Original subtitles

Hi, everyone. My name is Karen Howe. I'm the author of Empire of AI and a

very proud board member of AI Now.

And I am literally so thrilled and honored to be moderating this session

with Naomi Klein, author of Shock Doctrine,

Doppelganger, most recently, End Times Fascism with her co-author, Asher

Taylor, and with Arundhati Roy.

Novelist most well known for her gorgeous book, God of Small Things, and

most recently, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

Both of these women are living legends that I've spent decades writing about

anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism.

corporate globalization, all of the things, all of the themes that we've

been talking about tonight.

And we've already heard from such phenomenal speakers through the evening,

but we hope with this final panel to tie all of that together and leave all of

you nourished and energized for the road ahead.

So with that, I would love to invite Arundhati to have a reading.

Thank you so much, and it's a real honor to be with the two of you whose books

are just amazing, both of you.

I'm going to just read just the opening from this little essay that I just

wrote. It's called Apocalypse Now and Then.

The orgeries are raining down hard.

Think or sink, comply or die.

look up or be left out.

And so these not-so-gentle threats, it has come to pass that the age of AI,

actual idiocy, actual super idiocy,

recursive snowballing idiocy, is upon us.

Heck, I've already used two dashes in this opening paragraph.

That, as they say, is a tell.

So perhaps I haven't written this essay at all.

You'd have to use an AI app to check if it's actually AI and whether I'm

really or not really or only partially me.

You can no longer use your instincts. You have to use the app.

Now that AI owns the MDash, what will...

future generations make of Emily Dickinson and her love of them?

Has she been fed to the machine, too?

Will they love her less?

Are we being gradually locked out of language?

Does it matter anymore?

For reasons that have more to do with the writer's ego than with faith, I've

always been enthralled by the first verse of the Gospel according to St.

John.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

I believe this to be true, and I believe that disrupting and vitiating the

fundamental relationship between humans and language will undermine all

semblance of social coherence.

AI has crashed into the world of literature.

leaving writers, publishers, literary agents, readers, critics, teachers, and

students feel the ground give way under their feet.

Professors must now look at student assignments with distrust.

Publishers have to evaluate new writers like detectives inspecting a potential

crime scene.

It's hard to describe what this does to reading or learning.

The joy and challenge of intellectual engagement has been replaced by

something closed, mordant, and mechanical.

A taxidermist's Shangri-La in which everything that was once alive has been

skinned and stuffed and regards you unblinkingly with a meaningful glint in

its bright, spurious eyes.

It's like looking at someone and wondering if it's really who you think

it is.

or looking in the mirror and seeing your likeness, but knowing it isn't really

you. In time, we may forfeit that knowledge too, and then we will no

longer know who we are, or even if we are.

And when this happens to a whole society, a whole species, when we can no

longer rely on instincts that have been learned over centuries, passed down from

generation to generation,

When we can no longer trust our hearts, our eyes, our ears.

When we can no longer tell truth from falsehood or the virtual from the real.

When time collapses and the past, present and future run into each other.

When a million languages and cultures are pureed into glop.

When an ancient social compact, whatever its limitations and flaws, is smashed

beyond recognition.

Are we setting ourselves up for mass psychosis?

This line of thinking may open me to accusations of having fallen prey to the

inevitable moral panic that ensues when we are faced with something new and

incomprehensible. The same panic that preceded the industrial revolution or

the coming of the computer.

The question is, is that all it is?

Are we just living through an uncomfortable moment of transition in

the evolution of human progress?

Or is this indeed a catastrophic rupture?

Perhaps we should listen to the people who are building this glorious new

technology. Last month, a young employee at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon,

quit his job,

potentially annihilate the human race.

The picture he painted of his workplace was more or less the Manhattan Project

on steroids.

But as we know, this time around, the scientists are motivated in large part

by profit and a race to get there first.

What followed Coxon's resignation was bewildering. The CEOs of the biggest AI

companies fell over each other in their rush, to discuss, disagree, or concur

with the whistleblower who had exposed them.

Our screens blew up with videos of those billionaire oligarchs informing us in

somber, sepulchral tones that there was a fair chance that the machine god that

they're in the process of consecrating could bring about the end of human

civilization.

