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<\/a><\/p>\nAugust 1961 the beginnings of the Berlin Wall – East German soldiers put up barbed wire to start with. Photo retronewser.com\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n It reminds me of a story I heard some years ago on the BBC, about the erection of the Berlin Wall. \u00a0It featured an eye witness account from a British military officer* who went to assess reports that a barrier had started to be put up between the Soviet and British sectors of Berlin, in the early hours of 13 August 1961.<\/p>\n It went something like this:<\/p>\n “so I went to investigate and at [place?] I\u00a0 found a detachment of British troops manning a position along the dividing line, watching East Germans putting in concrete foundations and a barbed wire barrier. \u00a0I asked them if they knew what was happening and they said \u2018no\u2019 but they had been wondering.\u00a0 I said \u201cthose chaps over there are building a wall between the British sector and the Russians. You are on the wrong side of it. \u00a0So you had better move\u201d\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n The point being that although tensions had been rising for some time, when The Wall started to go up it took most people by surprise, even the troops (in several places what became the Wall did not exactly follow the sector borders, which up to that point were only marked by some rusty metal posts).<\/p>\n Big Tech AI is already causing widespread social anxiety on top of the impact of social media on children. \u00a0From data-centres and their water and energy demands to the erosion of truth, the disabling of learning in education and undermining of law, journalism and science, and the loss of authenticity from the creative arts.<\/p>\n photo: cbsnews.com<\/em><\/p>\n The AI spiral of blind innovation sucking in vast investment spins political FOMO – Fear of Missing Out – which hypnotises politicians, and that inhibits regulation. Last year in AI’s War on Truth <\/em><\/a>\u00a0I suggested ten factors which might bring the AI spiral down to ground: impact on mental health, economics (eg financial implosion), product safety, Sovereign AI, fire-walling (the fences), environmental damage (via data centres), Creative IP Rights, technological\/market limits, the volume of harms, and the scandal of ‘hallucinations’. Already some items on that list sound rather quaint, so fast has AI developed.<\/p>\n On the other hand, grass-roots opposition to data-centres is also spreading like wildfire, from Chile<\/a> to Scotland<\/a> to Australia<\/a> to Malaysia<\/a>. 70% of Americans oppose<\/a> them being built in their area. \u00a0As to Big Tech, in California, Meta was forced to settle for $16.7bn in a social media addiction court case against 29 States<\/a>, and it has had to abandon a plan<\/a> to replace up to 60% of its own staff with AI. \u00a0A survey found the more scientists have used AI, the less they trust it<\/a> and the less capable they think it is, while as models become more ‘capable’, it turns out they hallucinate not less as was expected but more.<\/p>\n Perhaps most serious for Big tech, in the US AI is even more unpopular<\/a> than ICE. Worse still, young people particularly distrust AI bosses<\/a>. \u00a0Pew found<\/a> US concern about AI rose from 37% to 52% in 2026, and for the first time a majority under 30 are more ‘concerned’ than excited about it. \u00a0The current global MIT survey found<\/a> the country with the greatest increase in people agreeing ‘products and services using artificial intelligence make me nervous’ was tech-obsessed India.<\/p>\n These are just some of the indications that the magical aura of Silicon Valley has dimmed significantly in less than a year, while concerns about AI have started to crystallise and opposition to organise. \u00a0Even governments like the UK’s which imported US-style unadulterated enthusiasm for AI in 2024, will now be infused with some doubt.<\/p>\n Partly to stay in line<\/a> with requirements of the EU’s AI Act (and California’s AI Transparency Act) to make AI images or audio identifiable but also because of customer concern, Spotify<\/a> and TikTok<\/a> have both enabled or undertaken labelling of AI content. Likewise YouTube, LinkedIn, and Substack have also moved<\/a> to identify, label, or limit some AI-generated content. \u00a0Even if nearly all the ‘rules’ are mostly voluntary, they indicate an unmistakable direction of travel as AI ‘de-socialises’.<\/p>\n Many universities are still committed to embracing AI at a corporate level but many academics are in despair at its impact on real learning, and some are resorting to old-school analogue and human face to face assessment to avoid the polluted digital domains. \u00a0 Businesses need people as customers – they probably won’t be selling to agents anytime soon – and people have agency. Some will be putting up “AI-free” fences.<\/p>\n Civil Society – NGOs and not for profits – need to read these tea-leaves and decide which side of those fences they will be on, and soon.