August 14, 2025

By Jim Towey

A pandemic is defined as “a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease over a whole country or the world at a particular time.” The rapid, infectious spread of AI throughout the body politic seems to meet this test. The Covid pandemic, and how the governments of the world responded to it, now serve as the template for what the AI pandemic portends.

You will say I am an alarmist. Read this and this. Peggy Noonan, a respected centrist voice at the Wall Street Journal is no alarmist. RocaNews* is a fun, fast and fair news site for younger generations, and it is citing the same concerns, too.

With AI, as with Covid, I see the same hype, faux urgency, over-promising by governments, blathering and bullying by the experts, suppression of dissenting views, coercion disguised as voluntariness, and the compliance by the mainstream media. I also see the same powerlessness of ordinary people who see AI spreading – with no vaccine in sight. Big Tech is now fattening itself at the trough where Big Pharma once feasted.

The fear-mongering that the Imperial College London ignited when it warned in March 2020 that millions of Americans of all ages would die from Covid, has reappeared as dire warnings from U.S. leaders about what happens if China gets to the Holy Grail of superintelligence ahead of us. The panic that led to irrational Covid measures can now be seen in every economic sector where if you aren’t all-in on AI investments, you are losing out – fast.

Not an Industrial Revolution

You may hear advocates of the AI revolution draw an analogy between what is taking place now with what took place at the time of the Industrial Revolution. The implication is, “Look at all the good that came from the Industrial Revolution! Thank goodness naysayers like you weren’t around then to halt such progress.”

Setting aside the fact that one transformation played out over centuries and the other at warp speed, this argument is disingenuous. The change AI brings to humanity, and for that matter, what nuclear weapons and their proliferation still bring, are of an order of magnitude different from what machine manufacturing brought to the world’s economies or conventional weaponry brought to war.

Now, besides a mushroom cloud looming over our future, we have another cloud harboring data centers with its own destructive potential.

No new jobs either

Fortunately, more and more people are awakening to what AI or an AI bubble bursting could mean to present and future generations. That’s why the snake-AI salesmen lie about the new jobs they say will be created the same way Big Pharma and the public health politicians lied about “flattening the curve.”

The Sam Altmans of the world promise that the new technology will free people up to be creative. Who needs a job when you can get a universal basic income check each month and maybe some government-issued soma-like marijuana to light the creative fires? Or alternatively, the Al prophets promise that AI will create new, higher-paying jobs to replace the displaced ones. That’s the same thing the experts said to steel and industrial workers decades ago – have you been to the Rust Belt recently? Trust me, those new AI jobs will be as real as Alexa’s is today. If society is groomed to be dependent on superintelligence, why would humans be needed for anything that AI can do? The answer is obvious.

More lockdowns coming?

Well, what is ahead? The AI and nuclear threats are on a path toward a grand convergence. It will not be long before AI’s principal purpose will be for military and security purposes, to protect against threats from abroad and at home, putting the “ai” in jail.  The surveillance of citizens now available through public and private sources could lead to lockdowns that Anthony Fauci only could have dreamed of. That’s what debanking did, and will do again, and what facial recognition, optic scans, implanted chips and numerous biometric interventions offer.

I have confidence that as AI’s true colors emerge – not the manufactured illusions of Big Tech but the real-world consequences that come when entry level jobs vanish, vacancies aren’t filled, and people are consigned to soul-killing jobs in service of the elite few  – Americans will demand a change.

Which political party will stand for these workers? Right now, neither the Democrats nor Republicans see where AI is heading, nor do they wish to. Big Tech spends on politics in America the way Qatar binges to buy influence here. There is an opening now for a visionary leader to step forward with a “People First” campaign.

Another American Revolution is needed, one that cries for a return to our founding principles and renounces a government that is of AI, by AI, for AI. As another revolutionary, Gandhi, once said, people are more important than things.

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors)

*My son Max co-founded RocaNews