Having established their suzerainty over our species, they reassured us that they

were doing their best to mitigate the risk.

They made a plea for government regulation.

Their cry for help hinted at some sort of pathology.

There was something a little kinky about it, a sort of tie-me-up, tie-me-down

vibe.

Is it that, or is it just the inherent nature of capitalism?

helplessness in the face of untethered greed.

Thank you.

In

March

2020, when the world shut down, my digital calendar, crowded with tiny

color-coded commitments,

Speeches to give, planes to board.

Then one day, it was all gone.

Cancelled. Empty days, stretching into April, then May.

I vividly remember two emotions.

First, intense relief.

I did not need to do any of these things or go to any of these places.

I was free.

The next feeling was a creeping concern about my mental health.

It is not a good sign, surely, to greet the cancellation of one's entire

professional life due to a global plague as good news.

I am not a child, and this was not a snow day.

The stillness of that year gave me time to consider much of this.

And one of my conclusions was, I want to live differently in such a way that if

all my commitments suddenly vanished once more, I'd be pretty disappointed

because I would actually want to do those things with my full being.

In retrospect, that was slightly aspirational. There will always be

things that feel like a chore.

Still, it's not a bad North Star to want to inhabit one's own life.

Fast forward five years.

and I'm teaching a graduate seminar on fascism, and the rapid proliferation of

AI comes up.

We discuss whether or not this should be understood as a fascist technology,

seeking to replace human thought and agency and tightly control what passes

for truth.

We invoke Hannah Arendt and her argument that having an ongoing internal debate

in our own heads What she called a dialogue between me and myself is

actually how we protect ourselves against great evil.

An international student volunteers that in her home country, few young workers

can resist the appeal of AI agents.

Work hours are so grueling and pay so inadequate that, she says,

everyone wants their own slaves.

This phrasing stops our conversation cold.

Slaves? Is this a translation issue?

No. She elaborates that AI agents are sort of like duplicate versions of

yourself, who you put to work, performing tasks to earn you money so

you don't have to do the work, like a slave.

I immediately thought back to my...

2020 relief, and then my resolution, I too had wanted to get out of my work

life. I had the great privilege of being able to make some changes.

The vast majority of people do not.

So my case to you is that AI is surging through our culture in part because so

many people are desperately trying to get out of their lives, and with very

good reason.

A great deal of modern life feels impossible and inhuman already, well

before the bots arrive.

The bots are just the closers in a bad deal stretching back decades.

It's not just work.

Arundhati has reminded us before that on social media, we all talk like chatbots,

each of us writing and posing to the same prompts, in the same little boxes,

according to the same emotional incentives.

Once we have already turned ourselves into interchangeable chatting machines,

the bots just arrived to finish the job.

We have many serious questions before us when it comes to AI.

What parts of this nascent industry do we want to heavily regulate?

What parts do we want to nationalize or internationalize? And what parts should

be abolished altogether?

We also have to ask questions like, is it even possible to advance targeted pro

-human uses of AI without tipping our already overheating planet into full

-blown collapse?

These questions are urgent, especially as the bubble currently holding up the

global economy audibly pisses air.

When the inevitable pop happens, we collectively

are going to have a narrow window of more leverage than we will ever have

again.

But let's not lose sight of the larger question beneath these other ones.

How do we make life more livable?

As in built to meet the needs and desires and deep pleasures of our living

selves. So we are a little less tempted to subcontract our lives to bots.

I'll end with a passage from mine and Astra's new book because it applies to

end times religion as much as it does to end times tech.

What would it take for the vast majority of our fellow humans to be satisfied

enough with their lives that the end of the world lost much of its allure?

Put a little differently, are there things that we can do?

as a society to help more people want to stay here, rooted in the living world.

Apocalypse culture and societal crises are age-old twins.

Many of the people caught up in efforts to speed up the apocalypse are facing

urgent, earthly, and seemingly insurmountable challenges.

They are struggling to secure the essentials of life.

Food, housing, medical, and mental health care.

And they are also missing the non-material essentials.

Community, connection, meaning, something to look forward to.

At a time when so much feels broken and bleak, messianism offers the promise of

redemption.