<\/p>\n Where the lines are drawn on \u201cAI-free\u201d will be case specific and driven by grossness of famous cases, opportunity and many other factors. \u00a0There may be no good homologue from the past.<\/p>\n As a pollutant of truth, AI is already similar to plastic. Its explosive global adoption was driven by being super-convenient, and it escaped effective regulation before it was realised to also be toxic.\u00a0 Pervasive AI would still leave Pioneers<\/a> to start \u2018free from\u2019 businesses as happened with GM- or pesticide-free food. \u00a0In the UK and probably elsewhere, some young highly educated people are already seeking out AI-proof authentic craft<\/a> livelihoods. \u00a0AI might go that way: stimulating a lot of AI-free start ups and lifestyle choices.<\/p>\n Or, as some AI advocates hope, it will be like writing or the invention of printing, ultimately ethically and morally seen as in itself, neutral.\u00a0 Given the centralised production and accrual of benefits as wealth, which is already causing all sorts of real world effects, personally I doubt that’s how it will go. The strategies (Peter Thiel’s dominant first mover) and the mentality (hyper-scaling domination) are more like the ‘Kings’ of the seven oil ‘Super Majors’ of the C20th than Johannes Gutenberg.<\/p>\n One of the worst cases for well intentioned AI users and developers is that it comes to be seen like tobacco and smoking, and thence progressive expansion of smoke-free-zones.\u00a0 The dynamics of the child-harm social media court cases are already analogous: starting with places (the home, the child\u2019s bedroom) which should be \u2018sacrosanct\u2019, and centred on \u2018blameless\u2019 victims (children and uninformed\/ deceived parents).<\/p>\n BBC report<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Meanwhile the financial markets are wondering about the growing gyre of investment circulating between tech supplier Nvidia and its AI firm customers, and asking who will survive when, rather than if, the bubble bursts, as it did with railroads and dot.com companies. \u00a0When that happens the effect on credit could reach far beyond ‘tech’ itself, similar to the 2008 credit crunch<\/a> which triggered recession affecting all of society.<\/p>\n On ‘X’, analyst @HedgieMarkets posted<\/a> on 25 August that ‘Anthropic is expected to tell IPO [its impending public stock market flotation] investors that its total addressable market exceeds $30 trillion. That’s roughly the entire GDP of the United States’. Anthropic reaches this astronomical sum by assuming it will take all possible business to be done with AI models. As Hedgie points out, institutional investors will recognise this as financial hyperbole \u00a0but ordinary retail investors who buy after them, may not.<\/p>\n A recent FT<\/em> report ‘The Multiplying Risks of Financing Datacentres<\/a>‘ noted ‘By 2030, tech companies are expected to pour $7tn into data centres \u2014 enough money to feed every person in China for three years’.<\/p>\n Although they control permitting of data centres and so could curtail or stop the entire spiral, few politicians have yet said much about whether this is actually a good use of investment. \u00a0Might it for instance, be better spent on hastening the real-world transition from fossil fuels to renewables to help fix climate change? \u00a0When the AI wonder-product hysteria started just a couple of years ago it was often suggested that AI could “help solve problems like climate change”. \u00a0You don’t hear that now, both because it’s patently obvious that we already know what’s needed, and because Gen AI has proven itself so unreliable in practice.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n And finally, if you are in a public interest cause group, do think about the fence issue. \u00a0I had a feeling that the fence between human-made and AI made may turn out to be, like the Berlin Wall, the sort you can’t really sit on.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n (Throughout this and my previous blog I’ve referred to ‘AI’ in an unqualified way, which is what almost all non-technical commentary does but in reality there are non-generative AI systems which often pose very little social risk. \u00a0Such as specialised medical applications. They however, usually have tiny requirements for data and processing compared to the ambitions of the ‘super intelligence’ chasers whose vision is for AI to run entire economies and societies instead of humans).<\/p>\n ____________________________________________________________<\/p>\n *The story was in a BBC radio programme but I can’t find it online. There is one obvious candidate, Brigadier L F Richards in charge of the Military Police but it’s not in his published recollections<\/a>. \u00a0If anyone knows where the recording is to be found, please let me know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The failure of governments to get ahead of Generative AI model-making based on Large Language Models and to regulate, will lead to people erecting their own fences to try and defend their families, professions, businesses and livelihoods. Quite where they … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n