote the politician out of office.
The results were clear: corruption increased by 14% when the economy improved. Meanwhile, the rate at which citizens’ punished politicians remained mostly stable, but their ability to detect corruption and their desire to respond to it was weakened.
One of the most striking results came from what politicians expected: they believed they were less likely to be punished during good times, and they were right to think so. The public goods looked better, even when the politicians had skimmed off the top, and citizens were less likely to act on their suspicions. As a result, politicians had stronger incentives to engage in corrupt behavior.
It is worth noting that because public goods are usually provided by the different levels of government (local or municipal, state or provincial, national) and citizens have a hard time disentangling who provided what, corruption can be further obscured by the actions of other levels of government. That is, a local corrupt politician may not be voted out of office if at the same time the higher levels of government are investing heavily in the district.
This study upends the assumption that corruption thrives only in times of hardship. Instead, it shows that booms may shield misconduct by creating the illusion of competent governance. Politicians can skim off the top without triggering alarm bells, especially when citizens are materially satisfied or politically cynical. For policymakers, the implications are clear: oversight and accountability mechanisms are crucial even when things seem to be going well. Transparency in public spending, citizen access to detailed budget information, and clear attribution of public goods provision (who funded what) can help make corruption more visible and accountability more effective. Otherwise, periods of prosperity may come with hidden costs—not just in money lost, but in trust eroded.