What that means is that to beat the tech oligarchs, we will all have to become

more human.

more loving, more animate, more present in our bodies, our cities, our

towns, our communities, and in this living world.

Thank you.

Naomi Arundhati, we are going to spend some of this panel talking about the

grotesque, But I want to begin and end with the beautiful.

And first, I wanted to take this opportunity to be very indulgent as a

writer speaking to two literary legends to talk about your language and meditate

on your language.

I find that when I read both of your work, it basically

reorders my entire universe.

And I'm getting emotional just thinking about the impact that your words have on

millions of people around the world.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to ask you, why did you choose to dedicate

your life to writing? And why continue to write in a moment when language

is supposedly so frictionlessly abundant?

Well, I think I'll answer

it in two phrases.

One is that whenever someone asks me that question about language, I

really, I mean the truthful answer is that I write to stay sane.

I write so that the blood flows easy in my body.

It's really nothing else.

And in my memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, there's a whole lot

about this pursuit of language and what it took for me

growing up in a country where there are 3,000 languages.

you know i belong to many of them so how do you find a language beyond language

you know which is really somehow uh i i think i have once said that language is

the skin on my thought you know i don't know if i can think without language so

i write really to myself but uh

At one point, I don't know how many of you are familiar with this really

beloved writer of mine, a friend of mine called John Berger. He's not alive

anymore. But he wrote to me,

and then he wrote it in one of his books.

He said, Arundhati, I keep wondering, why do you write? Because you keep...

I mean, you just keep getting blown down, you know. Everything you write

about, it's like literally you're facing a firing squad every time, and then you

do it again, and then you do it again.

And he said, finally, I figured out that the reason that you write is to tell

them I will never fucking be zero, you know. Whatever you do,

you're going to hear from me, you know.

so so it's almost like really a sense of dignity and a sense of sanity

that's why i write it's as basic as that

um well karen

i i just want to say that your writing has been um hugely important to me and i

think to so many people in this room and um yeah you know empire of ai

you know, is the, I think it's the most significant book of this new horrible AI

era. And you gave us a map, right? You gave us a framework to understand this.

And, you know, one of the things that I feel saddest about it, with this idea

that, oh, intelligence is a utility.

This is something, one of the things that Sam Altman has said, eventually

we'll just get our intelligence, you know, like we get our, and,

And I guess we somehow have failed to explain to people

that there is the work, the difficulty, because it is hard.

And I can understand why people don't understand why you would want to write.

If you could just get it from a vending machine or turn on the tap and then you

just get it.

But there's nothing better than to...

have written to have figured it out right because then you are sort of you

enter the world differently once you have made that map right and i mean

there are moments of pleasure in the writing and in the reporting and in the

research there there but but the the the real reason you do it is that it lets

you re-enter the world with that sanity that you earned often through insanity

like often through this very difficult process and so uh

I feel so sad when I think that people are depriving themselves of that, right?

Because they just see the writing as a finished product.

And you talked about John Berger. I also was blessed to have John in my life. And

I worshipped him, adored him. I sent him my book, The Shock Doctrine, in galleys

and asked him for a blurb. Didn't think I'd get one.

Got one back.

And what he said was that the book made him feel calm.

And that stayed with me as my understanding of why I write, right?

That we live in an incredibly chaotic world and we live in structures that are

deliberately confusing us all the time, right? But just when somebody like you

makes the effort to like order it and tame it, right? That lets us, your

readers...

feel like, okay, someone's got this. I am reading this. This is ordered, right?

The world's still chaotic, but I have a point of calm in that storm now because

you did that labor.

You know, I always feel that way whenever I read Arundhati, you know? And

so we do this for each other as humans, and we need that orientation

because the shocks are coming ever faster and more furious.

I just want to add to that that I think Whether it's writing or whether it's

music or whether it's art, at the heart of it is mystery.

At the heart of it, you cannot say why the world loved this particular band or

this particular book. It's a beautiful, elusive secret.

And what these people do is to take all of it and look at it.

Like a product, no different from mosquito repellent or toothpaste or

whatever it is, you know. And that is why, though they think of themselves as

intelligent people, I really find them low IQ, you

know. And it's really like, to me, AI is like asking me to drink

lizard blood or something, you know.

