For the past several years you have likely heard a lot about the development of artificial intelligence (AI) such as openAI's chat bot chatGPT. We have been sold the promise that AI will provide advancements and breakthroughs that will cure diseases, solve global warming, provide universal basic income (UBI), and generally transform our world into a tech-utopia. This is a lie. AI will have the ability to do all of these things, but the benefits of AI will not be equally distributed. In reality, AI holds the potential to create the most powerful empire in human history; one that will monitor us with a level of precision and control that would make the dictators in our history books salivate. 

How are we so confident that this is the case? We know this is true because all of the benefits that AI is promised to unlock could already be achieved. First, lets look at the current funding landscape of AI development. Specifically, how much money is being poured into building data centers, the infrastructure needed to train and develop large AI models. Recently, the current administration has endorsed a plan to pump $500 billion dollars into the construction of data centers across the USA in partnership with openAI, the empire behind chatGPT. What could $500 billions dollars do for Americans? That kind of money could eradicate homelessness, provide free medical care for everyone, and provide some level of UBI. Additionally and maybe most importantly, we could invest that money into transitioning from fossil fuels to sustainable energy which would provide more jobs than AI ever could. We have the means to create a country where everybody is respected, protected, and safe. We could fulfill the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. Instead, we take that money and dump it into a technology that will at best replace our entire workforce and at worst destroy every living thing on the planet. It needs to stop.

AI will lead to the death of democracy and the destruction of your political power in the best case scenario. The working class draws its political power from labor. Some of our power comes from voting, but the vast majority of our power comes from the need for our labor. The suffragettes did not gain the power to vote by voting, workers did not get better working conditions from voting, the civil rights movement did not take place in the voting booth. The withholding of the necessary labor to keep society running provides us with the ability for our voice to be heard. What happens when AI replaces all of our labor? We lose our political voice. It is that simple. Once our labor is replaced the ruling class will have absolutely no reason to listen to us. So, we need to act now before we are completely replaced. We are not being dramatic when we say that the fate of the world and our political freedoms hang in the balance. 

We demand a complete and permanent ban on artificial general intelligence. We the people refuse to gamble our lives and this planet for some ill-defined AI savior.