What AI will do for or to us in the future

What about reasonably regulated capitalism 

compared to pure capitalism or socialism?

This week on TDS, America’s only source for news, Jon Stewart raised the issue of what the future might look like. Stewart’s performance ~8:00 to ~14:40 of this video goes to the heart of the matter. When asked what the future of jobs would be in AI’s utopian wonderland, video clips of the CEOs and top players in the AI industry showed that none of them had any remotely credible answer. None whatsoever. Absolutely, positively no idea at all.

One of them said such speculation was something akin to being beyond human comprehension. Stewart pointed out that all of these brilliant geniuses could easily speculate a utopian human future somehow driven by AI, but they could not speculate on how that future would actually manifest itself for real people.

None of those brilliant AI geniuses, smarter than most everyone else (except Trump of course / s), could even come up with a plausible wild-ass guess. All the top AI dogs told us that there would be a gigantic explosion of new jobs. Not the same as old jobs, but a hyper-abundance of completely new, very high paying jobs. Vast new wealth would be gushing out of everywhere. Maybe not surprisingly, none of the experts could say exactly what all the new jobs might entail. One yahoo, the top dog at Nvidia went waaaay out on a limb and speculated that the new industries and jobs might include wellness centers and spas! Stewart pointed out that those jobs have existed at least since 2000 BC.

By the end of that segment, expert opinion boiled down to a true utopian vision that jobs would probably become obsolete because there would be so much of everything for everyone. Musk speculated that, if people wanted a job in his vision of an AI utopia they could take a job as a hobby. Musk commented that there would be so much abundance that there would not be a universal basic income. Instead, there would be a universal high income. People would just get free money or wealth from all the abundance.

Stewart boiled that insane crackpottery down to this: If capitalism with unfettered, unregulated AI is allowed to do its thing without any interference from anyone except the AI geniuses running the unregulated capitalist show, the end result would be socialism.

Human history and the human condition

If one looks dispassionately and with an open mind at history since the start of the industrial age, about 1750-1760, and the human condition what does one see? What one sees in history is a gradual but major shift from predominantly agricultural economies and hand production toward machine-powered manufacturing and factories. What one sees with the human condition is that it doesn’t change much. The owners of the means of production and wealth in the industrial age, almost always tried to keep as much wealth and power for themselves as they could.

One has to ask, why would that be any different in the age of the hypothesized AI utopia? Why would the geniuses owning and running AI be any different from the plutocrats and oligarchs that went before them? Has human nature changed a whole lot since ~1750? Listen carefully to modern multi-billionaires, including the ones that Stewart played video clips of. When it comes to wealth and power, how are they as a group of people any different from past groups of wealthy and powerful people like Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc.? Did a lot of the new wealth that the industrial age created and a few people owned and controlled trickle down to average people and workers? Hell no.

Even today in 2026, billionaires, centimillionaires and decamillionaires as a group generally oppose regulations and taxation. They tell people to stop being lazy, get a job and do bootstrap pulling.[1]

Q1: Does the distribution of the vast wealth and power that AI could generate in the future depend on economic arrangements and political policy, or will technological capability alone generate so much “abundance” that even multi-billionaires will have enough to allow for a universal high income because, e.g., they can’t carry that much cash around or whatever?

Q2: Are the AI geniuses naive idiots or stone-cold liars when they tell us to not worry about jobs because there will be a universal high income for everyone, with peace and harmony settled on the land?

Footnote:

1. For the moment at least, a fly in the regulation of AI ointment is comes from the recent scare that unregulated AI might kill us all. Some top dog AI geniuses see a potential for AI to get loose and cause billions of human deaths. There have been a few squeaks about maybe the AI industry really does need some regulations. But that spasm of social conscience will pass, just like a spasm of shock from Trump’s 1/6 violent coup attempt passed for a few MAGA politicians in congress.

What happens when special interests dominate the public interest

AI data centers consume huge 

amounts of electricity

As usual, it’s almost all and only about wealth and power. About the most protection for the public interest us and the public interest can expect from the MAGA party in congress is feeble virtue signaling. Special interests own and control the MAGA party. An article by tom’s Hardware, US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers — opponents say bill is ‘toothless’ and doesn’t do enough to protect citizens, makes the situation clear. MAGA politicians proposed a bill that makes it look like they want to protect consumers from costs of gigantic new data centers for AI. The proposed law, the Ratepayer Protection Act, was a bill designed to shield everyday Americans from rapidly rising electricity costs driven by data center buildouts nationwide.

