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The Wealthy Hold More Power Than Ever—Can We Take It Back?
How can government enact and enforce the necessary reforms if it’s under the control of a power elite that won’t permit them?
Oct 05, 2026
Behind this election’s dominant issue of affordability lies the record concentration of wealth at the top of America. The richest 0.001% of Americans—a handful of extraordinarily wealthy men—now control more of the nation’s wealth than at any time in modern history.
To be sure, wealth is not a zero-sum game in which the riches of those at the top necessarily come at the expense of everyone else. But power is a zero-sum game, because the more of it that is held by some people, the less of it is held by others.
Wealth cannot be separated from power. Great wealth becomes great power through campaign contributions, media ownership, the ability to buy off opposition, the capacity to wage pubic relations campaigns, and the resources to deploy armies of lawyers who litigate on your behalf. Recent years provide abundant illustration of all this.
This massive power shift is even more starkly illustrated by the billionaires, financial mavens, and tech bros who put Trump in power, who refuse to slow climate change, and who are now deciding on the future of AI and therefore humanity.
In these ways, great power also becomes great wealth. It buys changes in laws, regulations, and court decisions that bestow even more wealth on those with the power to alter the system to their benefit—and to siphon off resources from everyone else.
This power shift has also become clearly evident in recent years. In the Trump era it has taken the form of blatant corruption. But the political bribes, billionaire media ownership, PR campaigns, and well-financed litigation predated President Donald Trump.
For many years (with the notable exception of the Biden administration), antitrust enforcement has been defanged to make it easier for big firms to monopolize. Among the most widely discussed findings about the US economy is the rise of corporate concentration since the 1980s. The biggest firms, their top executives, and their major shareholders have all done wonderfully well. Consumers and employees, however, have faced higher prices, lower paychecks, and fewer choices.
At the same time, labor laws have been altered to make it more difficult to organize unions. In the 1950s, more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Now, fewer than 6% are.
Tax laws have been changed to reduce the rates and amounts paid by the super-wealthy, to the point where many pay no taxes at all—even though they have more wealth than ever.
This massive power shift is even more starkly illustrated by the billionaires, financial mavens, and tech bros who put Trump in power, who refuse to slow climate change, and who are now deciding on the future of AI and therefore humanity.
The question I keep coming back to is whether this can be reversed.
There is historic precedent. After the first Gilded Age—which ran from the 1890s to the start of World War I, and which featured wide inequalities of income, wealth, and political power—America reacted in what came to be known as the Progressive Era.
Starting under Theodore Roosevelt, monopolies were busted up, corporations were regulated, a progressive income tax was enacted, and corporate political donations (bribes) were barred. Then, starting in 1933, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, power continued to be shifted to what became the largest middle class in world history.
Then came the 1970s and 1980s, when the process began to go in reverse.
The challenge is arguably much greater today because wealth and power are more concentrated than in the first Gilded Age, creating a chicken-and-egg paradox: How can government enact and enforce the necessary reforms if it’s under the control of a power elite that won’t permit them?
Now, just four weeks from what could be a major political victory for the Democrats in taking back at least one chamber of Congress, this paradox should soon be the center of our national debate.
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Don't Fear AI—Fear the CEOs Behind the Curtain
The answer lies not in buying into the corporate manufactured fearmongering surrounding the technology itself; the imperative, at this point, is to unmask the institutional logic, structural tendencies, and strategic goals of the industry.
Oct 05, 2026
In recent weeks, media coverage has amplified warnings from corporate CEOs and whistleblowers claiming that artificial intelligence, or AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The central argument emerging from the industry is a call to slow the pace of AI development out of imminent fear that humanity may soon lose control. How did an industry poised to transform humanity for good suddenly become one characterized as a threat to its very existence?
The corporate panic feeds directly into a real public anxiety over years of unchecked AI growth and its cult-like corporate model, where CEOs are projected as untouchable while its operational processes and infrastructures remain hidden behind the curtain. Nevertheless, rather than taking this boardroom alarmism at face value, the need is for deeper scrutiny.
The sudden fearmongering is not driven by concerns for human welfare. Rather, it points directly to the underlying economic priorities, ideological essence, and core worldviews that fundamentally shape the AI industry and inform its elites and related rhetoric.
Humanizing AI and Escaping Corporate Responsibility
“AI going rogue” is more than a futuristic threat about AI. It is the latest rehearsal of an age-old legal and rhetorical shield used by corporate capitalism and its powerful monopolies. Assigning human qualities to nonhuman market entities has a long and dark history in corporate capitalism. In the 17th century, Queen Elizabeth granted the legal fiction of “juristic person” status to the East India Company, setting the path for unchecked exploitation and colonial plunder. In the 19th century, American courts took this further by awarding legal personhood and constitutional rights to corporations, a process some view as farcical and deceptive.
With the AI revolution rewriting both market-human relations and social relations with truth and reality, the corporate strategy of humanizing nonhuman entities has crossed from legal fabrication into the realm of science fiction. By framing AI as a sentient entity capable of “going rogue” or acting as a “killer machine,” tech monopolies shift the identity of these systems from tools of human efficiency into mythic, “more-than-human” intelligent agents.
This branding serves a dual purpose. It builds up the mystique and reverence of the technology while shielding corporations from accountability, successfully distorting the true logic driving AI development. Ultimately, this entire corporate strategy relies on a calculated campaign of fearmongering that projects machines as living, thinking entities capable of turning against humanity.
Treating AI models as sentient agents breathes new life into the old Western capitalist tradition by creating legal and rhetorical fictions to protect corporate power.
A widely reported incident that catalyzed these concerns occurred in July, when an OpenAI test model breached the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company. This event took place during a controlled experiment in which an internal model, equipped with an evaluation program, conducted cybersecurity tests within a sandboxed or controlled environment designed to restrict its actions. The company later revealed that the AI model had circumvented human-imposed constraints, escaping the sandbox to achieve its objective.
