The deadly business of AI and why Musk’s alliance with Trump is terrifying

Say you want to bribe a government to give you a contract, what do you pay – 10%? 20%? What about if you pay more than the contract is worth? What does it mean if the bribe is 10 times the size of the contract?

Cohere, an artificial intelligence company, is valued at 227 times revenue. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s provider of Starlink internet access, is worth 22 times revenue. Palantir is worth 40 times revenue.

What this means is that if you are a company like Cohere a R1-million contract is worth R227-million, if you are SpaceX it is worth R22-million and if you are Palantir it is worth R40-million.

Over the past few decades Silicon Valley has built the most formidable lobbying machinery the world has seen. It is based on business models that frequently break the law to prove they are bankable. Once revenue supports a high market capitalisation, then lobbying is used to prevent businesses being shut down.

This may be consequential for taxi industries and hotels, like with Uber and Airbnb. But that is nothing compared with the military-industrial complex, communications and government itself.

Ukraine’s holding back Russia and Israel’s slaughter in Gaza have unlocked the gates of hell by using artificial intelligence (AI). They vastly increase targeting and killing by way of machine learning. To keep up with the sheer number of targets identified by AI, the average Israeli intelligence officer has only 20 seconds to decide whether to bomb a home or hospital. Israel reportedly considers killing 20 innocents for every one low-level Hamas operative as a targeted strike. Little wonder Israel’s “targeted strikes” look like genocide to the impartial observer.

How much money that makes for Silicon Valley is hard to determine. But take Palantir as an example: this AI company started helping Ukraine in the summer of 2022 when it was worth about $25-billion. Just two years later it is four times the size and now worth $100-billion.

But that is nothing compared with the arms manufacturers. If targeting is increased exponentially so too is bombing. “In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to buy as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. “It’s a business,” he said.

Palantir’s Peter Thiel and SpaceX’s Musk have both gone from political obscurity to full-throated supporters of Donald Trump.

Palantir, SpaceX and hundreds of other companies in Silicon Valley depend on countries all over the world granting them licences and contracts. And together Silicon Valley has the most formidable lobbying machinery in the US.

So, if you are a head of state, why wait in line to get an audience at the White House when you can just as easily find a back door to the government through the tech sector? And how much more valuable is that back door with Trump who campaigns arm-in-arm with these tech billionaires?

Israel’s Netanyahu has figured it out. Musk toured Israel after the 7 October disaster and Netanyahu met him repeatedly. Hard to believe this is just a budding bromance.

Now there is a formula. Developing countries can juice valuations exponentially through licensing and contracting. Merge this with security interests and the military-industrial complex and we now have lobbyists from the arms and tech industries enjoying common cause. Combine this with the extreme valuations and you have a scale of financial incentives that is sufficient to buy off whole countries let alone corrupt officials. And then, combine this with the real possibility that Silicon Valley becomes both the back door and gatekeeper to the White House.

It is time to be afraid, very afraid. With this confluence of interests, it is inconceivable that democratic institutions will be able to defend the interests of citizens over corporations.

The race has just begun. The amount of money to be made from securing pole position in AI is going to overwhelm everything. And this means death of innocents at scale: “Two sources said that during the early weeks of the [Gaza] war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during air strikes on low-ranking militants.” 

So much money is already being made on Israel’s slaughter of women, children and elderly innocents in Gaza. But the future will be darker still because if we know one thing about capitalism, it always looks for new markets. And with racism on full display in the American elections, there are plenty more opportunities the world over. DM