How would the proposed bill to protect consumers from eating the costs of AI electricity demands? By imposing a federal standard for states and Public Utility Commissions that required regulators to consider whether entities that consume large amounts of electricity, such as data centers, should pay the incremental costs of energy infrastructure needed to serve them. MAGA politicians in the House and Senate proudly voted for the toothless bill, but Senate Dems opposed it. The bill died in the Senate because MAGA could not override a Dem veto. In line with special interest benefits, the proposed bill did not require any utility anywhere to do anything to protect consumers. It only required them to consider protecting consumers.

How this will probably play out

Given how sophisticated MAGA and allied special interest propaganda is, most consumers are probably gonna get whacked with big electricity rate increases disguised as something or anything other than charges for the AI industry and big corporate AI users to shift costs onto us so they can capture the cash. Absent enforceable rules to protect us, the cost burden will be allocated through opaque utility proceedings and tactics. We will not see an explicit line item labeled “AI subsidy” or cost. The new charges are likely to quietly appear as (1) bills paid later for infrastructure built against forecasts of future electricity demand, (2) higher base rates and delivery charges, (3) “grid-modernization” or reliability surcharges, (4) new generation and transmission investments characterized as serving the overall load growth, and/or (5) public subsidies and tax expenditures that reduce public revenue for schools, infrastructure, and services.

The bottom line for special interest before the public interest politics is predictable in our now fully corrupted pay-to-play political system. The added cost burden will very likely be diffuse, delayed, technical, hard for any individual household to trace to one firm or one project, and/or hard to impossible to understand. Meanwhile, benefits will be concentrated with utilities, hyperscalers**, big landowners, major contractors, and MAGA-connected developers.

** A hyperscaler is a technology company that operates enormous, globally distributed data-center networks and sells computing power, data storage, networking, and increasingly AI capacity on demand. The usual examples include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Companies like OpenAI are not yet hyperscalers.

Q1: Is it likely that (1) if passed, this bill would this bill have done nothing of substance because nothing stops regulators right now from considering consumer protections, and (2) this bill was only designed to make MAGA politicians in congress look good just before the midterms, so that they can win and continue screwing us for at least the next two years, if not forever?

Q2: Is is fair to say that MAGA politics is almost exclusively about a struggle about concentrating wealth and power with elites at the expense of the public interest?[1]

Footnote:

1. For better or worse, the public interest is a contested concept, arguably an essentially contested concept. Some people will sincerely believe that leaving electricity rates up to the free markets best serves the public interest. Others will disagree. In a democracy, reasonable compromise is supposed to deal with intractable disagreements like this. In authoritarian states, public opinion is mostly irrelevant. To MAGA’s authoritarianism, contrary public opinion is usually mostly irrelevant, unless it is election time. In election season, MAGA politicians try to deliver enough lip service about what we want to get elected or re-elected. The rest of the time, MAGA elites demagogue on us and deceive us to our endless detriment.

In politics, we usually don’t get what we want but we sometimes do get what we voted for.

Source

It’s not dementia, it’s malicious cruelty, corruption, bigotry and tyranny

Another observer has come to the conclusion that Trump’s extremely nasty brand of politics isn’t due merely to dementia. Instead, it much worse than that. A substack post, Trump’s Behavior Isn’t Dementia. The Truth Is Far Worse, cogently argues that that attributing Trump’s behavior to dementia mistakes an intentional, long-running authoritarian style for cognitive incapacity. That risks excusing or minimizing the political danger of the bigoted, cruel, kleptocratic authoritarianism that drives the MAGA wealth and power political movement.

Simply put, the argument is that calling Donald Trump’s conduct “dementia” is unsupported and politically misleading. Its central claim is that his behavior is better understood as an intentional, longstanding pattern of domination, cruelty, manipulation, and exploitation of chaos, not an involuntary cognitive disorder. The post contends that a dementia explanation wrongly turns deliberate conduct into a medical mystery and can can lead people underestimate his personal agency.

