I don’t think they plan on voters being an insurmountable problem.
That’s the unsettling part. When billionaires spend fortunes shaping elections, it’s reasonable to ask whether they see voters as citizens to persuade or obstacles to manage. Democracy becomes a lot less inconvenient when you can fund the candidates, influence the platforms hosting the debate, and lobby the people writing the rules. All perfectly legal, of course.
Y’all should stop using the word lobby and call it what it is. Bribery. The only reason your country isn’t stupid corrupt at face value is because you legalized bribery.
Annoyingly it also turned the word “lobby” into a contaminated dirty word, even though lobbying is a healthy and important part of a functional democracy.
Any group collectively arguing in favour of their interest to the government is a lobby. That group can be anything from employers, to unions, to civil rights advocates.
The problematic part is the bribery, not the fact that there is interest groups lobbying the government.
We’re so fucking dumb, our very first amendment to the Constitution gives us the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” We should amend that so people wanting to band together for a given cause can get bent. How about that?
The tolerance paradox had yet to materialise when that was written. Yes we should amend that to specify people, not corporations.
And ‘grievances’ such as “I want all the money and yet I don’t have it. Please fix this. Thx” should not be allowed to be lobbied for.
Most of the constitution needs major work.
Turns out telling people your technology will replace their jobs, devour their electricity, and possibly end civilization isn’t the winning sales pitch billionaires imagined. Imagine spending hundreds of millions buying political influence, only to discover voters don’t enjoy being treated like obsolete hardware.
telling people your technology will replace their jobs, devour their electricity, and possibly end civilization isn’t the winning sales pitch billionaires imagined.
“but what you guys aren’t getting is the fact that it’ll make me a lot more money.”
AI is still not viable business. All that fear mongering is to create an alternative revenue sources.
“look, I created a monster that can destroy us all. Please give me money to contain and tame it. We can’t destroy it because our enemies are creating their own monsters.”
You forgot to cite Patrick Boyle here ;)
I can only hope this is true. Most voters aren’t paying a bit of attention to where the money comes from.
They’re using AI. They think it’s wonderful, they’ve barely heard about the controversy around data centers, and think “data centers are where the internet it, yOU lIkE thE inTErNeT, Don’T yoU?”
The Top 10 AI Uses in 2025 (none of which it does very well):
- Therapy and companionship
- Organizing my life
- Finding purpose
- Enhanced learning
- Summarizing content
- Generating ideas
- Generating code (for professionals)
- Improving code (for professionals)
- Creativity
- Visual art and design
My thoughts exactly. I know two folks who are going all in with AI and haven’t even considered any controversy. Feels like they live on another planet. Hell, one of the guys was even showing off his pervert glasses and when I called them pervert glasses he laughed and said he hadn’t heard that before.
I really hope those folks are in the minority.
I sleep at night by telling myself they’re the minority
So, you also cannot discern the difference in traditional DCs and AI DCs? I feel like you know and I’m missing something.
their efforts aren’t buying the political capital they’d hoped for.
Trump did get elected by “AI money” and they all celebrated on stage with him, you know.
Midterms? Yeah, when you are an indisputably shitty President who has broken every campaign promise and is openly deranged, you will likely lose the midterms no matter how much you try to pump Republicans. Diminishing returns.
Usually the “winning” party only holds power for a couple terms, then, after their incompetence has disgusted yet another generation of voters, they lose, only to be replaced by the other party that will repeat the process.
bOtH sIdEs, YeS, oH My
I vote in every election, and you should too. Because it’s funny
Expect bipartisan legislation to increase the anonymity of PAC money before the year is over.
I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of democrats would be ok to give republicans more power so that they can squash progressive wing of democrats who are making people realize how useless half of democrat party is.
Definitely half the Senate; they’ve been there the longest, and seem more interested in internal party structures and hierarchies than governing. Some of them seem genuinely shook by the way Trump has upended Democratic norms, but even then they seem like they just want to get back to business as usual.
The good news is that I don’t think the current leadership is long for power. Schumer came across like such a weak imbecile in the shutdown negotiations that even centrists want him gone. Jefferies might hold on for another term because he kept the caucus together during the shutdown, but he’s heavily tied to AIPAC, and that is now deeply toxic to most Democratic voters.
Capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
Which billionaires aren’t flooding money into politics to influence elections? They were doing it long before all the AI drama.
Tbh, probably GabeN
Hello Americans! Please vote! Sincerely, everyone else.
Troll Musk. Vote Democrat.
By backfiring you mean they have nearly total control then yes. Those losers, it has totally backfired on them and now they are richer and more powerful than ever!
The next step seems obvious: they’ll take a page from the tobacco, gun, and meat industries and instead create fake think tanks or associations to funnel political money semi-anonymously.
That has already been happening for years.
Give us each $100,000 and I’ll consider it.
I thought someone did the math and said if all US billionaires were slaughtered and the money divided amongst US population, we’d all get like $400k+.
I always wondered if it would’ve been cheaper in Iraq and Afghanistan to just pay everyone to hand over their weapons and leave.
That was literally the case for Vietnam. They already hated the Chinese, we just needed to invest in industry for them and they would have been our allies.
The only problem was that France didn’t want that. They were too busy throwing a tantrum over losing their colony
Hell, we trained Ho Chi Minh in guerilla combat against the Japanese. The US was sympathetic to the independence of the old European colonies after the war. If it wasn’t for the cold war and trying to woo France into NATO we likely would’ve sided with Vietnam.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Futurism articles are just written by AI tbh…
Low bar journalism and reporting.
Turns out that taking hubris to far, thinking that the public will suck it all up just because they always did does have its turning point.
