The myth of Good AI. This is the rather gnomic title of my recent book. It tells the story of an increasingly disjointed world. It is also a reminder about the meris of humanity, things that differentiate us from the machines: empathy, love, hate, compassion, imperfection. The story of AI is a telltale of a scary world engineered by megalomaniac tech-fundamentalists and their governmental enablers.Everything has to be better, we are told at the cusp of this new era. More productivity, more emails, more micro-management of our workspace and of our everyday life. This trend is accelerating with brutal velocity – most of the people that I had talked to for the book don’t even know why.
What is it that these tech-fundamentalists such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman. Marc Zuckerberg or Bill Gates promise us? The book shows that the AI myths that they spin are essentially anti-human. It is all about profit, colonising other planets as Musk proudly advocates, and embedding AI into every aspect of our life. And yet people are already dying due to that tech-hysteria. There are recurrent reports about AI induced suicide, murder and terrorism. At the same time, the AI world remains the wild-west of non-regulation. Our decision-makers are too beholden by the myths of the AI looby to do much. Neither do they seem to be autnomous enough to act without the tech-lobby harassing them.
Not all AI is bad. You can easily prompt-engineer your own benevolent „resistance AI bot“ even on chat GPT. Just feed it some cutting edge research from decolonial intellectuals or some snippets from the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Or what about an art AI companion? A bit of Dali, Picasso and Monet would give it the data to teach you a few painting and drawing lessons. Like life, AI is not black and white. The point is that we shouldn’t trust Musk and co. to be in charge withour our supervision, as they are neither intellectually qualified to do so, nor compassionate enough.
Have you ever heard any of these figures talk about social emancipation, social justice, minority rights, human security, world peace? Is there a John Lennon or Bob Marley amongst the tech-billionaires? There is a reason why there isn’t. They emerge from an incredibly sterile and cloistered Silcon Valley mentality that is essentially devoid of critical acumen and intellectial oversight. It is a bro laboratory for nothing but maximising profit and realising megalomaniac ego projects. They are deliberately stealing our privacy which is neatly coded and stored in the hyper-energy ineficient data centres with their immensely destructive effect on our environment. Their technology comes to our living rooms as ghostly thieves, steal our choices and privacy, cut us off from each other and then they have the audacity to label their scary future as visionary. In fact, their conspiracy is nothing but psychotic, as their formula for earth is ultimately nihilistic.
So how to survive the age of AI? The first act of resistance may be surprisingly simple: Protect a space where no algorithm can follow you. Build an intellectual fortress in your private library—a place for books, wandering thoughts and unmonitored human attention. In an age when technology companies seek to turn every preference, movement and conversation into data, privacy must become an active practice. Learn to use counter-technologies that conceal your identity and frustrate the machinery of surveillance. And refuse to be optimised – deliberately disrupt the metrics that seek to predict who we are politically, socially and commercially.
But there is something even more fundamental at stake. Machines can optimise information; they cannot replace the human capacity for empathy, love, solidarity and connection. These are precisely the qualities that resist being reduced to a metric or converted into a commodity. Our response, therefore, cannot be to become more machine-like—to become faster, more productive, more measurable and endlessly optimised. It must be to be more human.
And resistance cannot remain an individual luxury. We need to democratise technological resistance
itself: build community AI projects in every favela and barrio, in every neighbourhood where people are too often treated as data points rather than citizens. Teach communities how these systems work, expose their biases, and create technologies that serve human beings rather than extract from them. The challenge, then, is not simply to resist machines. It is to refuse to become machines ourselves, to protect the messy, imperfect, loving and unpredictable dimensions of being human, to remain unashamedly unoptimised.
Ultimately, surviving the age of AI compels us to build a technological world in which empathy, human connection and solidarity are not weaknesses to be eliminated, but forms of power that no algorithm can fully capture.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect (North London News) editorial policy.
