this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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Don't forget, though, that there's another cashflow that they're banking on: total surveillance.
AI can't do a lot of things, but the thing it's most suited for is creating a society run like a prison to try and keep the discontented masses in check.
Not enough people realize this. They think the component shortage is a side effect, but it’s to push you towards cloud services on underpowered devices that rely on it.
Imagine the censorship when every service is monitored and controlled by them. Imagine the market capture when they can see everyone’s financials and trade secrets. When they can cut off journalists and activists with one click.
Haven't heard anything new lately, but there is a push to eliminate physical currency for, what I presume, is a similar reason -> make everything trackable.
People have been trying to eliminate physical currency for decades in not longer. That shit predates computers.
This is quite obvious, it hasn't happened at a global scale yet because people have to agree on which currency it would be
I think this will backfire too. I think they way underestimate the amount of people already using "underpowered devices" that will just continue to do so without the new cloud services shit.
Basically everyone I know us using a 5-10+ year old laptop, for example. And they just use it fine, sure it's pokey, and it's not everyone, but it's a lot.
The Italian government has just passed an emergency decree that authorizes AI-powered face recognition in public spaces without a judge's authorization.
I'm not even sure it's great at that. Is this not a function of any industry struggling to find a usecase eventually ending up with the largest US employer and cash cow: the DoD?
LLMs ('AI'), not so great, but it can get (probabilistic, but fascists don't care) descriptions of video feeds into easily searched text. Gobs of GPUs in datacenters paired with surveillance devices all over the place however presents a greater threat, where there's an (evil) will, a way will be forthcoming. Nice of Ukraine to point out how fragile they are. There's a deathstar analogy there somewhere.
Yeah, the type of people pushing this don't even care about the inaccuracy either. If it "catches a black man" with facial recognition, even if it's the wrong person it won't matter "they are all criminal thugs anyway." See also the ICE bull shit and basically deporting anyone even remotely Mexican looking, citizen or not.
This is my take as well.
Ai is a panopticon