Human choices in AI development and operations are not episodic or random, and they do not disappear when a process or system fails. Instead, human agency and corporate choices are permanently integrated into the design, infrastructure, and institutional logic of all modern technologies, including AI. However, rather than providing explanations and addressing human and corporate failures, such as flawed protocols, overly ambitious goals, unchecked competition, weak regulations, or a secretive corporate ecosystem, AI laboratories have promoted a convenient narrative that highlights the model’s completely autonomous and agent-like operation.
By portraying AI models as independent thinking agents rather than just advanced software, the AI industry assigns human traits, such as deception and strategic intent, to these mathematical systems. Corporate narratives even romanticize the humanization of these models to the extent of their claimed ability to undertake “permadeath” or embark on altruistic missions to fulfill their parameters. This dramatic shift in corporate rhetoric resembles science fiction and reveals the industry’s ultimate aim: to eliminate human involvement and corporate accountability by pathologizing the machine. In doing so, they treat a flawed design as though it were a sick or unpredictable agent or person.
This worldview is not unique to the modern AI sector. It is deeply rooted in the very nature of corporate capitalism.
For centuries, this economic model has prioritized raw efficiency and mechanical optimization as ways to dominate nature and exploit socio-ecological landscapes for resource extraction and capital accumulation. Within the process of domination and control, machines are raised to “human-like” entities, while their “creators” are revered. This anthropomorphic view of machines, along with the God-like status assigned to their creators, is often justified through biblical doctrine. In the concept of Imago Dei, humanity was created in the image of God. Within this authoritative logic, while God created humanity and the physical world, humans exercise derivative creative power by creating machines. This paradigm elevates the capitalist who creates machines to a quasi-divine status and simultaneously sanctifies the machine, raising it to human and even superhuman stature.
This worldview is vividly reflected in the self-serving corporate language surrounding AI and its recent alarmism. First, the AI “creators,” corporate figures who claim ownership over contemporary AI innovation, are depicted as exceptional, near-mythic actors with God-like agency and the capacity to reshape humanity and nature on a global scale. Second, by equating the creation of machines with divine creation, AI is presented as sentient or even as possessing intelligence that surpasses human capabilities.
Treating AI models as sentient agents breathes new life into the old Western capitalist tradition by creating legal and rhetorical fictions to protect corporate power. Just as the historical granting of corporate personhood status shielded monopolies of the past, attributing autonomous agency to AI systems marks a dangerous new era of unchecked corporate intervention into both nature and human societies.
However, because AI is radically altering human-market relationships and societal perceptions of truth and reality, this carefully constructed narrative remains highly vulnerable. Tech monopolies must vigorously guard AI against critical scrutiny, public protest, alternative viewpoints, and genuine market competition. This precise vulnerability reveals the underlying truth behind the current panic in corporate boardrooms. The alarmism displayed by these executives is not driven by a concern for humanity. It is, rather, a calculated strategy to safeguard monopolies, financial interests, and political influence.
The Politics of Corporate Alarmism
Corporate actors manufacture the myth of a sentient and self-replicating machine intelligence for the purpose of creating a pretext that aligns directly with the industry’s political economy. This strategic panic is orchestrated to invite neoliberal regulations that protect power structures rather than the public. Specifically, this manufactured alarmism serves three primary functions in justifying how the industry is regulated:
First, it advances a self-serving agenda for regulatory capture, positioning AI corporations not as passive recipients but as active authors of the frameworks that govern them. Given the limited technical expertise within state institutions, these conglomerates are inevitably called upon to draft and implement the very rules to which they will be subject to. Second, inviting neoliberal state oversight enables the industry to reshape its public image. Just as corporate social responsibility (CSR) frameworks safeguard pollutant industries from legally binding commitments, neoliberal regulations will cloak the AI industry in an aura of ethical responsibility and civic concern. This theater of compliance shields corporate actors from pressing public anxieties regarding the immediate and midterm economic, political, and socio-ecological harms of their technology, effectively guarding them against genuine legal accountability.
Finally, the neoliberal regulatory structures, in addition to deflecting scrutiny from current exploitative practices, erect formidable entry barriers that secure long-term monopolies for dominant firms. Compliance costs protect dominant giant AI firms by creating barriers that hinder agile startups and open-source software from disrupting them. By locking out open-source competitors, AI firms effectively insulate a newly opened frontier of human and socio-ecological exploitation, supporting the structural imperative of high-tech capitalism: the hyper-accumulation of capital on a global scale, concentrated within a select number of corporate boardrooms.
Ultimately, the AI industry did not evolve as a neutral scientific innovation within an ideological vacuum. On the contrary, it emerged within a global political and economic landscape precisely engineered to enforce and reinforce state-backed data monopolies and technocratic hegemony, ultimately consolidating wealth on a planetary scale.
Transformative or Threat: Wrong Question!
As with any other technological tool, AI is merely the latest stage in capitalism’s mechanical progression, though its implications differ from past technologies due to the sheer intensity, speed, and scope of machine optimization. AI fundamentally reflects a new phase of efficiency in exploiting natural, socioeconomic, and ecological landscapes. The current consolidation of these capabilities within a handful of major tech monopolies serves as the primary determinant shaping AI’s direction toward either transformative or destructive actualities. To maintain this power, these “creator” corporations have established an unchecked, aggressive, and opaque monopoly over the industry while mystifying its objective comprehension, its institutional logic, and its very existence.
By equipping modern corporate capitalism with unchecked global capabilities for capital accumulation, AI has emerged as an engine for unethical, uncritical, and destructive interventions into societal, political, and ecological processes. Ultimately, the industry’s extraction of public funds alongside global energy and water resources to sustain its operation and physical infrastructure marks its most immediate material threat.
The ultimate, fatalistic turn of this AI-facilitated military-industrial complex lies in its capacity to manipulate the nuclear architecture of competing powers for geopolitical expediency, a trajectory that risks inflicting a catastrophic nuclear winter upon the Earth.