This is not new. For decades, Trump used provocation, humiliation, dishonesty, insults, and aggressive norm-breaking as tools for gaining attention, exerting power, and keeping opponents off balance. His incoherence and erratic conduct need not reflect mental incapacity alone, which probably is significant. Mental incapacity can and very likely does coexist with his calculated, toxic political behavior. Blaming it all on dementia can have unhelpful impacts such as reducing his accountability by framing harmful actions as medical symptoms instead of choices, encouraging public passivity, or obscure the enabling role of allies, media systems, and voters who support or normalize Trump’s extremely abnormal conduct and politics.

What about Project 2025?

Regarding evidence of intentionality, the substack post points out that Trump and MAGA elites are well on their way to accomplishing hundreds of authoritarian and kleptocratic goals laid out in Project 2025. As of October 2, 2026, the Project 2025 Tracker shows 141 objectives that MAGA completed, with another 70 underway. That requires sustained, focused intent and planning, That is not random loose cannon blasts. Public attention to Trump’s mental decline distracts people from the ~66% of tracked Project 2025 objectives already completed or underway. Trump personally has completed 11 of 13 tracked executive-office objectives, with two more underway.

Q1: Is it likely that Trump’s toxic corruption and authoritarianism is mostly knowing and intentional and not primarily driven by dementia?

Q2: Whatever Trump’s cognitive state, is he nonetheless still morally responsible for his administration’s successful or ongoing pursuit of 211 authoritarian, kleptocratic Project 2025 objectives, or is what he’s doing a good thing and making America great again, or something else?

MAGA’s authoritarian and kleptocratic damage runs broad and deep

Trump corruption now runs free and wild across the globe

Corruption, Inc.

Trump is trying to negotiate a deal with Russia to buy oil-related assets in Russia and elsewhere. It somehow has something do with the Ukraine war. Maybe. People directly or indirectlyinvolved include Trump, his sons, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, one of the president’s daughters, and the Witkoff family. They all all have financial ties to partners in the deal. The deal requires sign off from Trump and the Kremlin. The Trump family and the president’s business partners would benefit financially if the deal is signed.

The deal involves sale foreign assets of Lukoil, a Russian energy giant. Fire sale prices are involved because US sanctions made them basically worthless to investors in Russia. Gas stations in the United States, refineries in Eastern Europe and oil fields around the world are involved.

The relevant public questions here, e.g., Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russian aggression, sanctions policy, and the terms of a settlement, are linked to opportunities for private wealth, political favors, American foreign policy, and Dog only knows what other sleaze and corruption might be involved. This deal is does not present just a perception problem with nothing more. The conflicts of interest and corruption are real. This proposed deal corrupts the core purpose of public office, converting it from service to the public interest to service to private interests. Here, private enrichment is part of the bargaining for policy decisions that should be governed by American security interests, the rule of law, US alliance obligations, and the interests of Ukrainian people.

In view of (1) Trump's rock solid track record of corruption, and (2) his admiration for Putin and brutal dictators generally, this proposed deal is obviously corrupt. American leverage over sanctions and war diplomacy is being sold off for a commercial opportunity for Trump, his family and his inner circle, while selling Putin a means of cultivating benefits he wants to get. Trump is trying to betray us and the Ukraine to rake in more cash. Corruption here amounts to the conversion of public power and foreign policy into a private cash opportunity for Trump and his family and chosen friends.

Q1: Should ethical public administration ask officeholders to avoid conflicts of interest, non-disclosures for deals, self-dealing, foreign leverage for profit, crony favoritism, and family nepotism?

Q2: Does democratic accountability reasonably ask if citizens can reasonably believe that state power is being wielded for the public rather than for corrupt purposes or favored special interests or persons?

Q3: Is Trump is trying to betray us and the Ukraine to rake in more cash?

Some info sources:

U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies

Trump, Putin, Ukraine and an Oil Deal: 5 Takeaways

Is America a Kleptocracy? -- in non-kleptocracies, grand corruption scandals may shock the conscience and grab headlines because they are not the norm. Such grand corruption in a kleptocracy is not an aberration but instead the unifying purpose and core function of the state. The scandals come so fast, so widespread, and so large that many citizens feel powerless to respond.

Kleptocracy Tracker Timeline -- “Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something presidents sought to avoid.”