By Teresa Heffernan.
Originally published in the Halifax Examiner, October 20, 2025.
In 2017, at a conference in California organized by the transhumanist Max Tegmark, there was a gathering of many well known players in the AI Industry — to name a few Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Nick Bostrom, Eric Schmidt, Willam MacAskill, Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Larry Page.
It was the sequel to a 2015 conference in Puerto Rico, also organized by Tegmark, where he had announced that he had secured funding from Musk for his Future of Life Institute.
The same year Musk launched his Open AI project with Sam Altman.
In 2022, ChatGPT, a large language model, arrived to great fanfare. Media outlets and social media platforms helped to advertise the product by reporting what company heads said this technology could do, and people were encouraged to experiment with it for “free.”
Other Big Tech companies jumped on board in the race to build more “free” chatbots.
But there is nothing “free” about chatbots and we all pay. as grand promises of a coming “superintelligence” that would solve world problems have dwindled to promises of sexbot avatars.
Large language generators (LLMs) suck up text and images and translate them into numbers to statistically predict the next word or sentence. Requiring billions of mathematical calculations, this technology comes with a litany of problems.
For example: the AI industry ingests vast amounts of copyrighted work — books, music, news articles, film & art — to produce chatbots, while an exploited largely invisible global labour force cleans, annotates, corrects and classifies the content.
The technology and the infrastructure on which it relies have been funded with public tax dollars while the benefits have mostly gone to the private sector, further consolidating the power of the ultra-wealthy.
In short, the AI industry accelerates the race to the bottom for workers around the world while enabling money to flow upward to the world’s wealthiest, pitting the richest 1% against 99% of people on the planet.
In addition to errors rates (which are getting worse not better and for which there is no solution), chatbots have also been reported to cause cognitive decline and psychological damage.
And as the world grapples with global warming and disappearing species, those billions of mathematical computations that underlie chatbots and image generators are driving up energy demands, which keeps the fossil fuel industry happy, and sucking up enormous amounts of water even as we face a global ground water shortage. The AI Industry depends on an unsustainable resource-intensive infrastructure.
Moreover, Meta, Anthropic, Open AI, Google, and Microsoft are all heavily invested in surveillance and the war industry. The list goes on.
So given all these problems, why is the AI industry burning insane amounts of money converting non-numerical content into numbers? The short answer: numbers make information easy to manipulate.
For instance, white supremacy or pro-nazi language or misinformation can be amplified, as Musk’s Grok does. Or chatbots can support you even when you are wrong, as ChatGPT does.
Altman notes that GenAI blurs the border between the authentic and the artificial, and this is the point: democracy cannot function without truth, reality, expertise, and facts, and the AI industry is gunning for totalitarianism.
In his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017), the transhumanist Tegmark enthusiastically spills the beans.
He opens with a question about whether the reader believes in AGI.
If yes, he advises the reader to turn to “The Tale of the Omega Team” that outlines the AI Industry’s plan: an elite group at a corporation secretly build an AI named Prometheus with the goal of taking over the world and “helping humanity.”
Sucking up the digital world and making billions, the highly secretive Omega team develops and sell products, like AI-produced text and movies and uses bots to hype online reviews. They build a media empire and take over news channels around the globe; they use AI to “revolutionize education”; they take over government services; they groom political candidates to undermine nation states; they use bribery, deception, manipulation, and “persuasion machinery” to “erode all previous power structures in the world.”
The tale concludes: “for the first time ever, our planet was run by a single power.”
Welcome to Big Tech, corporate-owned chatbots, and the totalitarian fantasy of AI gurus.
Having reduced the world to computable numbers, the “move fast and break things” crowd has indeed made billions, tried to replace news with clickbait, forced their way into education, taken over government services, backed crypto, promoted hack science, invested in a paramilitary, broken laws, and put politicians, like Trump and Vance, in power.
As these billionaires are also building doomsday bunkers, investing in the war industry and contributing to ever-increasing wealth disparity and planetary destruction, their promised techno utopia is proving more of a nightmare.
The AI investment bubble will burst, but unlike the 1840s Railway Mania bubble, we will be left with a useless infrastructure of rusting data centres given the short shelf life of GPUs.
What can you do to limit the damage? Boycott chatbots…turn them off. Resist the AI hype and question the uncritical adoption of this technology. No market…No dice. We need to reclaim the future from the AI industry.
Read the whole article here: https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/commentary/welcome-to-big-tech-corporate-owned-chatbots-and-the-totalitarian-fantasy-of-ai-gurus/