With friends and family, I have a clear and simple rule: never mention AI. Rarely has a development permeated every single strand of society as much as artificial intelligence; and yet, for all of the clear and present dangers it poses, the discussion around its regulation is minimal to the point of non-existence. That silence is not accidental. It is engineered.
In fact, and emphatically unsurprisingly, the powers that be are actively trying to restrict and narrow the conversation around it. It makes sense: why would tech billionaires – let’s call them what they are, oligarchs – who are actively profiting from inflating AI’s value, and who already use it to manage the algorithms and processing that underpin their platforms, allow serious, sustained criticism to flourish? Why would they invite scrutiny of the very tool consolidating their power?
In the United States, the direction of travel is already clear. Federal lawmakers and powerful special interests are pushing for a light-touch, centralised approach to AI governance – one that sidelines local oversight and limits the ability of states to impose meaningful safeguards. It is a posture dressed up as innovation, but rooted in control. There is, as ever, only one real reason for this: flooding the zone with partisan, misleading AI-generated content is enormously profitable for those sitting on the throne, clutching the levers of power. On a human level, society – and people themselves – become pawns in a vast game of extraction. The masses are fed deliberately targeted misinformation, calibrated to exploit fear and insecurity, until division opens up and the authoritarians and profiteers settle comfortably in the middle.
Profit over community
It is personal for me. My hometown not without its problems, but one I care deeply about – is set to become the site of an enormous data centre. Billed by the UK government as a transformational investment in a region with a long history of neglect, it is sold as a northern reset: jobs, opportunity, regeneration. Cut back the spin and the reality is far starker. The proposed centre, expected to become the largest in Europe, represents little more than the UK selling land, power, and agency to the highest US bidder. It will not bring meaningful long-term employment. Data centres require remarkably little manpower, while draining vast local resources to meet their energy demands. The community pays the price; the profits leave the region. Energy prices rise. Agency disappears.
A familiar story for my family and friends in the North East: profit over community; the expendability of workers; the ordinary person taken entirely for granted. And this is where responsibility widens. I do not only blame the offenders – the oligarchs, the accelerants of chaos, those actively pitting us against one another for gain. I also blame the centre-ground. I blame the social democrats.
Our politics is already divisive, yet the political environment we inhabit is one in which the left has largely surrendered the main stage to the hard right. On AI, silence has become a position – and it is a complicit one. The lack of urgency, the absence of serious debate, the failure to articulate a vision of regulation rooted in public good rather than private profit: these are choices. Because make no mistake – they know the risks. They see them in real time. They are intelligent, educated people being briefed on the consequences of unregulated AI. By remaining silent – or worse, apathetic – they are helping to build a world in which you are poorer, less powerful, and more easily manipulated.
AI: a tangible threat
I’m the first to admit that AI is an absolute revelation. In many ways, it is something to be celebrated. The sheer abundance of information now at our fingertips is nothing short of the most significant social innovation since the creation of the internet. Its potential is enormous – and bluntly, there is no turning back. We are already through the threshold. AI will transform our entire world. Be under no illusions about that.
But it is often our own naivety that feeds the problem. Political disillusionment in the Western world is now so entrenched that many of us have simply stopped caring. Trust in politicians has collapsed and, paradoxically, the response to that mistrust has been the surrender of the only real power we possess: knowledge, engagement, and the ability to hold those in authority to account. We let people we do not remotely trust operate with minimal scrutiny – unchecked, unchallenged, and increasingly unanswerable.
I struggle to think of any other profession where a lack of trust results not in constraint, but in greater freedom to act. And yet that is precisely the environment in which AI is developing.
There is also a temptation – heightened by the bludgeoning of our attention spans – to judge AI solely by its most visible outputs: ChatGPT answers, AI-generated videos, novelty images. How harmless can they be? But this fixation is a distraction. It obscures the deeper reality: that AI is not merely a tool of convenience or creativity, but a mechanism through which power, influence, and control are being rapidly centralised. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, has publicly expressed his view that AI will enable a surveillance state, where everything we do is recorded and reported. This is before we even consider the fact that Ellison – a close ally of Donald Trump – and his son are also attempting to buy up Warner Bros, further entrenching their media power.
