Across the board, companies are rapidly deploying and developing these tools with minimal oversight — as a result, malicious forces can easily manipulate these technologies to undermine our democracy, enable mass surveillance, and violate our human and civil rights.
While there’s ample evidence of AI’s harms, Congress and state legislatures have failed to pass meaningful regulations to rein in corporations and empower people. Meanwhile, hyperscale data centers are springing up across the United States, backed by increasingly risky financial schemes that pass economic and environmental risks on to communities.
In a just democracy, we would have laws and regulations that balance AI’s negative impacts with the potential for innovation that serves the public interest. We would commit to learning how to harness new technologies to improve health and educational outcomes, protect the environment, ensure access to accurate information, and safeguard human and civil rights. Our elected officials would be willing to say no to risky and harmful technologies.
How is AI contributing to inequality?
Silicon Valley oligarchs have prioritized short-term profits over the long-term public good and convinced many in Washington to do the same. These same players have harvested and trafficked Americans’ private data — using it to target us with hate, discrimination, fraud, violent immigration raids, attacks on reproductive care and more.
Now these companies are exerting their money and power to persuade government officials to do their bidding, proposing a lawless, deregulated AI policy landscape that allows them to extract even more wealth at the public’s expense — devastating the environment, our democracy, and labor, human and civil rights.
We must fight back — pushing for robust tech-accountability reforms; lending policy and organizing expertise to stop exploitative data-center construction; demanding transparency into how government officials are using public funds to prop up AI infrastructure; pressuring tech leaders and public officials to mitigate AI’s negative consequences; and ensuring that the people most impacted by AI can help shape policy solutions.
