Government and Corporate Actors Are Coordinating to Regulate AI to Keep us “Safe”

The government is claiming that they need to regulate AI to keep us "safe."  Once again, they claim that they need to protect us from, at bottom, words and ideas. Where have we heard this before?

We can be certain that they want to censor us because they always want to censor us, regardless of who is in power, because censorship gives them control over us. They won't admit that they are trying to "censor" us. No censor admits that he or she is engaging in censorship, but that is exactly what they are aiming to do. Sayer Ji connects the dots for us:

Si's post is actually a long thread of posts (and this article). Here are his first four posts:

The world is being flooded with warnings that AI could destroy humanity.

But the panic itself is creating something just as consequential:

A justification for controlling the systems that will increasingly shape what billions of people can know, say, and even think.

The first censorship regime was easy to recognize.

Your post disappeared. Your account was shadowbanned. Your video was labeled. Your reach was throttled.

The next one may be almost invisible. Because it won’t necessarily suppress what you say. It may help compose what you say before you say it. Think about what has changed. Search once gave you competing links. Now AI gives you one synthesized answer. Autocomplete once finished a word.

Now AI drafts your email, summarizes your meeting, answers your child’s questions, edits your argument and increasingly speaks for you.

That is a fundamentally different kind of power. Call this emerging layer speech infrastructure.

AI is becoming the mediation layer between:

you and information

you and your audience

you and your doctor

you and your government

you and eventually even other human beings. Control that layer and you don’t need to censor millions of individual posts.

What is Si reacting to? An undeniable and coordinated psyop on the same scale as the COVID psyop. We are currently being bombarded from what appears to be many directions, but it is actually a focused attempt to rip control from ordinary people and hand it to a select group of elites (including the government and some of the biggest sellers of AI), who want all of the vast power that AI already has, and more. Working with the government, none of them will ever be satisfied, because the People cannot ever be trusted with self-governance.

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AI’s Threat to Up and Coming Professionals Threatens a “Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons”

In "The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons: How AI Could Disrupt the Regeneration of Professional Expertise" Nolan Lovett writes: "AI-assisted productivity and AI-independent expertise are not the same capability, and developing one does not automatically build the other."

This is an extremely serious problem in the context of training young and upcoming workers. For instance, many lawyers with lifetimes of experience know how to ride herd over AI. They can spot when AI is missing the mark. They know when it is spewing mere information, long strings of words that that lack persuasive content. They can recognize when AI goes off the rails and almost instinctively implement corrective prompts. Just like how chess masters can quickly spot dangers and opportunities on a chessboard.

I'm worried that our current crop of law students and young lawyers will take the easy way out, over and over, because it's too damned tempting. Until they are mid-career and it's is too late. They might never acquire the intellectual skills and rigorous habits of perseverance that are necessary to adequately and safely use AI in the legal field. Their clients will be the ones to pay the price.

This is, indeed, as Lovett writes, "a threat to the cognitive commons":

Without intervention, organizational responses to competitive pressures will deplete the shared expertise that all organizations rely on. By eliminating entry-level positions, organizations prioritize efficiency while socializing the costs of diminishing knowledge. This leads to increased systemic fragility, where failures occur due to validators lacking the Internalized Mastery required for substantive oversight and a loss of meaningful agency in automated work. As retirees leave without adequate successors, the pool of experts shrinks, reducing the ability for independent validation and crisis management.

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The Efficiency of the Human Brain and AI

Fascinating post quoting Elon Musk on the efficiency of the brain and the potential efficiency of AI:

Well, we have a clear example of efficient power, efficient compute, which is the human brain. Our brains use about 20 watts of power, and only about 10 watts is higher brain function. Half of it is just housekeeping, keeping your heart going and breathing.

So you’ve got maybe 10 watts of higher brain function in a human, and we’ve managed to build civilization with 10 watts of a biological computer. Given that humans are capable of inventing general relativity and quantum mechanics, inventing aircraft, lasers, the internet, and discovering physics with a 10-watt meat computer, there’s clearly a massive opportunity for improving the efficiency of AI compute. Right now, even a hundred-megawatt or gigawatt AI supercomputer can’t do everything a human can do. But we already have the proof that true intelligence can emerge from just 10 watts. That should lead you to one conclusion, AI can get a lot more efficient.

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Dismal Job Prospects for White Male Writers

I'm a race abolitionist. I think we should completely dispense with the categories of "black" and "white" and describe people in other, less destructive, terms. The only exception is that we should retain and enforce civil rights laws because some people enthusiastically categorize people in terms of "race," discriminating against some races and preferring others. I set forth my position in this acticle, ""Race" is Like Astrology."

I hope that someday, all of us will get back on track with the purpose of the original civil rights movement (rather than the absurd and destructive "anti-racism" movement) and that, someday, "race" will be the least useful or interesting thing we can say about people.

That said, "white" males are actively being discriminated against, especially against Millennials and beyond (Millenials were born between 1981-1996), especially in the creative fields, including writing. This oftentimes overt discrimination is well-documented by Jacob Savage in his article at Compact, "The Lost Generation." . Here's an excerpt:

In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions.

Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.

When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.” ...

It’s striking how casual it all was. “Chicago Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs [staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others.

This is an excerpt from a much longer excellent article. I highly recommend reading the entire thing.

I would hope that these dire statistics don't dissuade any "white" male from pursuing their dream, of course. But this is a tough time for all creative writers, given the growing threat of AI. Grok offers these statistics showing that although Hollywood scrips are still largely being written by organics, publishers are caving to the bots: v Publishers' AI Reliance (Web, Books, Articles)

  • Web publishing: >50% of new articles AI-generated in 2025 (up from 5% in 2020), displacing freelancers in copywriting/editing; focuses on news, how-to, reviews, and SEO content.

  • Books/articles: Emerging displacement; survey of 258 UK novelists shows 51% fear full replacement, 39% report income losses (85% expect more), with 59% of genre authors' work used to train AI without permission.

  • Broader impacts: Google's AI Overviews cut traffic 34%, leading to layoffs; >25% of Americans use AI for info over traditional sources; 97% of novelists oppose AI writing full novels, citing originality/ethics losses.

  • Trend: AI replaces commoditized content/jobs, potentially making publishers obsolete; 33% of authors use AI for non-creative tasks, but mass displacement in low-creativity areas is ongoing.

Hollywood's AI Reliance for Screenplays

  • AI use is limited and experimental, mainly assistive for brainstorming, analysis, and rote tasks; full scripts remain ~100% human-written (study of 3,800 US TV episodes 2020-2023 showed 1.9% AI probability, no increase post-ChatGPT).

  • Tools like Largo.ai triple green-lighting rates and make focus groups 10x faster/cheaper; 71% of screenwriters use AI for editing by late 2025, with 76% of studios incorporating it to cut post-production time by 35%.

  • Backlash includes WGA protests over job displacement and copyright; 53% of audiences uncomfortable with AI-touched content; future seen as collaborative, not replacement.

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