The two portraits, above, come from a New York Times article published on April 30, 2024. Online, the article is titled, "Friends From the Old Neighborhood Turn Rivals in Big Tech’s A.I. Race." It's an interesting story. I certainly encourage you to test The Times' paywall, and to see if you can read it.
Dennis Hassabis, on the left, is the chief executive of Google Deep Mind.
Mustafa Suleyman (he's the guy on the right) is the chief executive of Microsoft A.I.
Let me draw your attention to the guy on the right (and to a statement he made before he assumed his present position with big-tech behemoth, Microsoft):
For a time, Mr. Suleyman remained an independent voice warning against the tech giant and calling for government regulation of A.I. An opinion piece that he wrote with Ian Bremmer, a noted political scientist, argued that big tech companies were becoming as powerful as nation states (emphasis added).
Anyone who has been reading my blog postings on any regular basis will probably remember that I think that the "digital world," which plays such a prominent role in our contemporary lives, is actually quite "different" from the "real world" that we inhabit with our flesh-based bodies. When we get on our phones, or start employing virtual reality headsets, or play computer-based games, or utilize A.I. chatbots to tell us about the world, we separate ourselves from the physical realities that, until recently, defined a "common world" inhabited by all of us.
That "common world" is no longer the world in which we are, inevitably, alive. The way I see it, many of us are now "living" in a reality that we access by "technology" - and only by technology - and the technology-based world, in which we are increasingly living, separates us, even as it claims to bring us together.
What if the highlighted statement, from Suleyman and Bremmer, is true? If it is, then we are being told that more and more of the lives we live are being lived in a (digital) world that is as powerful as any nation state, and that is wholly under the control of powerfully and outrageously rich corporations.
Maintaining and utlizing the techniques of "self-government," within the "real," old-school, physical world, is difficult enough. But the digital "nation states" that now define the realities we find most important are not created by, or operated by, "the people." Nor are these digital worlds under the people's control.
If Suleyman and Bremmer are right in the statement quoted in the article (and I think they are), it is urgently important for "the people," all of us, to claim and exercise control over the digital realms in which we increasingly reside. If we don't do that, it's really "game over" for self-government and for "democracy." In fact, that is what an earlier version of Suleyman was calling for, prior to his elevation to the upper reaches of Microsoft management.
Suleyman and Bremmer have claimed that the Googles, and the Metas, and the Microsofts of the world are the new "nation states" of our social, political, and economic existence.
And who is in charge of these "nation states"? It had better be us, "we, the people," or we, the "ordinary people" who are, at least theoretically, "in charge" of the United States of America, will find that we have been transformed into modern "serfs," and the billionaire owners of the corporate "nation states" that increasingly comprise the world in which we actually live, will reign over us, and will do so unmercifully.
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