AI Overall HARMS and Not Benefits Us, the Have-Nots of the World.

AI does obviously harmful things. Many of the supposedly beneficial things are also harmful. Our rulers are foisting AI on us, and they make the harmful things NOT optional. Let's say NO to AI!

Jun 15, 2026

If one were to make a list of the pros and cons of AI and take into account how supposed pros actually get used by the ruling billionaire class, then I think the cons would outnumber the pros so greatly that the logical conclusion is that we should stop the use of AI.

The pros that aren’t really pros

Probably the AI application that has the best reputation for being beneficial is when it is used to examine X-rays to detect cancer that is missed by a radiologist. But guess what. I read an expert in such things explain that what happens in practice is this. A hospital may have, say, ten radiologists on staff. This is how many are needed to examine the number of X-rays that need examining. An AI company tells the hospital management, “Our AI can help your radiologists not to miss a cancer diagnosis if you buy our AI and use it along with your radiologists to examine the X-rays. Before long the hospital management thinks, “Hey, with this AI we don’t need ten very expensive radiologists. We can just keep one on staff who will double check the decisions made by the AI so we’ll still ensure that a human being is making the final decision.” This one remaining radiologist cannot realistically examine all of the X-rays that formerly required ten radiologists to examine, and therefore he/she will sign-off on almost all of the AI decisions without examining the X-ray personally. AI slop will end up taking the place of expert radiologist examinations. The hospital management will be happy to be saving a lot of money, and the patients whose cancer is never diagnosed, well, they’ll never know that the radiologist never actually looked at their X-ray, since his/her signature will be on a form that said he/she did so.

Another AI application that has a good reputation is when it is used to deal with the creation of new medically useful proteins used as drugs. The problem is that the haves are operating the pharmaceutical industry to make profits, not to create health. It is a corrupt industry, as I wrote about here. Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, back in 2009 wrote a scathing article in the New York Review of Books, titled “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption,” relating her experience of pharmaceutical companies using lies to promote (in medical journals) and profit big time from their drugs. In 2008 the NYT headlined an article with “Experts conclude Pfizer manipulated Studies” reporting:

“The drug maker Pfizer earlier this decade manipulated the publication of scientific studies to bolster the use of its epilepsy drug Neurontin for other disorders, while suppressing research that did not support those uses, according to experts who reviewed thousands of company documents for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the company.”

When we, the have-nots, rule society after our egalitarian revolution, then and only then we can discuss using AI for medical research.

Some people say AI is great for helping them write. But is it really? The more one relies on AI to write (fiction or non-fiction) the more one’s brain forgets how to write well. Our brains automatically stop “wasting brain power”on tasks that we no longer believe we need to do, and our brains lose the ability to do these things. For example, before our friends’ telephone numbers were in our smart phones for voice activation (or in speed dials before then) we memorized many phone numbers. Now we can’t do that. Another example is that nowadays nobody can memorize a long poem because any poem is immediately available on Google or equivalent and our brains know that. In the past, however,—especially before there was writing!—people routinely memorized extremely long poems or accounts of their people’s history and so on: think of Homer’s strictly oral poem, The Iliad, for example that existed for centuries before ever being written down. There is evidence, I’ve read, that people who rely on AI to “help them write,” end up very quickly being unable to write well. More and more we’re getting just AI slop from our writers “helped by AI” now.

Some people love one kind or another of AI chat bot.1 Some people perceive a chat bot as a personal friend or even a therapist or counselor, some even as a kind of boyfriend or girlfriend. There are big downsides to this. There have been reports of people being induced by their AI chat bot to become psychotic and even to commit suicide.

Some like and some hate the AI chat bots on which one is now increasingly forced to rely upon to communicate with a corporation for customer assistance. Some of us miss being able to talk with a real human being, especially when—as is often the case—our concern is not one that is addressed by FAQ responses. Some of us are driven to screaming profanities in anger at the impossibility of being able to get the assistance of a real human being who can actually solve our problem. Even if you are not such a person, I ask you to consider whether AI chat bots are important enough to justify the AI “new industrial revolution” that the ruling billionaire class is forcing on us.

Some say the customer support AI chat bots are great because they save the corporations money compared to hiring humans to do the same thing, and as a result their product or service prices are lower and we can buy their product or service for less. To this I reply that we the have-nots are impoverished far more by things such as our rulers diverting $1.5 Trillion of wealth (that we produce) towards funding the Pentagon and fighting unjust wars against bogeyman enemies to control us, than we would be impoverished by corporations hiring humans instead of AI bots for customer support.

