AI is a master of “bureaucratic cruelties, scaling administrative violence in ways that intensify structures of inequality, such as when AI is used to aid decisions about which patients are prioritized in healthcare or which prisoners are at risk of reoffending,” stated Dan McQuillan from the University of London. AI inevitably increases what historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt called “institutional thoughtlessness,” McQuillan added. The great and uncomfortably honest philosopher, Arendt, would also talk about the “banality of evil”, having been a Jew in the time of Hitler. AI is banal.

AI is the massive consolidator and concentrator of power and wealth. It is the ultimate tool by which the elite can manipulate and control people because with AI, every child, woman and man can have an AI companion to monitor and control their every thought and move. The sheer scale of AI systems means that only a handful of the most powerful companies in the world can afford to run them. “For reference, the amount of compute used in frontier AI models has been increasing ~4x a year,” Mohit Agarwal and Abhi Desai wrote for The Stanford Review. “Major AI lab CEOs are predicting $1 billion and even $10 billion training runs. Only a select number of closed-source model providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to underwrite these ever-increasing costs.” That’s all a very deliberate consolidation of power play by Big Tech.

All the while, the Great Big Lying Machine and its Big Tech greenwashers gaslight society. By hiding as much as possible of Big Tech environmental harm, they can flood the environment with all these happy stories of how AI is in fact saving the environment. When Microsoft went all in on AI, and its pollution exploded, it was pumping out stories like this:

An animal skitters through the heavy underbrush of the Colombian forest. An AI tool called MegaDetector identifies and classifies the results. Could this picture of genus Dasyprocta, a rodent-like creature better known as an agouti, help solve the puzzle of deforestation that has plagued the Amazon for years?

We don’t need AI to figure out what needs to be done in the Amazon. We need to stop mining, stop industrial agriculture, stop mass logging there, stop the genocide of the indigenous people. The biggest problems we face do not need AI.

AI is the ultimate expression of the Silicon Valley tech bro character. AI speak is so Silicon Valley speak. Super confident sounding white emptiness. Fake it until you make it arrogance, and make sure to move fast and break things disdain for our environment. Growth hacking its way to environmental devastation. The Great Big Lying Machine is being sold as a Fact Machine, a Knowledge Engine. It is managed by people who consider “factual accuracy” as “an area of active research.” The reality is they intended to create a Great Big Lying Machine because, from advertising to politics, there’s a lot of money and power to be gained from lying.

AI is made by people who inhabit a moral and ethical void and emptiness. They weigh the business case between truth and lies and come down on the side of lies. Truth is boring. It doesn’t help growth. Truth isn’t fast. It’s too slow. It’s an inconvenience. Lies are clickbait. Lies are fast. Let’s go with lies. After all, the tech bros think that they can get away with a Great Big Lying Machine because lies have been so normalized due to Big Tech social media and other forces. To them, they don’t even have to pretend that truth matters, because they know that AI’s primary purposes are advertising and political propaganda—they essentially being one and the same thing.