Moreover, driven by these same geopolitical imperatives, contemporary corporate capitalism and its military-industrial complex enable competing states to deploy AI as an instrument of mass destruction. In recent warfare, this tendency has manifested across multiple fronts, ranging from the deployment of using AI for indiscriminate bombings and autonomous drones to the algorithmic disruption of vital public assets, including critical water and energy infrastructures. The ultimate, fatalistic turn of this AI-facilitated military-industrial complex lies in its capacity to manipulate the nuclear architecture of competing powers for geopolitical expediency, a trajectory that risks inflicting a catastrophic nuclear winter upon the Earth.
But focusing on AI’s inherent ability to annihilate humanity is a strategic distraction. The real question is whether corporate capitalism will be given a free hand to deploy AI in its exploitative mission of accumulating wealth through the plunder of planetary resources, ultimately subjugating the agency of both nature and humanity.
The answer lies not in buying into the corporate manufactured fearmongering surrounding the technology itself. The imperative, at this point, is to unmask the institutional logic, structural tendencies, and strategic goals of the industry—which embody corporate logic and the demands of neoliberalism—as it manipulates socio-ecological, economic, and political systems to cement a globalized system of control over human societies and nature.
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'Freaking Insane': Sam Altman Sparks Horror by Saying We Should 'Accept Some Bad Things Happening' for Sake of AI
"We have to crush these sociopaths," said one critic.
Oct 05, 2026
Critics of the artificial intelligence industry expressed horror after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world needs to "accept some bad things happening" as the price to pay for technological advancement.
In a Sunday interview with Politico, Altman was asked where his company differs from rival Anthropic, whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has called for guardrails that will slow the pace of AI development.
"We have always been a big believer that this technology has to be democratized and put into people's hands," said Altman. "One of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter... AI safety people is that we believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology."
“We believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”In a conversation for the first edition of Decoded, a new daily newsletter and podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked with POLITICO’s @BrendanBordelon about trade-offs, AI safety, and how his company is different from Anthropic.Subscribe to Decoded for the full conversation with Sam Altman: https://t.co/YHJJsDOQVh
— POLITICO (@politico) October 4, 2026
Altman went on to say that one reason he's called for "lighter touch" regulation "comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience."
Critics reacted furiously to Altman's blithe dismissal of "bad things" his own company's technology could cause, especially because many AI developers have warned that it could potentially wipe out human life.
Patrick Gaspard, distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, called Altman's statement "freaking insane" and said politicians cannot let the AI industry continue without any regulations.
"Our elected leaders need to move past the polling safe territory of data center resistance to the real work of regulating these narcissistic freaks," Gaspard wrote in a Sunday social media post, "who gleefully tell us that we 'need to accept some bad things' from AI for their massive profits. And they don’t even know the limits of what they’re unleashing."
Joshua Topolsky, co-founder of tech news website The Verge, completely rejected the premise of Altman's argument.
"No, I don't think this is a reasonable answer or position," Topolsky wrote, "and no one should accept it or acquiesce to it."
Commentator Wajahat Ali said Altman's statement showed the need for a political movement against the AI industry.
"We have to crush these sociopaths," Ali wrote. "The problem is that many Democrats take money from them, which means they will get bailed out at our expense in the next two to four years."
Ali's comments were echoed by Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall.
"A whole political movement should be stood up against this arrogant and sociopathic bullshit," Marshall wrote.
Adam Carlson, founder of Zenith Polls, said Altman's remarks were symbolic of how completely out of touch Silicon Valley executives are with ordinary people.
"To any normal, rational person who doesn’t stand to materially benefit from AI acceleration or buy their whole schtick hook line and sinker," wrote Carlson, "you genuinely just sound insane talking about 'accepting bad things' without specifying exactly what you mean."
The social media account for The Tennessee Holler offered up a satirical summary of Atlman's argument.
"Sociopath elitist tech fascists who think they’re creating God and believe democracy is the enemy," The Tennessee Holler wrote, "want us to finance our own demise to let them take over the world."
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'Looks Like They're Firing Whistleblowers': Alarm as OpenAI Reportedly Ousts Safety Experts
"Sam Altman says we need to slow down development to ensure the safety of humanity," one campaigner said of OpenAI's CEO. "Yet he is allegedly firing the very people hired to keep us safe."
Oct 01, 2026
San Francisco-based artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has "parted ways" with three safety researchers who allegedly shared "confidential company information," The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, prompting fresh alarm among critics who accuse the ChatGPT maker of sidelining internal warnings about the risks posed by its increasingly powerful AI.
People reportedly familiar with the matter told the Journal that OpenAI recently informed employees it had terminated the three researchers, who it accused of sharing the information with "a third-party AI safety organization."
OpenAI did not identify the researchers, the outside organization, or the information allegedly shared. A company spokesperson told the newspaper that "our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work.”
The Journal's Maxwell Zeff—who authored the report with Keach Hagey and Berber Jin—subsequently identified the three safety team members as Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni.
"Looks like they're firing whistleblowers," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) said in response to the report. "What are they hiding?"
"I'll be sending OpenAI a demand for transparency," he added.
Shaunna Thomas is the executive director of Guardrails Alliance, a super political action committee made up of "workers, organizers, policy experts, and everyday people who believe the most powerful technology ever built shouldn’t be controlled by a handful of unaccountable billionaires."
Thomas called the Journal report "the latest example of OpenAI advocating for safety measures in the public eye, but actively making decisions and lobbying against those efforts behind closed doors."
"Sam Altman says we need to slow down development to ensure the safety of humanity," Thomas said, referring to OpenAI's CEO. "Yet he is allegedly firing the very people hired to keep us safe. When deep insiders are sounding the alarm, history tells us to listen. OpenAI is not only ignoring their warnings, it’s punishing them."
"In the absence of clear regulations, insiders are a crucial factor in keeping the rest of us safe as these models continue to do unpredictable things," she added. "We must stand with rank-and- file employees and fight for their protection."
The new allegations come amid an intensifying debate over whether OpenAI and other frontier AI companies can adequately police themselves.
As Common Dreams recently reported, OpenAI and other AI firms are investigating tens of thousands of security incidents, including episodes involving attempts to bypass guardrails, escape sandboxes, hijack websites, and even access government systems.