The obvious cons

One of the worst things about AI is that it generates lies that seem credible. For example:

Fake AI videos—deep fakes—are popping up like mushroom all over the internet, putting fake words in the mouths of trusted experts or popular celebrities for the purpose of deceiving people and defrauding them. Here is one example featuring Dr. Oz and other celebrities; I could tell it was fake only because the narrator at one point reads “12” in the script as “one two” instead of “twelve,” a common kind of AI tell:

Even worse are the increasingly common fake AI videos that falsely but convincingly portray people—against their will and without their consent or even knowledge!—in a sexualized manner (often pornographic.)

The problem is far more than the very substantial harm that such videos inflict on their direct audience or victim. The problem is that now, because of AI, nobody can trust any video or article or newspaper report that they see on the internet no matter how legitimate it appears to be; it could be an AI fake. The internet is essentially destroyed as a source of credible trustworthy information far more now than it was before AI came along.

The NYT reports that the world’s leading expert in AI deep fake videos is very alarmed:

Farid’s own research had proven that most people could no longer distinguish a real photograph from a digital creation, a real voice from an A.I. clone, a real video clip from a wholesale fabrication. Lately, he was failing his own tests.
“I feel like I’m going blind,” Farid said, and he worried that A.I. was obscuring the truth, distorting reality, fracturing democracies and slowly breaking him, too….
I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swimming up the street,” Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emily Cooper. He put down his phone and poured a whiskey. “The technology is getting so good. It takes me to a dark place.”
“Because you can’t tell just by looking anymore?” Cooper asked.
“Because nobody can,” Farid said. “I don’t trust anything. Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”

AI facial recognition surveillance harms us

AI facial recognition for surveillance is dangerous!

The Brookings Institution reports:AI facial recognition is aimed at people demonstrating:

Law enforcement also uses technology—cameras, facial recognition, geolocation, and data mining—to track participants and monitor demonstrations.

Don’t forget that a chief purpose of surveillance by the ruling class of the have-nots is to make us fear that we are always being observed and listened to, and hence to make us afraid of ever saying or writing (or thinking?) anything that goes against the dictatorship of the rich. The purpose of the surveillance is to make us SELF-CENSOR ourselves. And it accomplishes this even if the surveillance is not really watching each and every one of us all the time; it suffices that we worry it might be.

Autonomous AI killing machines!

AI drones now operate without any human control to pursue a target and destroy it. The NYT reports on this:

On a warm morning a few months ago, Lipa, a Ukrainian drone pilot, flew a small gray quadcopter over the ravaged fields near Borysivka, a tiny occupied village abutting the Russian border. A surveillance drone had spotted signs that an enemy drone team had moved into abandoned warehouses at the village’s edge. Lipa and his navigator, Bober, intended to kill the team or drive it off.
Another pilot had twice tried hitting the place with standard kamikaze quadcopters, which are susceptible to radio-wave jamming that can disrupt the communication link between pilot and drone, causing weapons to crash. Russian jammers stopped them. Lipa had been assigned the third try but this time with a Bumblebee, an unusual drone provided by a secretive venture led by Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google and one of the world’s wealthiest men.
Bober sat beside Lipa as he oriented for an attack run. From high over Borysivka, one of the Bumblebee’s two airborne cameras focused on a particular building’s eastern side. Bober checked the imagery, then a digital map, and agreed: They had found the target. “Locked in,” Lipa said.
With his right hand, Lipa toggled a switch, unleashing the drone from human control. Powered by artificial intelligence, the Bumblebee swept down without further external guidance. As it descended, it lost signal connection with Lipa and Bober. This did not matter: It continued its attack free of their command. Its sensors and software remained focused on the building and adjusted heading and speed independently.
Another drone livestreamed the result: The Bumblebee smacked into an exterior wall and exploded. Whether Russian soldiers were harmed was unclear, but a semiautonomous drone had hit where human-piloted drones missed, rendering the position untenable. “They will change their location now,” Lipa said. (Per Ukrainian security rules, soldiers are referred to by their first name or call sign.)

The Economist (behind a paywall) headlines:

Do we really want to find out if AI will escape human control? Do we really want to live in a world with these kinds of horrible AI applications (made possible by obnoxious data centers) harming us day in and day out?

The pros that may be useful or amusing but that are not worth having if the cons come with them

Sure, AI can do some very nifty things, some of which are simply amusing or fun and others that help one do something. But is the price worth it if these nifty AI applications are, because our billionaire rulers wish it to be so, part of a package deal that includes the harmful AI applications? I don’t think so. Are super-strange photos and videos that make one go “Wow!” so important that having them is a good idea when the price of having them is AI applications that defraud people and create deep-fake pornographic images of people to harm them and destroy good writing and destroy the credibility of the entire internet and cause some people to commit suicide and help the cops arrest us and even kill people without any humans in control on a battlefield? Really??

