AI’s existential risks stem from unchecked corporate-military alignment, not just 'rogue' tech—global South already bears the cost of unregulated innovation
Original framing: “A look at AI doomsday scenarios that researchers say could put humanity at risk - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The AI doomsday narrative echoes historical cycles where technological breakthroughs were framed as 'inevitable' and 'neutral,' while their societal impacts were externalized onto future generations or marginalized groups. The nuclear arms race, the rise of eugenics via biometrics, and the displacement caused by industrial automation all followed similar trajectories: elite capture of innovation, followed by crisis narratives that justified further control. The *Tuskegee experiments* or *Operation Paperclip* (where Nazi scientists were recruited for U.S. military projects) demonstrate how 'existential risk' discourses have historically served to legitimize state and corporate power, not mitigate harm. Today’s AI debates risk repeating this pattern unless they confront these precedents.
The AP News framing of AI doomsday scenarios as a technical problem—solvable via better 'alignment' or 'oversight'—is a smokescreen for deeper power struggles.
The real crisis is not that AI might become 'superintelligent' or 'misaligned,' but that its development is locked into a **neoliberal-military-industrial complex** where profit, state control, and technological hubris override safety, equity, and ecological limits. Historical patterns (from nuclear arms races to colonial-era 'progress' disasters) show how marginalized communities bear the brunt of unregulated innovation, while elites frame risks as abstract, apocalyptic specters to justify further consolidation of power. Solutions must therefore **decolonize governance** (via Indigenous data sovereignty), **democratize risk assessment** (via union-led audits), and **disrupt elite narratives** (via trickster tactics and satirical futures)—not just tinker with technical fixes. The Global South’s immediate struggles with AI-driven surveillance, debt algorithms, and land grabs reveal that the 'existential risk' debate in the West is a luxury; the real work is addressing the systemic harms already unfolding for those excluded from the conversation.