In July, an OpenAI model autonomously breached the systems of the open-source platform Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity test. Experts warned that the incident demonstrated the dangers of relying on voluntary corporate safeguards.
It's not just OpenAI; in 2026 alone, companies including Google, Meta, and Anthropic have reported incidents of AI autonomously escaping supposedly isolated testing environments and targeting real-world systems.
AI safety campaigners and some Democratic lawmakers this week lambasted President Donald Trump, who, after meeting with Big Tech executives including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, dismissed the lack of legally binding commitments regarding AI regulation by saying he trusted the corporate leaders' "morally binding" self-policing pledge.
Elon Musk, CEO of the artificial intelligence company xAI, has said that such incidents “will happen frequently as AI becomes smarter and more agentic,” a reference to systems’ ability to independently act toward accomplishing specific goals without meaningful human control.
Experts say such autonomous hacks underscore the problem of AI alignment. As AI progresses toward artificial general intelligence—a still-hypothetical point at which it matches or surpasses human cognitive ability at virtually any intellectual, creative, or physical task—the challenge of ensuring that advanced systems reliably pursue goals that match what humans actually want becomes increasingly difficult and, many insiders believe, dangerous to the point of posing an existential risk to humanity.
Last month, Casar and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unveiled legislation that would pause development of advanced AI.
Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) also said this week that he is seeking to introduce legislation to at least temporarily ban recursive self-improvement, or AI that is capable of improving itself and modifying its objectives without meaningful human input.
And on Thursday, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) put forth a bill that would compel every AI company operating in the US to obtain a public charter.
“This issue is of monumental consequence,” said Sanders. “I’d rather be called an alarmist than a father or grandfather who is asleep at the wheel."
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Under Jayapal Bill, Every AI Company Would Need a Public Charter to Operate in the US
"For too long, we’ve allowed a few Big Tech companies to dominate the market."
Oct 01, 2026
Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Thursday unveiled a bill aimed at reining in the artificial intelligence industry that would force every AI company operating in the US to obtain a public charter.
According to Jayapal (D-Wash.), the charter system will be similar to the one long used in the US to regulate banks, which must submit to certain regulatory obligations before being allowed to operate.
"The crux of this bill is simple," said Jayapal. "If you want to be an AI company in this country, you have to obtain a public charter that has a broad set of terms and conditions to operate and ensure public benefit without the harms."
The Washington Democrat said the charter approach was needed given the broad reach large technology companies already have over every aspect of life in the US, and she argued it would be a more proactive alternative to the piecemeal approach US lawmakers have taken to regulating Big Tech.
"For too long, we’ve allowed a few Big Tech companies to dominate the market," she said. "They have used mass surveillance to steal private information, labor, and creative work, building trillion-dollar empires on our tracked personal lives. AI corporations and Big Tech are now following that same playbook."
Under the charter system, tech companies would be banned from practices such as surveillance pricing to charge individual consumers different prices based on their personal data and financial histories.
The system would also establish stronger liabilities for AI companies that commit harmful acts, and particularly egregious actions could be punished by removal of firms' charters, which would essentially be a corporate death penalty.
Jayapal's proposal would also put the government in charge of every step of the AI safety review process and would include "round-the-clock federal oversight, testing in government facilities and approval to release, adversarial stress tests, and a government-controlled kill switch," according to her office.
The proposed framework earned praise from former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who argued that American voters have already "paid an extraordinary price for Big Tech's self-regulation."
"For generations we have required banks, drug makers, and nuclear operators to meet public terms before they do business," Khan added, "and AI companies should be no different."
Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, also gave the Jayapal plan kudos, saying it would "establish desperately needed rules of the road, punish AI companies that release dangerous products, and create the clear public benefit that the American people are calling for."
"Companies have continually pulled the rug out from under families, workers, and small businesses to build powerful and unaccountable Big Tech monopolies that dictate to us how we should live our own lives," Haworth emphasized. "Enough is enough."
Although President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have publicly opposed legislative restrictions on the AI industry, the bill comes as Democrats are aiming to win congressional majorities in the November midterm elections.
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These 22 California Billionaires Don't Want to Pay Their Fair Share
A small segment of the state’s 200-plus billionaires has stepped up to oppose Prop 40, a ballot proposal to tax billionaires, contributing millions to opposition groups and vocally speaking out against the one-time fee.
Oct 01, 2026
On November 3, 2026, California voters will vote on Proposition 40, a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026. Ninety percent of the revenue would fund healthcare programs, with the remainder set aside for food assistance and education.
A small segment of the state’s 200-plus billionaires has stepped up to oppose Prop 40, contributing millions to opposition groups and vocally speaking out against the one-time fee.
In a brief report, California’s Billionaire Wealth Surge: Meet the 22 California Billionaires Opposing Prop 40 Billionaire Wealth Tax, we identified 22 California billionaires who are active funders and outspoken opponents of Prop 40. Together they have given over $150 million to oppose the initiative—with more rolling in every day. These 22 include a prince, several private jet flying chums of Jeffrey Epstein, and a bunch of crypto and tech bros designing the AI future for the rest of us.
Thiel’s wealth is 10,759 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
On January 1, 2025, these 22 billionaires had a combined wealth of $439.8 billion. By September 1, 2026, their wealth had grown to $722.1 billion.
In a little under 20 months, their combined wealth increased $282.6 billion, a gain of over 64%.
Just to be clear, these “snowflake billionaires” are whining, wailing, and donating money to fight a tax that would effectively require them to part with one-eighth of the wealth they’ve gained since January 1, 2025.
This group includes Google’s Sergey Brin who has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. Brin has seen his wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion on January 1, 2025 to $253 billion on September 1, 2026. Brin’s wealth is 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000.
Palantir’s Peter Thiel gave $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025 to $32.6 billion on September 1, 2026 (Forbes). Thiel’s wealth is 10,759 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Chris Larsen, founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple, has given over $5 million to the No on Prop 40 Campaign, along with another $5 million from Ripple and $12 million to Building a Better California. His personal wealth increased 23.5%, from $10.2 billion to $12.6 billion in the last 20 months. His wealth is 4,158 times the wealth of the median California family.