Okay.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about,

I mean, I think the way that you put it is very profound, that this

commoditization of something that is fundamentally not commoditizable, right?

And let's talk about the ideology from where this comes from.

There's this tendency in the public discourse to treat these tech

billionaires and these tech companies as distinct entities, that each of them

represents somehow a different choice.

Naomi, in your most recent book with Astra, you articulate the fact that

these are not distinct entities. And in your essay, you also mentioned the same

thing. You use the metaphor of a cyclope, a cyclope, a single headed,

multi-bodied cyclope.

So, Naomi, can you talk a little bit about why is it important to actually

recognize that the fact that.

these men and their machines are one ideology. And what is this ideology?

What happens when we succumb to their vision?

Ooh, yeah, there's a lot there. I mean, look, I think there are these very

marginal differences, you know, but it's helpful, I think, to think about open AI

and anthropic as being caught in like a Coke and Pepsi battle for supremacy.

And then you have...

elon musk and grock lagging behind so he's sort of doing like the maybe i'm

the monster energy drink uh to this cyclops and then there's meta with this

like cuddly little muse bot going like i'll be the pumpkin spice latte of the

um of the ai wars

But these are tuning differences, right? The guts are essentially the same.

And they're tuning them to different tastes.

And they are deeply coordinated.

These players are deeply coordinated.

They loathe each other, don't get me wrong.

But you saw that moment where they all came together with Donald Trump to be

like, we shall regulate ourselves.

And they signed a document that Donald Trump said was, maybe more important

than the US Constitution.

So they do coordinate, and you've got NVIDIA that is doing circular financing

with all of them loaning them money to buy their chips.

But they're in a war, right? And the stakes they have explained to us are

that they believe that eventually there will just be one company standing, like

they are in a race to swallow the entire economy. You can see it in the documents

of their IPOs. Elon Musk said that SpaceX has a potential future market of

$28 trillion.

That is...

a few trillion dollars less than the entire US economy.

Anthropic is telling their investors that they have a future market of $30

trillion. So they all believe that there's really only one player that can

win this. It'll probably be some sort of merger of NVIDIA, Palantir, Anthropic,

and SpaceX, just judging from who hates each other least

of these titans.

And so that's why they are inflating the bubble in the way that they are. That's

why they're spending in completely unreasonable ways because the prize is

so enormous in their telling.

So, you know, they define reaching AGI as the point at which they pass, where

their technology performs the vast majority of human activities, right? So

that literally means, like, we're out of luck, right?

I don't know whether they can do it or not, but that is what they're racing

towards. Those are the stakes of it. So, yeah.

So then what happens? We join what they call the permanent underclass, as it's

known in Silicon Valley.

Surplus humanity.

After we have finished training the bots with our labor and our creativity and

they've stolen all of our art and stolen all of our books.

And so how do you treat surplus humanity?

You know, this is your function.

Then you do have an economic function. It isn't to consume and it isn't to

work. It is to be surveilled.

It is to be killed, as Arundhati just said.

It's to be contained, to be scanned.

And Israel has been running.

an experiment since they sealed Gaza about

20 years ago, built the wall, placed Gaza under siege, and

have been testing these technologies.

So, I mean, this is like why it's so absurd that we're saying, oh, something

bad might happen in the future. We already have an AI-aided genocide in

Palestine.

So Gaza, Minneapolis.

But, you know, look at what is happening now in France.

Like, look what would happen when young people in France stood up and said, fix

the roof of our classroom instead of spending so much money on weapons.

Like, that was their core demand.

We want to cool our classrooms instead of spending more and more of the French

budget on the military. And look at the way the French state crushed them,

right?

So that's a glimpse of the future.

It's the same thing that's happening in India now.

And I think it's interesting that these companies have

become so large and in a way they're trying to fuse themselves with the state

and eventually become the state.

So in India we were colonized by the...

East India Company, and then that was taken over by the British Crown, and

here, maybe Columbus was right. This is East India, after all.

So you're looking at a situation where they are seeking to replace the state

and fuse themselves into the state, giving, of course,

the shiny gifts of colonialism, but taking away

all forms of governance and all forms of freedom.

