By Bhabani Shankar Nayak
There is no doubt that AI is leading transformation in different spheres of life and society, influencing every sector of the economy, politics, culture, individual life, infrastructure, and industrial growth. The AI-led ICT shapes governance, policy and decision-making debates unlike any other period in history. However, the AI race has not produced the efficiency it has claimed to achieve; it has not accelerated productivity as claimed; it has not produced the profit it has claimed to generate. Investors are not making money. For example, Nvidia Corporation’s price-to-earnings ratio is below the US market average. Despite its phenomenal growth, Nvidia is not making the profit it claimed to make.
The combined global revenue of all AI companies has reached $229 billion by August 2026. AI companies are borrowing heavily to invest; the AI debt market now stands at a staggering $445 billion and is expected to grow to $600 billion by the end of 2026. Despite dubious ways of calculating revenue and getting huge tax benefits, AI companies are not showing economic output to breed confidence. The profit-debt ratio is also showing concerning levels of imbalance in the balance sheets of AI companies, with staggering operational losses. It is also predicted that AI companies are going to disrupt $4.7 trillion of the profits of global businesses by 2035.
Instead of making robust economic planning and trustworthy, secure, and sustainable technological innovations, burgeoning AI companies and their leaders are following scaremongering as a strategic tool to evade responsibilities and enter into the weaponisation of AI for profit, to ensure shareholder value and expectations and secure their profit at the cost of people and the planet.
From Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to Jacob Coxon, and from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Elon Musk of xAI, they are unanimous in their views that they are frightened by the growth and abilities of AI, which can potentially threaten human lives. Therefore, AI companies and their leaders call on states and governments to develop regulations for sustainable AI.
The call for regulation sounds reasonable, but the danger hidden behind this reasonable appeal is the scaremongering strategy amplified by the Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger, who argues that “AI could kill all humans…and 10% of people within the next decade.”
Knives neither have abilities nor skills to kill but the madness of their use and users do kill. In the same way, AI is neither designed nor intended to kill people. AI does not have abilities and skills to kill if programmed otherwise. AI is designed to facilitate people and increase labour productivity and to empower people.
However, the noble intentions of the science of AI do not breed profit as expected by the AI companies. Therefore, this consolidated corporate campaign by the leaders of AI companies sounds like confessions of criminals before committing mass crime.
Fearmongering as a strategy has been used by both ruling classes and religious leaders, and their affiliated ideologies, to domesticate human life, labour, and love.
There are three components of this fearmongering strategy of AI leaders. Firstly, fearmongering strategies are designed not merely because ‘fear sells’ but also to ‘shockvertise’ the inevitability of AI products and services of AI companies in everyday life. Secondly, they are designed to set the investor’s expectations of the profit potential of AI companies. Thirdly, they are designed to create inevitable conditions to expand cybersecurity infrastructure to further weaponise AI in the name of security, which can kill people and the planet.
It is not AI but AI-led Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS), designed, manufactured, and marketed by AI companies in collaboration with the military-industrial complex, that can kill and threaten everyday lives, domesticate people, and bring stability to the profit-making pyramid of AI-led capitalism without any form of resistance.
AI-led AWS is designed to dehumanise people and destroy their social life to create autonomous human life absolutely dependent on technology. Technological slavery under techno-feudalism is what these giant AI companies and their leaders are trying to establish by spreading fearmongering.
In this context, the Luddite strategy is not an option; rather, the option is to create regulations by which people can innovate, use, and control AI to further humanise, democratise, decolonise, and decarbonise both knowledge, skills, technology, and human beings for the greater common good of society, where collective peace and collective prosperity prevail.
The world needs AI that empowers people and creates conditions for a sustainable planet without inequality and exploitation.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
