A car without brakes on a street without signs
“AI is a car without brakes, driven without a license, on a street without signs.”
VIRGÍNIA DIGNUM (Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden)
As soon as he got into the White House Donald Trump announced the creation of Stargate AI, a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. The initiative begins with a $100 billion investment in its first phase, scaling to $500 billion over four years. This infrastructure is meant to secure American leadership in artificial intelligence and supposedly create “hundreds of thousands” of American jobs. This announcement is just a part of the story; indeed, this project will create jobs in the beginning and will be for years the envy of the civilized world, but if the AI sector is left pornographically funded and not supervised this project might generate zero jobs, an unequal society and eventually contribute to its total collapse. Stargate is paradigmatic of the dark days we live in: no planning, no sharing, no sense of common good, just hubris.
Let us be clear, it is an understandable enterprise from Trump’s perspective to foster an initiative as Stargate. No modern president would do otherwise. Modern presidents and political leaders are puppets in the hands of the real decision-makers. In the shadows of tall shiny skyscrapers and humming data centers, the architects of our digital age orchestrate a slow annihilation of organized societies as we know them. They are not just “breaking things and moving fast”. They are just breaking things. The tech oligarchs—once seen as pioneers of progress—have morphed into unaccountable overlords, their influence sprawling like a dark web, suffocating every corner of modern existence. These companies commodify the most intimate aspects of our lives, with their insatiable appetite for profit. Data is no longer ours; it is their currency, extracted under the guise of convenience, then weaponized against the user. Downgraded from the category of consumers where we were put in the 90s, we all became just that—users. Algorithms turned reality into a mutable construct, tailored to maximize clicks, outrage, and despair. The destruction is not limited to our minds, it corrodes jobs and lives. What seized to be an anthropocentric world grew into a machine-centric world where all power lies with the machine´s owner. This will bring forth the largest corporate consolidation in History, and it will not look pretty.
Global corporate consolation has already been devastating in the post-pandemic not only in the high-tech sector but across all areas of organised human life. For example, according to a study of the Haas Institute over the past two years, major mergers in the agrochemical, seed, and fertilizer industries have consolidated six corporations into three: Dow-DuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, and ChemChina-Syngenta. These mergers, controlling 70% of the agrochemical and 60% of the seed markets, threaten competition, stifle innovation, and exacerbate environmental and agricultural challenges globally. In the US according to Statista, in the first quarter of 2024, almost two-thirds percentage of the total wealth of the country was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth.
Stargate promises to take all of this to the next level of sophistication. Its advanced AI capabilities, while marketed as tools for progress, risk being monopolised by already-dominant players, further eroding competition and widening the wealth gap. This might not only stifle smaller tech innovators and businesses already suffering but could also entrench systemic inequities in access to technology, resources, and opportunities. Stargate could allow tech giants like Google or Amazon to dominate markets by leveraging exclusive access to advanced predictive analytics that their smaller competitors will not have. In agriculture, corporations like Bayer-Monsanto could monopolize AI-driven crop management, controlling food production. This could widen wealth gaps, limit innovation from startups, and deepen the already gargantuan global inequalities.
Our world is bending under the weight of this unfeeling intelligence, growing colder, harsher, and dehumanised. Unless humans regulate AI and keep it away from profit-driven enterprises in the hands of few, fear of the future will stop being a worry; it will become policy. The Stargates of this world will not just destroy it but reshape it into a hollow monument to greed and control.