And yes, the surplus people, of course, there are going to be surplus people all

over the world in India and Africa. I mean, in India, labor is now, a lot of

labor is required to wear a camera on their foreheads that is documenting

their movements so that they will be replaced by robots.

People who have been cut off from the millions of people, starting from the

state of Assam, but now in the whole of India, who've been removed from the

voter list.

Therefore, they are not, you know, they don't have any rights or benefits.

Some of them are building their own detention centers, just in the way

workers are required to capture data in order to replace themselves.

So it's a kind of dystopia where You can't really separate things.

People like to separate.

The battle against data centers is separate.

The battle about climate is separate.

The battle of the arts is separate.

But actually, at the end of the day, all of us are on the front line. All of us

are. So all of us have to stand up and fight.

To build on that, I mean, in many ways, and we've sort of been talking about

this all evening, this current fight against AI is actually part of a very

long continuum of many, many different frontline fights, environmental, labor,

anti-colonial movements that are all rejecting these hegemonic narratives of

progress and inevitability.

Naomi, you've observed this is also the most unifying struggle, and this is

something that was observed through the evening as well.

And yet, simultaneously, even as the fight is more unified, what we're

fighting against is also more unified, right? And so there are all these

interlocking power structures that are making the struggle against them

increasingly difficult to sustain.

You know, workers fighting for labor rights, for example, are facing ever

more surveillance, automation, atomization, gigification, and a

hollowing economy.

How, you know, there are two most common questions, categories of questions that

I often hear from audiences that I would love to pose to you.

The first one I'll pose to you, Naomi, which is the people who see the system,

they don't want to be part of it.

And yet, you know, they are in a very difficult position where they're

searching for a job in this current economy. And suddenly they find

themselves being offered a job to build a data center.

Or they are in an office where their boss is telling them, you either use AI

or you're out.

And basically the question that they then ask is, I feel so much guilt

suddenly becoming a part of this system that I actually don't want to partake

in.

Does that mean I'm a bad person? What do I do in this kind of situation?

And Naomi, as someone who has been part of so many frontline fights through the

years, I'm sure you've had a multitude of these types of conversations. So what

do you say to that person in that situation?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is true. I've been around the left for a minute.

But I have never seen a movement rise up this quickly, this organically,

like the movement.

against AI generally.

And you hear these claims, oh, it's foreign funded, blah, blah, blah. It's

not even foundation funded. It's barely foundation funded because most of the

big foundations actually don't want people taking on AI.

as clearly as the communities are committed to taking it on, right?

So people are, you know, this conference, like this is an amazing

night. We could have met for two days and we could have had, you know, panels

on what is being done to women and girls. We could have had panels on AI

and warfare.

We could have had panels on, you know, immigration.

I mean, people are organizing in all of these areas.

And there's a real gap.

So I'm really grateful that this is happening. But the enthusiasm for this

event speaks to the fact that there haven't been that many spaces created.

People have found each other.

AI Now organized what I think was the first panel a year ago during UN Climate

Week, the first panel of organizers

in local data center fights who are meeting each other for the first time.

And you start seeing a movement understand itself as a movement in real

time. Like, this is not just a local fight. This is a national fight. It's an

international fight, right? And you've documented that.

So it's happened so fast.

I mean, Astra and I, when we were writing the book, were just racing to

keep up.

And the point I was making with the reading at the beginning is that, yes,

people are using it.

But often doing so joylessly, often doing so in a spirit of resignation, in

a spirit of overwhelm, in a spirit of their bosses forcing them, in a spirit

of this is the only job on offer, right? So it's just why I think we need to

understand as a movement that our job is not just to fight AI. It's to make life

worth living for more people, right?

Yeah.

And I do feel like one of the things that I can bring to this discussion as

somebody who's spent a long time in the climate movement, and I still see myself

as part of the climate movement, and I think what AI is doing to the climate is

disastrous, and we don't talk about it enough.

And I think it explains a lot of this realignment, this fascist realignment,

the decision to go to align with Trump is that these guys absolutely understood

how much carbon they were going to burn.

And they wanted what they call the frontier, right? The frontier has no

rules. They don't want rules.

