Ten years ago, Cambridge Analytica used data from Facebook games to tweak UK and US voters and torque world geopolitics.

Today we find out that the company behind Pokémon Go used all your data finding Pikachus to teach autonomous robots how to navigate and take away your jobs.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind."

No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But "AI" is just accumulation by a few powerful.

So No. It's not collective but extractive, not knowledge but data, not humankind but the hegemonic western view. Everything in that statement is wrong.

A surge in new datacenters, each with the power demand of 100,000 households and a cooling water demand of 1,000,000 m³ per year to train AI models on material obtained without consent on hardware now unaffordable to consumers so fascism-adjacent tech billionaires can sell us the idea that any skill is now worthless and in doing so creating the largest economic bubble ever while simultaneously destroying society and environment.

I think that about sums it up.

#genai #llm

Cory Doctorow: "America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/#that-makes-me-smart

We see big things and ignore the small. Ordinary, easy things, done over and over. Scrolling, buying, clicking, sharing. Looking outward rather than inward. ‘Our hands are tied,’ we say, while tying the knots.

Hundreds of small, daily, convenient knots, until the world becomes a prison & we talk of nothing but being free.

This is the part people dislike, because it sounds like blame. And it is, a little.

It is easier to say the world is too hungry than to admit that we are still feeding it.

What will it take, if not shooting and killing a white suburban mom with witnesses and cameras all around, the homicide of a detainee by the authorities in a detention facility, armed paid thugs inciting violence, and the abduction and abuse of a five year old boy, with the intentionally traumatizing of that child and family by, and glorified by, the government using armed, masked, lawless agents who have been declared above the law by the regime leaders.

What is it going to take, Republicans?

Nothing new under the sun. Remarkable parallels with today.

[via @smalls2672 RT by @GreatDismal on X]