AI and the Digital Revolution Are Mankind’s Deadly Enemies
AI and the Digital Revolution Are Mankind’s Deadly Enemies
Paul Craig Roberts
Does the pleasure you get from scrolling your cell phone compensate you for the frustration from the absence of customer service? The same digital revolution that gave you a cell phone gave the companies the opportunity to drive up profits and executive bonuses by replacing customer service with AI that is seldom, if ever, programed to answer your questions and is extremely reluctant to connect you to a superior human who knows what to do. All of us have been stressed out trying to get problems fixed, accounts adjusted, repairs made. My favorite AI response when I call about the internet being down is “you will get faster service if you chat with us online.”
All of us know the frustration of the constant demands to update our information, our telephone number, our email. These endless notices always appear when we are in the middle of some activity that is inconvenient to interrupt to go tend to Internet house-keeping problems. But if you fail to respond too often, all of a sudden you cannot get into your investment accounts, your bank account, your Internet files, because the necessary code, since passwords no longer suffice, doesn’t reach you via cell text or email because you didn’t update. These kinds of problems are almost impossible to correct, because they use your cell phone number and email to identify you. And even if you can get a human on the phone, the person has no way of knowing who you are except your information on file.
The ability to hack the Internet has grown so rapidly that accounts now have to have double and triple protection, and this doesn’t suffice. Your password and user name are merely step one. Next you have to receive a code via cell phone as a text to the number on record. Then a code via email of record. If you didn’t update or made a typo, you don’t have access to what is yours. Just try getting that straightened out.
And now we hear from Malwarebytes, one of the protective services you can purchase online to protect you against viruses, phishing, and capture of your cell phone and/or computer, that AI is being employed by cybercriminals to craft convincing voice, video, and email messages to defraud both
businesses and individuals with sophisticated tactics that result in devastating financial losses, reputational damage, and compromise of sensitive data. The AI-powered scamming operations can bypass security filters. As the AI tools are low cost, they can be used on a poor man’s budget. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/how-ai-was-used-in-an-advanced-phishing-campaign-targeting-gmail-users?utm_source=iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b2c_pro_oth_20250224_februaryweeklynewsletter_v4_174008949080&utm_content=AI_used_for_phishingEvery dollar companies saved by laying off customer representatives has been spent on cybersecurity. As cybersecurity experts will tell you, there is no cybersecurity. The protections can only make hacking more difficult. The digital revolution is costing us much more than our privacy.
Malewarebytes gives an example of how the attack on you unfolds and how to avoid being a victim. Notice that the only way you can avoid being a victim is to be unreachable by anyone whose email or telephone number you do not recognize. But these can also be obtained, and I suspect that it will not be long before scammers contact you via your husband, wife, or child’s cell phone number. Or something like this can happen. Your college kid loses his/her cell phone, gets a new one, different number, has a car accident, calls you and cannot reach you because you don’t recognize the number. Suppose a headhunter wants to offer you a job at $100,000 more than you are currently making, but it is not a number you recognize and goes unanswered.
Already cell phones have gone beyond being useless, as no one answers a call, to being dangerous. Texting has taken over communication. People hear one another’s voices less and less. The digital revolution is isolating people by making verbal conversation problematical.
And the situation is worsening at warp speed. The other day a software engineer I know who is earning in the six figures told me that his employer just told the engineers that they would be replaced by AI in three years. He has a mortgage on a $900,000 condo and is stunned that his expensive education and years of experience are suddenly worthless. Why will Americans go to universities? What will be the point of education, of public schools? Who among the work force displaced by AI can pay property taxes?
The digital revolution and its bastard child AI, along with nuclear weapons, US blowar labs, and Israel, are the worst enemies mankind has. How is Trump going to make America Great Again when in the third and fourth year of his term there will be mass layoffs of Americans replaced by AI? Indeed, Trump and Musk have bought into this development and are discussing replacing a large chunk of the civil service with AI. Why not instead just get rid of the useless work with budget and spending reform?
As an economist I am utterly and totally amazed at the complete and total stupidity of displacing humans with AI. Robots don’t need food and clothing and entertainment and cars and housing. They don’t have car payments and mortgage payments and credit card payments. With humans displaced by machines, aggregate consumer demand disappears, so, as no one has a job or any income, who purchases the goods and services produced by AI? What becomes of the economy?
As I pointed out years ago, and as Elon Musk today confirms, AI and the digital revolution introduce the era of Socialism. Everyone, Musk admits, will have to be given an income. Otherwise, there is no point in the AI provision of goods and services. As humans are not involved in production, merit no longer matters. Everyone will be given the same income. Equality at last. Indeed, what is the point of humans? They no longer have any productive function. Why are they needed? What do they do with themselves with nothing to do? Why should machines produce substance for people who do not participate in production? You can see why Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum want to reduce the human population to a small percentage of its present size.
The digital revolution and AI bring us the most dystopian of all worlds.