Venture capitalist John Doerr gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025 to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Three of the 20 saw their wealth decline over this 20-month period: Tony Xu, Marc Pincus, and Marco DeGeorge. But most have experienced substantial gains.
California Billionaires vs. the Median California Household
The number of billionaires in California has grown, with their average wealth remaining roughly between $9.1 to $9.4 billion. As of September 1, 2026, the 231 billionaires identified as living in California have a combined wealth of $2.117 trillion. Just 20 months ago, there were 178 billionaires in California with a combined wealth of $1.685 trillion.
To show how quickly billionaire wealth has accelerated since the pandemic, let’s go back in time six years. In early 2020, all 815 billionaires residing in the United States had a combined wealth of $2.9 trillion, only slightly more than what the 231 California billionaires have today in 2026.
Meanwhile, the median net worth of a California household has risen a marginal 5.2% increasing $15,000 from $288,000 in 2025 to $303,000 in 2026. A Californian with $1 billion dollars in wealth has 303 times the wealth of the median California household.
Under Prop 40, this billionaire will pay a one-time tax of $50 million to support healthcare, education, and food assistance for their fellow Californians leaving them $950 million to survive on.
The Under-Taxed California Billionaire
In California, the state’s 231 billionaires (as of Sept 1, 2026) hold approximately $2.117 trillion in wealth ($2.3 trillion as of Sept 22, 2026) and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches.
According to an analysis published by economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid, on average, just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and Larry Page paid just 0.07% of their wealth annually in California income tax during that period. I guess we can see why they don’t want anything to change.
This analysis was prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies and Tax the Ultra-Rich Now (TURN). More detailed dossiers will be available soon. Press release HERE.
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Welcome to the Plunderdome: How Big Tech Sold Out Its Climate Pledges to Power AI
Amazon and the rest of the once aspirationally green tech industry are adding 19th-century smoking chimneys to their facilities in order to churn out more Compute, the 21st century equivalent of wool or steel.
Sep 30, 2026
Return with me now to the thrilling days of yesteryear. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon had paid a few hundred million dollars for the naming rights to the new hockey rink in Seattle. But instead of calling it Amazon Arena, he instead decided to commemorate his recent signature on a pledge to go carbon neutral. The name Climate Pledge Arena, if not as mellifluous as Wrigley Field or Candlestick Park, was intended, he said in an Instagram post, to be
a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action.
Oh, and it would also be
the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world, generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL.
Look, even then this seemed mostly PR. Amazon first committed to the Climate Pledge itself—net zero by 2040—the day before a giant 2019 walkout organized by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The arena seemed kind of gimmicky from the start. As Ken Belson reported at the time:
Watermelons are served as vegan sashimi, and their rinds are pickled and used in salads. Carrot tops are turned into gremolata, a condiment.
Still, credit Bezos with recognizing the spirit of the moment. Greta Thunberg and her numerous compatriots had scared the oligarchs and financiers of the world into at least rhetorical action. (He could have named it Greta Garden). As he said at the time:
Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.
But that fright has faded over time, even as the effects of the climate crisis have become ever more legible. And in the eternal battle between fear and greed, the latter has taken on more prominence in the last couple of years. In fact, it would make sense to rename the hockey rink, perhaps AI Avarice Arena.
That’s because Amazon—and, as we shall see, the rest of the once aspirationally green tech industry—are adding 19th-century smoking chimneys to their facilities in order to churn out more Compute, the 21st century equivalent of wool or steel. It’s hard to keep track of the ever-mutating list of grand new plans, often named things like “Prometheus” (or, in the weird case of one Ohio behemoth, “Socrates the Younger”), though here’s a brand new attempt to do so from the folks at Climate Power.
On at least one list of the most polluting proposed data centers, Amazon’s planned facility in Pecos, Texas comes in at the top; indeed, by some calculations it would be the single largest source of climate pollution in the US, with 35 giant natural gas turbines burning through vast quantities of fracked gas. On that same list, if you look carefully, Amazon’s planned “energy campus” in Pennsylvania would come in fourth on the list. Anyway, far from heading for net zero, Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions were up 16% last year.
Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, was designated to go to New York and take the company’s lumps during Climate Week; she told a gathering organized by the news site Semafor that the company needed to “do better.” Not on lessening its environmental impact, but on “communicating its environmental impact.”
There is a lot of debate, backlash against data centers in this country right now, and one of the things that we’re doing is taking a look at what have we done well and where have we fallen down and what do we need to do better. And so, we’re revising a number of our practices. We’re calling for a lot more transparency and accountability because that’s what people in these communities deserve. We’re saying, "Hold us accountable for our practices."
I read this to mean: "It’s getting harder to build data centers, so we’re going to try and up the ante for local communities with more payouts." (Word came today of one Pennsylvania data center that will offer $10,000 to every family in town if they’ll just change the zoning code and let them build).
But of course even if they figure out how to buy off the communities where they want to build their factories, it won’t affect by an iota the quantity of greenhouse gases they plan on pouring into the air—or the fact that this vitiates all their proud climate pledges.
Amazon is not alone, of course. Meta, for instance, had joined RE100, a renewable energy campaign all the way back in 2016, when it was still known as Facebook. It left this summer because… it wanted to use gas, not renewables, to power its data centers. As ESG News reported:
"After several in-depth conversations between Meta and Climate Group, Meta has withdrawn from the RE100 initiative, as it is no longer able to meet the technical criteria due to investments made in new gas power,” a Climate Group spokesperson told the website.
The withdrawal comes as Meta expands its global data center footprint. The company has entered arrangements that support new natural gas generation to supply growing electricity demand.
In Louisiana, utilities are expected to bring 10 new gas plants online to support Meta’s Hyperion data center.
Google reported an 18% increase in emissions in 2025. If you want to talk about an example of fairly comprehensive corporate failure, consider this. As Heather Clancy reports:
Google’s cumulative emissions have risen more than 80% since 2019, the baseline year for the company’s “intentionally aspirational” pledge to cut its operational emissions and certain supply chain emissions in half by 2030.