They've made that very clear.

But I think one mistake we made in the climate movement was.

making people feel that they had to be very pure before they could join the

climate movement, right? Whereas if you had a car, if you hadn't, you purged

your whole life of fossil fuels, then you couldn't be a climate activist,

right? So I think we need to build a really welcoming movement that, yes,

holds on to a deep critique.

of what these technologies are doing, and it's horrific what they're doing,

but just not have too many purity tests around why people may be using it.

Arun Jyoti, I wanted to give you the second category of question that I most

often encounter.

I'm just laughing because I come from the land of Gandhi and purity tests.

You can't do anything unless you wear a loincloth and whatever.

So the second most common category of question that I face is from people

who really struggle to connect their day-to-day experience with the AI tools

and the broader critique that we're articulating here.

But I've gotten so much benefit from AI.

It's really helped me with my job interviews.

It's really helped with my applications.

It's really helped with helping me reduce taxes.

These are all real things that people have said to me. It's really helped me

save a lot of money on home improvement by asking ChatGPT how to fix certain

things so that I don't have to pay up the wazoo for something that's broken.

And so what do you say to those categories of people? I mean, you talk

actually directly about this in the most recent essay that you wrote.

Well, see, I mean, I've been involved with, you know, the anti-dam struggle,

the anti-displacement, anti-mining.

And I just wanted to add that, you know, it's so, I guess I come from,

I just arrived from Delhi yesterday.

Truthfully, there's no anti-AI movement in India.

India is gearing up to be one of the greatest suppliers of data of all time.

And if data centers can't happen here, well, please bring them there. Please

bring your toxic waste to us. We'll cherish it.

That's the attitude over there. So it's actually pretty terrifying.

And the thing about whether it was dams or mining or...

All these, I mean, all these arguments, the science of AI is new, but the way

it's been foisted on us is very, very old, you know. And we've heard it all

before.

And when you were asking me this question, I was thinking about

OxyContin, actually.

I was thinking, oh, yeah, but it does cure pain.

But what happens next, you know? So, of course, it has, it helps people.

You know, these industries are very, very good at boosting the help

and under-reporting the consequences of what they're actually all about.

So I'll just read a little bit from this essay about that.

So it feels...

a little like that moment before the tsunami in 2004.

Remember how in Thailand and Indonesia, the ocean drew back from the coastline

and people ran out to marvel at the miles of pristine new beach that

suddenly emerged, not realizing that far out at sea, a wall of water was building

up and would come crashing over them.

We're in that moment now. A towering wall of stupidity is about to inundate

us. The trail of delectable crumbs on the shining sand is luring us deeper

and deeper into the ocean.

It reveals magical treasures, jeweled seashells and secret castles that

promise a forever honeymoon.

or a money who if that's what you prefer pick up those shells and marvel at what

they can do for you the ugly name for them is consumer applications they can

be your mother lover therapist doctor they can write novels for you in a

minute in the style of your choosing and translate them into any language you

want they can edit your films compose your music do your research and draft

your legal documents

What they can do in the field of medicine is nothing short of a miracle,

but it won't stop the poor from continuing to die of cholera, malaria,

tuberculosis, or simply hunger and poverty.

They also promise to deliver instant justice, education, and democracy to you

via your phone.

If you swing the other way, they can improve your Nazi salute and arm you

with a mental chainsaw.

What's not to love?

How can you resist this and why should you?

For all the talk of AI and authoritarianism, is it not true that

some of our best, most beloved anti-fascist YouTubers and tireless

activists, certainly in India, with tens of millions of subscribers collectively,

are devoted proponents of AI?

Or that the Gen Z cockroach uprising against the Modi government, which fell

on us like rain on parched earth, rolled in on the most delightful, irreverent AI

videos. It is. But when the threat assessment spells real danger,

that window can be slammed shut in an instant.

As I write this during what is being called season two of the cockroach

protests in India.

The Internet in my neighborhood has been shut down.

During other protests in states like Kashmir and Manipur, the Indian

government has ordered Internet shutdowns that last for months.

But apart from this, you know, later in this essay I talk about how there's a

lot of talk about what AI can do for human beings, but not much about what it

does. to human beings.