The First World will be the first to be utterly and totally destroyed by the digital revolution. But “education” will eventually carry the digital revolution into what was once called “darkest Africa.”
In an AI world universities are superfluous as there are few if any jobs that AI cannot do. The only remaining jobs would be plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and perhaps sooner or later your friendly plumber will be a robot programmed to run through the programs, one of which will clear your line.
Meanwhile libertarian and free market economists will be telling us that “better jobs” will be created by the digital revolution just as they told us that jobs offshoring would create better jobs to take the place of the old “dirty fingernail jobs.” These promised jobs are yet to materialize.
A Trump-Putin Accord?
A Trump-Putin Accord?
Paul Craig Roberts
Why is it that American liberal Democrats and Europeans are so disturbed that Trump is moving the United States toward normal relations with Russia instead of maintaining a hostile approach to Russia based on proxy wars, sanctions, and endless propaganda? We know why the think tanks and university faculties supported by the military/security complex are upset–their incomes are at stake. But why the Democrats and Europeans? The answer will have to wait until another occasion. This column addresses readers’ questions about the many varied conflicting reports about a Trump-Putin deal.
What are my expectations, readers ask, for the Trump-Putin meeting about the conflict in Ukraine? I am pleased that readers think I have been sufficiently correct over the years for my analysis to be of interest.
The outlook for the resolution of the conflict and for a final end of the Cold War is good, but never forget the adage that “there’s many a slip between cup and lip.”
First of all, neither leader wants the war. Putin did everything he could to avoid war. He devised the Minsk Agreement which kept the breakaway Donbas republics in Ukraine. He begged for a mutual security agreement and was cold-shouldered. He was forced to intervene in Donbas by Washington, a conflict for which Russia was unprepared. Putin has fought the conflict in the least effective way possible in order to counter the Western propaganda that he had “invaded Ukraine” and Europe would be next.
Trump regards the orchestrated conflict the American Zionist neoconservatives created with Russia as a stupidity that is in the way of profitable business between the US and Russia and as a stupidity that is leading to the rise of BRICS and the denial of American business relationships with a large part of the world.
A war leader is the last thing Putin is, a job for which he has no talent. Trump favors business uber alles. So a deal is the most likely outcome.
Moreover, statements from Trump, Putin, Lavrov and other officials have created such expectations of an end to the conflict that it is now almost impossible not to deliver a mutually acceptable outcome.
Even proxy wars are expensive, and Trump and Musk are committed to reducing the US budget by $1 trillion. That can’t happen with the US shipping hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine.
Putin and Lavrov remain open for Russia being a part of the Western world. Although Putin was forced by Washington’s aggression to revive Russian nationalism, his heart, like many of his generation, is for Russia to be a part of the Western world. Perhaps Putin is lost in the past and does not recognize the spiritual and moral corruption into which the Western world degenerated under liberal leadership. If Trump had not won the election, pedophilia would have been legalized in the Kamala regime. Indeed, it is likely that Democrat judges would have legalized marriage between women and dogs as “freedom of choice.”
The question before us is: Can Trump and his government, a capable collection of talent, restore American principles or have our principles been so destroyed by decades of university, media, and entertainment propaganda, and by judicial rulings and unconstitutional regulatory rules that have left the American system too far gone to be resurrected?
If Putin secures a reasonable end to the conflict in Ukraine, will he revert to his trust in negotiations with the West as he did with the Minsk Agreement, thus setting himself up for a future US government that equates Making America Great Again with Washington’s Hegemony?
The problem with the US government is that it no longer honors the agreements of previous governments. The neoconservative Clinton Regime did not honor the agreement between Gorbachev and the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations that the Cold War was supposed to end, not move to Russia’s borders.
Unless Trump succeeds in cleaning out of the US government all anti-American forces, a vast ensemble, a subsequent government can walk away from an agreement that ends the conflict and renew the conflict or start a new one.
The problem with the West is that governments have lost character and integrity. Can they be trusted?
Just as American propaganda destroyed the confidence of the German people and turned them into self-accusing anti-semites, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe used the dissatisfaction of life under the Soviet Union to place Russian hopes in the West, and there they remain among many of the Russian intellectual class, few of whom are Russian nationalists.
With all of these considerations, I still think that the expectations created by statements of Trump and Putin are too high for them to renege on a deal.
If we can say goodbye to conflict with Russia, the remaining question is whether Trump in truth is really Israel’s puppet and can be led into a war for Israel’s behalf with Iran. At this point I think not. Has Trump been playing along with Israel to avoid attacks by the Israel Lobby on top of attacks by the whore media, Democrats, corrupt judiciary, EU morons, and RINO Republicans?
AI generated propaganda videos of Trump turning Gaza into a Gold Coast Resort not withstanding, Israel might yet find itself ordered to stand down or else.
I don’t think it is a good bet that a person of Trump’s ego would subordinate himself to Israel.
If Trump stops the wars and throttles the criminal regime in Israel, will a successor regime in Washington undo Trump’s good work?
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