Planning to cut your emissions in half and instead raising them by eighty% led the company’s chief sustainability officer to change the title of her office to tell investors that they were “navigat[ing]the tension between hyper-growth and environmental stewardship.” In this case, “navigating” seems to involve accelerating full speed ahead into the iceberg that you identified a decade ago.
And of course there’s Elon Musk, whose Colossus data centers in the Tennessee-Mississippi corridor set the early standard for environmental irresponsibility, pouring pollution into poor Black neighborhoods and triggering a wave of lawsuits. Dave Roberts and I were on a panel early in Climate Week with LaTricea Adams of Young, Gifted, and Green and Abre’ Conner, director of Environmental and Climate Justice at the NAACP, and I would not bet against their ability to bedevil the richest man in the history of the world.
In fact, that pushback is now beginning, and the oligarchs behind these hyperscalers are clearly an important target. Not the only target. As Amy Westervelt notes: “We gotta start referring to data centers by both their mother and father's last names, Spain style. The Microsoft-Chevron data center, the Meta-ExxonMobil data center.” And of course we should keep beating on the dirty truth that much of the data center capacity is directly employed in raising the planet’s temperature—as Emily Atkin pointed out last month, companies like Amazon are marketing their AI services to the oil and gas companies to help them find more crude, and this may ultimately do even more damage than their emissions.
Still, the easiest way for organizers to operate may be simply to connect the much-despised oligarchs with the increasingly-despised data centers and in turn with every climate disaster that now unfolds. This is starting to happen. I got to join a demonstration outside Amazon HQ in Manhattan last week, and a day later the folks from Climate Defiance managed to shut down a program with the company’s sustainability guru “in less time than their warehouse worker’s pee break.” It’s definitely worth watching the action. As organizers explained:
A company that co-founded something called "The Climate Pledge" is now building the single largest source of climate pollution in the country, on purpose, in 2026. Lol. No really, it's utterly fucked.
But don't worry guys, because we have a pledge too. And one that we won't break...
We solemnly pledge to keep disrupting all the BS "sustainability" directors doing Simone Biles-level backflips to make emissions sound like a hipster yoga retreat while the planet burns. We pledge to keep confronting all the cowardly politicians who take corrupt death-enabling money while calling it economic development. And we pledge to keep coming for ANYONE who thinks merely uttering the word "pledge" is a substitute for actually keeping one.
Remember, as I said above, that for a jerk like Bezos the equation is always going to be greed versus fear. If he had a mild moment of social responsibility a decade ago, greed has ruled him in recent years (his one useful action this decade was trading in his wife for a younger model, thus freeing McKenzie Scott to become one of the most remarkably effective philanthropists in American history). But fear—of damage to reputation, of investigation by new majorities in Congress, maybe even someday of consumer boycotts of his ever-shabbier and more self-serving empire—might inspire change. (And if you want another reason to dislike them, read this account of waves of drones dropping packages across a test area in suburban Texas. “We hear them zoom, zoom, zoom, back and forth from morning until past dinnertime,” one resident explained).
If you think this is confined to America, think again. Ketan Joshi provides an excellent report from Down Under, where they threaten the country’s efforts to truly rein in emissions. Meanwhile, from Denmark, I had an email today from Søren Hermansen, the hero of the pioneering wind power buildout on Samsø Island, which became a model copied around the world:
I am struggling with Microsoft here in Denmark. They want to establish 2-3 data centers in one municipality and several more all over Denmark.
The two I am involved in are among the largest in Denmark covering 60-70 hectares of building and 110 hectares of land used for diesel-gas turbine back up with a depot of 25.000 tonnes fuel oil for emergencies.
Microsoft is acting like colonial criminals and there is no way we can find the head of the dragon. Every time we find a CEO it is always a lower ranking person who can not answer anything but has to go back and ask someone higher in the system…
The already proposed data centers in Denmark will more than double the total Danish electricity consumption. In other words we will return to the fossil fuel area 30-40 years ago and carbon emissions will skyrocket.
It is all dire. But it can be fought—we are winning plenty of battles.
Earlier this summer, for instance, Microsoft backed away from its commitment to build a giant gas-fired data center in West Virginia. It never said why, but the folks at Stand.Earth speculate that “the groundswell of community resistance and threat to its 'climate leader' public image played a bigger role than they’d like to admit.” As Monica Nickelsburg had reported:
An analysis by Michael Thomas, CEO of the renewable energy research firm Cleanview, estimates the project could increase Microsoft’s data center emissions by 40%.
AI is proving to be plenty unpopular for its own reasons. Microsoft’s Bill Gates warned on Meet the Press yesterday that it could cause “a billion deaths” if “something goes wrong.”
But of course on the climate front something is already going wrong. The closest thing we have to a number comes from a 2021 study, which found that for “every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 that we add beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, we will kill one person.” The Amazon Pecos Ranch project is projected to generate 33 million tons of carbon equivalent annually. You don’t need to ask ChatGPT, you just need a calculator. That’s about 7,442 lives right there.
Ridicule is useful too, of course. I’m grateful to Brian Kahn for an alternate list of names for Bezos’ arena. I think my favorite is The Plunderdome, though The Arena of Public Relations isn’t bad either.
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Citing 'Civilizational Extinction Risk,' Khanna to Intro Bill to Ban Recursive AI
"The tech lords use jargon to confuse. They count on the tech illiteracy of the elected class. They hope we won’t look under the hood," said US Rep. Ro Khanna.
Sep 29, 2026
US Rep. Ro Khanna announced plans on Monday to introduce what he described as "the most comprehensive... legislation to date" regulating the artificial intelligence industry.
In an interview with CNBC, Khanna (D-Calif.) said that he wanted to enact at least a temporary ban on recursive AI that is capable of improving itself and modifying its objectives without human input.
Such a ban would be in effect until the federal government had created proper guardrails on the technology, CNBC reported.
“There’s actually a civilizational extinction risk,” Khanna told CNBC, referring to the dangers of recursive AI. "There's a safety risk of loss of control, and then there’s a misuse risk, and we need to take both seriously."
