AI is just a tech titan ruse to replace democracy with technology they control Roger McNamee C4News

Silicon Valley investor: ‘AI is a massive challenge to democracy’
Ciaran Jenkins Data Correspondent and Presenter

https://www.channel4.com/news/silicon-valley-investor-ai-is-a-massive-challenge-to-democracy

We spoke to longtime Silicon Valley investor and Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor in the early days of Facebook, Roger McNamee, who’s now turned his attention to stopping social media from destroying democracy.

https://politicsthisweek.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/not-the-bcfm-politics-show-presented-by-tony-gosling-227/

Ciaran Jenkins: Roger, you’ve got this global summit in Paris, and at the end of it, the UK and the US say, ‘no, we’re not signing that’. What is going on?

Roger McNamee: Fundamentally, I think that AI represents a massive challenge to democracy on a global basis. The essential problem with it is the technology has been around for about 50 years, and every few years they promise ‘this time we’re going to be able to make a machine that thinks like a human. Just give us more money, more processing power, more data’. And every time they do, we get the same outcome, which is a really crummy set of products that cause more harm than good. You’ve seen predictive policing. You’ve seen the way it’s used for mortgage approvals and job approvals.

Basically, AI is a black box that nobody can criticise and nobody can challenge. And what’s going on in the United States right now is that Elon Musk and his people are trying to put AI in place of civil servants in every part of the government that matters. And their goal, very simply put, I think, is to replace democracy with technology that they control. And that is an incredibly scary thing.

Ciaran Jenkins: And quite a big claim. There are plenty of people, obviously, who say that AI does some marvellous things, particularly in the world of health care and so on. But there’s a reason, aren’t there, that all these countries are trying to get ascendancy in this world? So just trying to figure out why you think the UK and the US have gone out on a limb in this way, not signing up to this agreement?

Roger McNamee: I can’t speak for the UK, but the United States, it’s very simple. The largest technology companies in the United States made an assertion that there was only one way to build the next generation of AI and that would require roughly $1 trillion worth of investment, which would require us to change the way electric power is created in the United States, to use up huge amounts of fresh water to steal every copyright that exists, and to invade people’s personal privacy in exchange for which we would get this miraculous change. We spent about a quarter of that money already, and the results are, I think the best thing you could say, very disappointing.

Listen, I absolutely believe that AI has valuable use cases. The problem is it’s not a technology that’s ready for the prime time it’s being put into. And if you put it in place today, I think the fundamental thing that’s going to happen in the US, and maybe in the UK, is that you’re going to see the government used as the candy jar, to pay all the costs for this technology that’s not producing results that are nearly as good as were promised a few years ago.

Ciaran Jenkins: Do you think that this new Trump US administration wants to opt out really, of any form of global AI regulation, full stop?

Roger McNamee: Yes, I think they want to opt out of everything global. I think their plan is very simple, that they would like to change the US role in the world from being the most important economy and the country that really leads in all kinds of international affairs, to a country that’s very insular and that is very profit-centric. And I think they’ve been quite open about that, and the United States voted for it and the current polling suggests it’s still a relatively popular position.