As the growth of artificial intelligence accelerates, it is already posing significant challenges to society. Companies have started laying off workers whose jobs AI models can now perform. The expansion of data centres has spiked energy consumption and increased the carbon footprint.
AI agents are being used by malicious actors to automate the spread of disinformation. Algorithms are demonstrating bias, raising concerns about flawed application and discrimination by human-related technologies that use them. AI is being used to identify targets in warfare, leading to greater loss of human life.
These are complex problems that demand serious regulatory attention. Yet, today’s dominant AI policy conversations are rarely grounded in these immediate challenges. Instead, the global discourse has been swept by apocalyptic prophecies.
We see this doomsday narrative promoted by some within the AI industry and echoed at the highest levels of decision-making: from lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders championing bans on superintelligence, to cautionary messages from the Vatican, to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling open-source AI a real threat. It is entirely reasonable for global leaders to take these industry-amplified warnings seriously. However, this chorus of influential voices sounding the alarm about AI “existential risk” has inadvertently pulled our focus away from the multiple crises AI has caused, already affecting labour, the environment and communications.
Worse still, the public panic is being weaponised to enforce a modern regime of digital colonisation – the concentration of power in the hands of a few AI corporations in a handful of countries. The doomsday narrative provides the perfect justification for regulations that would target open-source AI models, which are free or cheaper to use and allow users to modify them to fit their needs. The logic presented to lawmakers is simple and seductive: if advanced AI is a potential weapon of mass destruction, it can only be developed by a trusted few.
Under the banner of “safety”, tech giants are attempting to write the rules to protect their monopolies by shutting down competition from smaller, cheaper open-source AI models. This directly mirrors historical colonial tactics: preventing local industry from developing to force total reliance on the “empire’s” exports. Currently, the entire globe is dependent on these frontier AI systems developed by tech giants, especially the Global South, which lacks the resources to create its own AI models from scratch, now costing upwards of $100m in compute power alone.
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