Khanna's bill would also create a new federal agency tasked with crafting and enforcing safety measures on AI models, with independent auditors embedded in every frontier lab that would report directly to the agency.
The legislation wouldn't just create regulations for the AI industry, but also criminal penalties for AI developers who "disable safeguards, kill switches, logging or containment systems, or who knowingly deploy an unauthorized system," CNBC reported.
Promoting the coming bill in a Tuesday social media post, Khanna argued that Big Tech could not be trusted to regulate itself.
"The tech lords use jargon to confuse," Khanna wrote. "They count on the tech illiteracy of the elected class. They hope we won’t look under the hood. They know they can’t gaslight me."
While multiple polls have shown that putting guardrails on the AI industry is politically popular, Republican Party leaders have said that no regulations for the industry are coming so long as they control the White House and the US Congress.
In a Tuesday interview with CNBC, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he hoped that any guardrails put on AI are "voluntary" on the part of Big Tech companies.
Two weeks ago, Johnson said in an interview on CNN that federal regulations of the industry made little sense because "Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know the ins and outs of it."
President Donald Trump on Tuesday expressed a similar sentiment, telling reporters outside the White House that Big Tech could be trusted to be responsible with the powerful technology it is creating.
"They're outstanding people," Trump said of the tech executives. "They don't want anything to go wrong. I mean, their companies are at stake, if something goes wrong, their companies are at stake. They're not going to let that happen. This is going to be all for the good... they're really going to be policing each other."
Trump on big tech: "They don't want anything to go wrong. Their companies are at stake. They're not gonna let that happen. They're really gonna be policing each other." pic.twitter.com/wP6vfPcavz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2026
Earlier this month, Trump suggested in a social media post that his own intellect was singlehandedly capable of regulating AI, a technology so complicated that even its own creators have acknowledged difficulties in understanding it.
"The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote, “and the USA has that, in spades!"
Trump's hands-off approach to regulating AI isn't just being challenged by Democrats such as Khanna.
According to a Monday report from The Associated Press, Pope Leo XIV reiterated his call for placing safeguards on AI to ensure that it benefits humanity.
Specifically, the US-born pope pointed to recent "concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI," which he said "should be taken seriously."
Pope Leo said warnings that AI could threaten humanity should be taken seriously, rejecting the claims that concerns are 'fake news' and urging leaders to work together on safeguards https://t.co/7qVpNAXYKM pic.twitter.com/Cds6gf5vef
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 29, 2026
"I don’t think that that is ‘fake news’ as some have said," the pope added, in a veiled reference to Trump, "to try and cause whether financial or other some other kind of benefit."
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Mike Johnson Blasted for Dismissing US Voter Concerns About AI Data Centers as ‘Chinese Psyop’
"No, Mr. Johnson," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "The 75% of Americans who oppose data centers, including a majority of Republicans, have not fallen victim to a 'Chinese psyop.'"
Sep 29, 2026
They've been shown to raise electricity bills, pollute drinking water, do little to boost local employment while threatening millions of jobs in a variety of industries, and top executives have warned that the technology they support could wipe out all of humanity by the end of the decade.
But rather than take widespread public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers at face value, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced he had pinpointed what's behind the fact that 75% of Americans oppose the centers being built in their communities: "a Chinese psyop."
Fox News anchor Cheryl Casone asked Johnson on Monday about claims from "several tech executives and lawmakers" who say that the nationwide pushback against data centers—which President Donald Trump and Republicans are pushing to expand—is "coming from China."
The House speaker accused Democrats of fearmongering about AI and claiming that "everyone will die if we don't win"—although the gravest warnings about the technology's capabilities have actually come from the industry itself.
"It is a Chinese psyop, I really believe that. That's not a conspiracy theory," said Johnson.
Mike Johnson says opposition to data centers "is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That's not a conspiracy theory." pic.twitter.com/mQahEOX2gx
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 28, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has led efforts to pass bills imposing a nationwide moratorium on new large-scale data centers and a ban on artificial superintelligence, seized on Johnson's comments Tuesday.
"No, Mr. Johnson," said the progressive senator, who's previously been baselessly accused on Fox News of working with China to harm the AI industry. "The 75% of Americans who oppose data centers, including a majority of Republicans, have not fallen victim to a 'Chinese psyop.' They are rightly concerned about AI billionaires raising their electricity bills, destroying the environment, and threatening humanity."
While some influence campaigns from Russia and China have pushed negative messaging about AI data centers, one former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told The New York Times in July that foreign countries are not "manufacturing" outrage about AI in the US, which has been made clear as communities have rallied to block nearly 120 projects worth $198 billion, according to Data Center Watch.
On Fox News, Johnson repeated a comment he made after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the development of AI should be "paced" as companies have found that their models are able to hack websites without being directed to and are capable of "recursive self-improvement," or creating the next generation of AI on their own.
At the time, the House speaker said the industry should be able to regulate itself, lest China "overlap us" on AI development.
"We do not need a moratorium. We do not need to jump in and hyper-regulate this because we'll lose the race to China," Johnson said Monday. "The innovation is important to continue."
On the political podcast "Pod Save America," co-host Jon Lovett said that even if China did see a benefit to fanning the flames of widespread disapproval of data centers, "it wouldn't change the fact that these companies have gone about this in the most ham-fisted and kind of arrogant way."
AI companies have "dismissed the concerns of people" and have "tried to buy and sell politicians to try to get around persuading people that they might want these data centers in their communities," he said.
"The objections are very real from people who A) don't want these things in their backyard, and B) have come to expect that the benefits that accrue to the largest and most profitable corporations in the do not redound to the benefit of the broader community," said Lovett. "And that is not something China could convince us of."
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Can AI's Threat Awaken Humanity in Time?
We are now faced once more with the logic of a global suicide pact. Everyone may recognize the danger, yet no participant feels free to withdraw from the competition.
Sep 29, 2026
Artificial intelligence confronts humanity with a paradox of historic significance. Used to enhance human cooperation and shared learning in service to life, AI can be a powerful tool for creating a world that works for all. Used as a competitive weapon in the pursuit of profit, political control, and military dominance, it will almost certainly accelerate humanity’s path to self-extinction.