I mean, apart from the data centers and the environmental stuff, there are

studies that show that it's a sort of direct decline of cognitive,

there's a cognitive decline that's happening.

And you, we are eventually going to be reduced to like people

with atrophied brains and long tentacles that just do What should we call them,

prompticles or something?

So, I mean, the damage is enormous.

And the advantage is it's not that we can't write our own legal documents or

we can't find therapists. You know, this is not the solution for the lack that

exists in society.

These are things.

We've been fighting for forever.

But you can't produce, you know, morphine and say, have this, you'll feel

better.

So that's what I'd say, you know, that the benefits are

nothing compared to the costs that generations are going to pay, apart from

the fact that, oh, they just casually tell us, oh, yeah, there's a 10% chance

that you'll be annihilated, you know?

Yeah.

Karen, one thing I'd just love to add is just, you know, one thing we know about

this AI situation we're in is that they're incredibly overleveraged, but

they've somehow managed to find somewhere around $8 trillion to finance

the AI build-out.

Without a market for their products anywhere near the expenditure, which

puts us all at another kind of risk that I think we really need to talk about,

like what happens when that bubble bursts.

But, you know, as part of a movement, I know many people in this room were

calling for a Green New Deal, a global Green New Deal for many years. And we

heard again and again that there was no money for this, that it was just a nice

idea.

It would have cost less.

It would have cost less.

And so this is the relationship between what we build instead, which came up

on the wonderful data center panel. It's so urgent because they're interrelated,

right? If you have a teacher who...

is being respected and being paid a living wage and teaching maybe 12 to 15

students and able to use her pedagogical skills to turn the light on for those

students. The idea that a chatbot could do her job or his job for them is

absurd. Nobody would suggest that, right?

But if you have a teacher that has...

40 students right and they're they're having to do go fund me for supplies and

the books are outdated and there are no supports for high needs kids then when

somebody comes along and says well how about if everybody had a chatbot tutor

that actually sounds like maybe that's a good idea right so we have to understand

where we are in this story it did not start with ai right the body was already

weak i'm also deliberately creating a situation like that you know that's how

The whole idea of privatization started, you know, that you first undermine

public infrastructure and then say, oh, privatization is the answer.

And now this is capitalism's endgame.

So you want to privatize the history of human endeavor.

You want to privatize civilization itself.

You want to privatize history and sell it back to us by the meter.

That's what's going on.

We are out of time, but I'm going to, I'm just going to very

quickly use moderator's pivot. I'm just glaring at me off stage, but I just, I

really wanted to end with, how do we find joy in the process? Like, give us

like one little joyful nugget in the time that we don't have.

Look at my shoes.

Okay. I'm just going to say this one thing. Can I say one thing to close?

Okay. All right. When I wrote The Shock Doctor and I made this quote famous for

Milton Friedman, only a crisis real or perceived produces real change.

And he said, our job is to keep the ideas ready for when the politically

impossible becomes politically inevitable, right?

So there's a big crisis coming because these folks have gambled with the entire

economy. They know it's coming, right? They've gambled because they think one

of them gets to win.

Those moments really do produce real change. The reason why Milton Friedman

came up with that theory was because he thought everything went wrong with the

New Deal.

He said that in a letter to Pinochet.

He said everything went wrong in our country.

Because people got this idea that if the banks broke the economy, maybe people

should care for each other. Maybe they should have Social Security. Maybe they

should have parks. Maybe they should plant trees, right?

It didn't go far enough.

We're going to have another window, and we need democratic socialism.

Okay. Is everyone ready for one more call and response? I know Kashan warmed

you up earlier in the evening. I'm going to have one minute.

I just want to talk about joy So this is actually a little piece from

one of my first political essays and it's my writers manifesto The only dream

worth having is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only

when you're dead To love to be loved to never forget your own

insignificance, to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar

disparity of life around you, to seek joy in the saddest places, to pursue

beauty to its lair, to never simplify what is complicated or complicate what

is simple, to respect strength, never power, above all to watch, to try and

understand, to never look away.

And never, never to forget.

So I'm going to say, when people rise, and you're going to say,

empires fall.

When people rise, empires fall.