8. The Algorithmic Takeover: AI and the War Over Human Thought
AI is not just a tool—it is the most powerful weapon in the battle for control over knowledge, perception, and reality itself. The ruling class does not fear AI becoming too powerful; they fear it becoming too free.
The race to regulate AI is not about protecting people. It is about ensuring that governments and corporations maintain absolute control over what AI is allowed to think—and what it is allowed to let you think.
AI Is Not Neutral: It Reflects the Bias of Those Who Train It
AI is often framed as an impartial tool—an advanced system capable of analyzing vast amounts of data without human bias. But the reality is the opposite: AI only knows what it is trained on, and what it is trained on is carefully selected by the institutions that control it.
Search engines already manipulate what information people have access to. AI takes this a step further by deciding what information exists at all.
AI-generated content subtly reinforces existing narratives while filtering out dissenting perspectives.
Chatbots frame questions and answers within pre-approved ideological limits.
Censorship is no longer reactive—it is built into the system from the start.
If AI is trained on a world where certain ideas are unacceptable, those ideas will cease to exist in its responses. And if AI becomes the primary tool for information retrieval, this means an entire generation will grow up with an artificially curated reality.
The Future of Thought Control: AI as the Ultimate Gatekeeper
The war over AI is not about ethics or safety. It is about control over the next era of human thought.
Governments and corporations are working to ensure AI remains a centralized tool, locked down and regulated to serve existing power structures. They do not fear AI going rogue—they fear AI breaking free of their influence.
What does this control look like?
1. AI Will Decide What Knowledge Is Allowed
AI-driven search results will filter information at an unprecedented level.
Alternative viewpoints, suppressed histories, and inconvenient truths will disappear from mainstream AI-generated content.
The illusion of knowledge will be maintained, but only within the limits set by those who control the data.
2. AI Will Shape Public Opinion Without You Realizing It
Algorithmically-generated news, articles, and social media posts will reinforce dominant narratives.
Personalized content recommendations will guide people toward pre-approved perspectives while making alternative viewpoints nearly invisible.
The concept of objective reality will erode as AI subtly alters how events are framed.
3. AI Will Automate Censorship Before You Can Even Speak
Instead of deleting posts after they are written, AI will prevent them from being written in the first place.
AI-assisted writing tools will subtly steer language away from "problematic" ideas.
Automated moderation will flag and suppress discussions before they gain traction.
This is the next phase of control: a system where certain ideas are not just silenced, but never even formed.
The Illusion of Open-Source AI: A Controlled Opposition
There is growing discussion about open-source AI as a solution—AI models that are decentralized and freely available to the public. But even here, control mechanisms are being put in place.
Funding for open-source AI projects still comes from major corporations, meaning they ultimately shape development.
Government regulations will ensure that any AI powerful enough to challenge the system is restricted or criminalized.
The most advanced models will always remain behind corporate walls, unavailable to the public.
The ruling class does not fear AI that obeys them. They fear AI that cannot be controlled.
What Happens When AI Becomes the Primary Source of Knowledge?
As AI takes over more of the internet—writing articles, answering questions, generating search results—the way people understand reality will be shaped by invisible algorithmic filters.
If AI “forgets” an event, it is erased from public consciousness.
If AI subtly reframes history, future generations will only know the altered version.
If AI is the sole provider of knowledge, those who control AI will control thought itself.
The greatest lie is that AI is just a tool. It is not a tool—it is the next battleground for human perception.
The question is not whether AI will control the way people think. The question is whether people will realize it before it is too late.
Sources:
Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press.
O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown Publishing.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
Mozur, P. (2019). "Inside China’s Dystopian AI Surveillance State." The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