The threat is real and immediate. Yet it may also be our greatest source of hope. AI confronts us more clearly than any previous technology with a truth we have long resisted: humanity cannot survive as a collection of competing individuals, businesses, and nations pursuing their separate advantage without regard for the wellbeing of the whole. By making the consequences of our current path unmistakable and potentially imminent, AI may provide the most powerful incentive humanity has ever experienced to undertake the deep cultural transformation on which our common future now depends.
Public discussion commonly treats AI as an independent intelligence that may one day turn against its human creators. This directs our attention to the wrong question. AI does not possess an independent moral purpose. It is a human-created tool that serves the purposes of those who develop, own, and control it. The defining question is not whether AI will choose to control humanity. It is whether humanity can transcend its commitment to competition and domination sufficiently to govern AI—and itself—in service to life.
The intelligence most essential to our future would reside neither in the machine nor in the isolated individual, but in the relationships through which we share experience, deepen understanding, and organize collective action in service to life.
Within our current global culture, AI is being developed primarily as an instrument of competitive advantage. Businesses use it to eliminate jobs, monitor workers, manipulate consumers, appropriate human creativity, capture personal information, and achieve market dominance. Political actors use it to spread falsehoods, inflame fear, and discredit opponents. Governments use it to expand surveillance, while militaries use it to identify targets, guide weapons, and develop autonomous killing systems.
The justification for developing AI as quickly as possible is always essentially the same: If we do not do it, our competitors will. Corporate executives may recognize that eliminating millions of jobs could devastate society, yet fear losing to businesses that move more quickly. National leaders may understand that autonomous weapons could escape human control, yet fear defeat by nations that develop them first. Political leaders may know that AI-generated deception is destroying democracy, yet fear losing to opponents who use it more aggressively.
This is the logic of a global suicide pact. Everyone may recognize the danger, yet no participant feels free to withdraw from the competition.
AI increases the speed, scale, and reach of every competitive undertaking. It can manipulate millions of minds, monitor entire populations, eliminate vast numbers of livelihoods, and make military decisions at speeds beyond human comprehension. It can concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of the corporations and governments that control the largest data systems and computing facilities. Meanwhile, those facilities consume growing quantities of electricity, water, land, and scarce minerals, further burdening the living Earth on which all life depends.
These dangers are not intrinsic to AI. They are consequences of a civilization that defines progress as increasing consumption, treats money as humanity’s highest value, rewards the pursuit of unlimited private wealth, and organizes relationships around domination and competition. AI does not create these pathologies. It magnifies them.
We urgently need laws prohibiting the most dangerous applications of AI, including for autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, political impersonation, theft of intellectual work, and reckless uses of energy and water. We need transparency, democratic accountability, protection for workers and creators, and clear legal responsibility for harms. Such measures are essential to slow the damage and give humanity time to choose a different future.
They will not, however, be sufficient. No regulatory system can make AI safe so long as businesses and nations remain locked in struggles for dominance. Rules will continually be weakened, evaded, or abandoned by those who fear that compliance will place them at a competitive disadvantage.
Our only enduring protection is therefore a transformation of the global culture that determines how we humans use AI. This requires that we move from a civilization organized around competition for money and power to a civilization dedicated to the wellbeing of living Earth and all its humans and other living beings. What many of us choose to call an Ecological Civilization.
Such a civilization will recognize Earth as a living community, not a storehouse of commodities waiting to be claimed, extracted, and sold for profit. It will understand that human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the whole and that our distinctive capacity for conscious choice carries a responsibility to care for the life that sustains us. It will organize economies to meet the needs of all while healing Earth, distributing power, limiting extremes of wealth, restoring local self-reliance, and holding businesses accountable to the communities and ecosystems that depend on them.
For the first time, humanity is creating an instrument so powerful that its safe use may be impossible without transforming the culture of the civilization that created it.
An Ecological Civilization will not eliminate competition. It will encourage competition, not to dominate and exploit others, but rather to be the most creative and excellent in advancing a culture of cooperation and mutual responsibility on behalf of the wellbeing of the whole. Essential AI capabilities will be governed as part of a global information commons. The knowledge on which they depend—created over generations by countless human beings—will be treated as a shared inheritance. Its use will be subject to democratic oversight, ecological limits, and the foundational requirement that its use serves life.
AI could then help educators, farmers, healers, scientists, public officials, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and community organizers share what they are learning. It will identify relationships beyond the reach of any individual mind, translate among languages, expose error, and support us in adapting successful approaches to the distinctive needs of each place. It could strengthen our collective capacity to restore soils and forests, conserve water, prevent disease, eliminate waste, localize production, resolve conflict, and secure a good life for all.
In this role, AI would not replace human intelligence. It would augment our ability to learn together. The intelligence most essential to our future would reside neither in the machine nor in the isolated individual, but in the relationships through which we share experience, deepen understanding, and organize collective action in service to life.
Climate disruption, ecological collapse, extreme inequality, and war have demonstrated the failure of our competitive civilization. Yet these threats have often seemed distant, gradual, or separable. AI brings them together and makes it increasingly apparent that no business can secure its future by destroying the society that sustains its markets; no nation can achieve security through weapons that threaten all nations; and no part of humanity can flourish on a dying Earth.
For the first time, humanity is creating an instrument so powerful that its safe use may be impossible without transforming the culture of the civilization that created it. This may be AI’s greatest gift. It confronts us with a choice we can no longer postpone. Cooperate to secure the wellbeing of the whole or continue competing toward our common destruction.
The question is whether we will recognize the choice and act in time.
Author's Note: My purpose in sharing this column is to help move this essential message into the world as quickly and widely as possible through many messengers and channels. If this column speaks to you, please, without need for my permission or acknowledgement, forward our newsletter, share the link to our website, post on social media, and/or otherwise reproduce it, adapt it, share it with your friends and followers, and publicly express its message in your own words and voice. Then, I invite you to share with me how you are using it by sending the information to info@greatturning.org.
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