Note that I have not even yet mentioned the horrible data centers. AI is harmful even if the data centers are located only in space, as Elon Musk says he wants to make happen.

The horrible AI data centers

Keep in mind that AI requires gargantuan data centers that, as I have written about here and here and here, are HARMFUL to us, the have-nots. Here is what it sounds like living near a data center:

The harm is worse, far worse, than just the annoyance of the noise:

Consumerreports.org online here has a very detailed report about the enormous ecological and social cost of the rapidly increasing number of massive AI data centers. I strongly encourage you to read it, and then ask yourself, “Do We the People want these data centers?”

John Steinbach was shocked to receive a $281 electricity bill in January 2026—a huge spike from the roughly $100 he’d paid the previous month. “It’s just so far beyond any bill that I’ve ever had,” he says. Steinbach, who has lived in his Manassas, Va., home for nearly 40 years, worries his rates will keep climbing as the outsized electricity demand from AI data centers grows. “They’re building them like it’s ‘Field of Dreams’—build it and the electricity will come—but we don’t see how that’s going to happen.”
The contribution of AI data centers to higher bills is just one of the ways the development boom is affecting consumers. The facilities also compete for critical resources like water and land, and they can lower air quality and increase traffic, often while benefiting from changes to zoning laws and huge tax breaks.
Data centers are not new. Such buildings have been around for decades, housing the servers and other hardware needed to power the internet. But since the introduction of ChatGPT to the public in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence has exploded, requiring mountains of new, power-hungry equipment.

The report has lots more following these initial paragraphs.

Furthermore, the billionaire ruling class is horribly oppressing people who do the work to create the data for these data centers:

When AI corporations hire. Ph.D. workers, it is oppressive!

When AI corporations hire less educated workers it is also oppressive:

The billionaire ruling class wants us to submit to being impoverished on the grounds that AI is wonderful and important:

MSN.com reports:

BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) CEO Larry Fink says America’s giant AI buildout will need trillions of dollars, and regular people’s money is part of the plan.
According to Larry, the investments in artificial intelligence, including those for data centers, power grids, chips, and cables among others will come from places such as bank savings and pensions.
This implies that funds invested in the retirees’ savings plan will go towards financing the actual backbone of artificial intelligence.
According to Larry, the United States wants to stay ahead in AI, and that costs a ridiculous amount of money. In his yearly letter to BlackRock shareholders, he said the country now treats AI leadership as a serious national goal. He wrote:
“The United States clearly understands that leadership in AI is not optional and will require sustained investment; in research, infrastructure, and talent. Capital markets capable of financing innovation at this scale are essential.”

If we are persuaded that AI really is wonderful and important, then we will not be able to effectively resist the pro-AI oppression that our billionaire ruling class has in store for us. Let’s reject the notion that AI is wonderful and important!

Let’s tell our billionaire rulers: We Don’t Want Your AI!

As I wrote earlier here in my critique2 of Bernie Sanders’s leave-the-rich-in-power AI plan (that has since been taken up by Donald Trump, by the way):

Here’s the GOOD, egalitarian revolutionary way to deal with AI

First step: Remove the rich from power, have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. (Read here how we can do this.)

Second step: In each local community, the sovereign Local Assembly of Egalitarians (consisting only of people with egalitarian values and aims who live or work in the local community) democratically decide how to deal with AI in their local community, and no person motivated to use AI to get richer than other people will have any say in the matter whatsoever.

Do I know what the egalitarians in every local community will decide to do regarding AI? No. I trust that they will try to apply egalitarian—not capitalist anti-egalitarian!—values to the issue, and that if they decide they made a mistake then they’ll try doing it differently.

“But I need to use AI on my job or else they’ll fire me”

Yes, of course, some people have jobs that require them to use AI. Such people can still do things (perhaps even secretly) to support the movement to stop the promotion of AI and to remove the rich from power. This is similar to the problem that we all have regarding the use of money: we live in a society based on money and so as long as that is the case we need money to survive. But this doesn’t mean we cannot build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make our society not be based on money.

Some of my previous posts on AI:

The Guardian Suggests We’ll Have to Go ‘Hat In Hand’ to Ask the AI Moguls for Some Food to Eat: You know, like poor little Oliver Twist did, with likely no better reward

Robots & AI In an Egalitarian versus Class Inequality Society: In an egalitarian society robots & AI would do only what egalitarians WANT them to do, and nothing else; unlike today. But WHAT do we WANT them to do?

Stop the De-Humanization of Our World: Stop Robots Answering When We Call Corporations, Stop Self-Service Check-Out Machines in Stores, Stop AI Fake Human Actors in Films. What’s Next? Robot Nurses? The rich want to robotize our world, to make the rich richer, while treating us like dirt.

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