Power is everything, and we are allowing a tiny handful of the wealthiest men – many of whom, Ellison included, have openly expressed a desire to achieve immortality – to rewrite the social fabric of human civilisation.
AI will create a microscopic pool of winners and billions of losers. It’s the arrogance of man that we all think we can somehow beat the odds and be among the winners. In doing so, we hand even greater autonomy to those already clutching the levers of power. Let me be unequivocal: you and I – we’re the losers. The odds are stacked against us to a degree that cannot be overcome. Mass job losses, rampant unemployment, the hollowing-out of the graduate and entry-level workforce. Universal basic income, the erosion of creativity, and the construction of a mass surveillance state. But only those with something to hide should be worried, right?
This is not speculative. We are not talking about distant hypotheticals or sci-fi nightmares waiting politely in the future. AI is already reshaping power in ways that are tangible, damaging, and profoundly anti-democratic. In the United States, AI-generated political adverts and deepfake videos are now routinely deployed to mislead voters, suppress turnout, and flood social media with false narratives faster than fact-checking can keep up. In India, automated facial-recognition systems have been used to police protests, disproportionately misidentifying minorities and dissidents, with little transparency and no meaningful right of appeal. In the UK, algorithmic decision-making tools have already been trialled in welfare assessments, policing, and hiring – systems shown to replicate and intensify existing racial and class biases while offering no clear line of accountability when they get it wrong. Writers, artists, and journalists are watching their work scraped, reproduced, and monetised without consent, while the same technology is used to hollow out entry-level jobs that once offered a route into stable employment. Even at the most basic level, AI-driven recommendation systems are accelerating misinformation, radicalisation, and social fragmentation – not because they are broken, but because they are working exactly as designed: optimising for engagement, outrage, and profit at scale. This is what “innovation without regulation” actually looks like. Not freedom. Not progress. But the quiet automation of inequality, surveillance, and powerlessness – rolled out while we are told, repeatedly, not to worry.
The promise of resistance
We should be wide-eyed about the fact that the future looks bleak. But we should not simply give up and bow down to what we consider the status quo, or succumb to the notion that resistance is futile. We can resist. We can fight back. If we engage in pushing back, results are absolutely possible. We can point to evidence of this: McDonald’s recent AI-generated Christmas advert – in which it claimed its staff’s fingers hurt from writing hours of detailed prompts – was taken down after significant pushback on Twitter. It’s a small example, but the reality is that the power of the individual is far greater than many of us think, and greater than any oligarch actively controlling the levers would let us believe. We need to remember this truth: making us feel powerless is itself an admission that power still exists.
The US is the new frontier for the AI debate, but its ramifications – as demonstrated by the proposed US-funded data centre in Blyth – flow far deeper.
And yet – this is the part too often ignored – the political opportunity here is enormous. In the United States, the midterm elections offer fertile ground for candidates willing to do something radical: name the threat plainly and run against it. Sensible AI regulation is not a niche concern or a technocratic sideshow; it is a populist issue hiding in plain sight. Jobs, wages, truth, creativity, privacy, power – all of them now intersect with AI. At a moment of deep economic anxiety and institutional distrust, a candidate prepared to challenge unaccountable tech power, to call time on oligarchic capture, and to put democratic guardrails around AI would not be swimming against the tide, but riding it. The same is true here in the UK. The failure of mainstream politics to seize this issue is not evidence of its weakness, but of their timidity. In a fractured media environment where assumptions no longer hold and loyalty is thin, we should challenge everything. The change agenda is far more powerful than it appears – and the fact that no one has yet claimed it only widens the opening. The future does not belong to the algorithms or the billionaires who own them. It belongs to us. We the people.
