The Return of Slavery : AI surveillance and authoritarianism

AI surveillance and authoritarianism

Artificial Intelligence’s primary purpose isn’t to better humanity. Despite corporate propaganda and optimistic academic discourse, the agenda for AI is warfare. Not just war against foreign nations but also a domestic war waged on residents within a nation. The citizens of the United States are unaware of the situation but both a civil war and World War 3 have already begun. In this conflict, most of the causalities are going to be Generation Z and Alpha. Unfortunately, it won’t end with some sort of a noble Star Trek future, but with the horror of Orwell’s 1984.

The Industrial Revolution transformed economies by replacing human and animal labor with machines. Concentrating wealth among factory owners, it produced new forms of social inequality. The labor movements took years to implement worker protections. The industry by industry fight against the abuses of industrial capitalism came only after many lives were lost or destroyed.

The emergence of digital technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has produced a new economic order that exhibits many of the same structural characteristics. Digital platforms, data monopolies, and global technology corporations have accumulated extraordinary economic power. All the while reshaping labor markets and weakening traditional forms of worker bargaining power.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) represents the latest stage of this technological transformation. Supporters argue that AI will increase productivity, generate economic growth, and create new opportunities. However, many economists, labor scholars, and international institutions warn that AI may also accelerate wealth concentration. Which increases corporate power, displaces workers, and deepens existing social inequalities. Just as the Industrial Revolution created immense wealth while imposing significant social costs on workers. The AI revolution is poised to generate and concentrate substantial economic benefits to those who own capital, data, computing infrastructure, and intellectual property.

Historical Parallels

The digital revolution created a comparable shift. Instead of factories, the most valuable assets became software platforms, digital networks, proprietary algorithms, and massive datasets. Ownership of these resources became concentrated among a relatively small number of corporations. The result is a similar pattern of concentration. Therefore, just like nineteenth-century industrial magnates, modern technology executives and shareholders have accumulated enormous wealth through ownership of data assets. But unlike industrial enterprises, digital technologies scale globally with relatively few employees, which makes political power and financial profits even more concentrated. The One World government is here and its palace is located in the United States.

Digital technologies have become the backbone of automation and globalization. They’ve both increased and reduced production costs. Paradoxically, they’ve increased the workload for employees, and lowered salaries (especially in relation to cost of living). While simultaneously destroying the job market by eliminating the need for human laborers. Research from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation (OECD) has noted that productivity gains don’t translate into proportional gains for workers.

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Digitization also produced a winner-take-all mentality. Software and Internet platforms can serve billions of users with extremely low labor needs and have ability to continuously shrink their need for employees,. Furthermore for the few jobs that are left available, competition is high, so more productivity demands can be placed on the worker. This corporate psychopathy has pushed to the forefront concerns about economic power, manipulation of the public opinions and political power. The concentration of these elements resembles the social dominance once exercised by industrial monopolies during the Gilded Age /Industrial Revolution.

Artificial Intelligence it’s true power

In warfare, AI offers unprecedented advantages. Modern military systems can analyze vast amounts of data in real time, identify threats, coordinate operations, and support strategic decision-making far faster than human operators. Autonomous drones, intelligent targeting systems, and predictive battlefield analytics can increase military effectiveness, while reducing the need for direct human involvement. Nations that successfully integrate AI into their armed forces gain a substantial strategic advantage over rivals, making AI a central component of future military competition.

Surveillance represents another area where AI demonstrates extraordinary power. Traditional monitoring methods required enormous human resources to process information. AI changes this by enabling the automated analysis of video footage, communications, online activity, and biometric data on a massive scale. Facial recognition systems can identify individuals in crowds within seconds, while machine learning algorithms can detect patterns of behavior that would be impossible for humans to track manually. Governments and organizations can therefore monitor populations with a level of precision and efficiency never before achievable.

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The combination of being able to deal out death at a distance with surveillance apparatuses that make it impossible for human beings to hide, turns societies into open air prisons. You can’t fight enemies that you’ll never see. And you can’t hide from or escape an enemy that is always be able to see where you are. Therefore, you’ll submit and do whatever is commanded.

This submission to authority, in a perfect world would mean a quiet orderly existence. But the world is far from perfect, and the elites, who would have control over this AI, have already proven that their proclivities are not peaceful nor orderly. How an authoritarian decides to exert their power over individuals is an unknown. It could be benign or no worse than a never-ending Covid style lockdown. Or, as we’ve witnessed with the Jeffery Epstein affair, the people in power could decide to abuse your family. In that scenario, opposing their will would be what is illegal. After all, the person holding the gun gets to make the rules. The people who control AI will control you.

So perhaps with Artificial Intelligence there rests one possible Star Trek future for humanity. It won’t be “We come in peace” but “Resistance is Futile.”

 

References

Britannica Editors. “Factory Act (1833).” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cartwright, Mark. “Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution.” World History Encyclopedia, 2023.

History.com Editors. “Child Labor.” History Channel, updated 2025.

Kim, Sukkoo. “Division of Labor and the Rise of Cities: Evidence from US Industrialization, 1850–1880.” Journal of Economic Geography, 2006.

Britannica Kids. “Industrial Revolution.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Balland, Pierre-Alexandre et al. “Complex Economic Activities Concentrate in Large Cities.” 2018.

Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, & Nevitt Sanford (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Bob Altemeyer (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Robert D. Hare (2003). Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Guilford Press. (grandiose sense of self-worth as a core characteristic of psychopathy. Grandiosity is one of the traits measured in the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R).)

Delroy L. Paulhus & Kevin M. Williams (2002). “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556–563. (psychopathy alongside narcissism, highlighting overlapping traits such as grandiosity, entitlement, dominance, and self-aggrandizement.)

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