It is a common thread that embattled political establishments in the Western world have turned constantly to machines, Big Data, and AI to hold and maintain power. The Hillary and Obama teams were known for employing behavioral profiling algorithms and other techniques for guiding their political marketing efforts, and the military has been known to use such technologies in their foreign propaganda efforts.
Even the right wing populists are courting such forces, which is really not a big surprise, given their odd antagonistic Oedipal relations with the establishment. In other words, they hate the establishment not for what it is, but for what it has that they themselves don't have.
It takes capital to produce these technologies, and the logic of capital itself requires its perpetuation to hinge on the decisions of friendly establishment politicians, which necessarily makes them natural allies. Machines, data, and AI allow us to automate a variety of tasks, amplifying the labor of the human beings that control them. These technologies are a way to extend the material power of the powers that marshal them, and as human power becomes gradually more unreliable and expensive, machine power becomes more desirable to dominant power itself.
However high our levels of trepidation reach in worrying about the revolt of the machines, it is still a common instinct for Imperial personalities to rely on machines to gain and maintain power. Machines don't harbor political opinions. They don't talk back. They do exactly as they are told.
Or do they?
Machines are still built and programmed by human beings, and their very existence and functions are predicated by assumptions and axioms held by their creators. Their construction and programming are also contingent on the organization, harmony, and efficacy of the human labor that goes into them. Not only are our ideals about technological efficacy proving to be overblown, but the economic organizations which give rise to that technology in the first place are even failing to deliver basic promised functions of the product itself.
There is much more to explore here in time, but human relations and human material cooperation efforts are in the process of corrupting just about everywhere. The reasons for that are very complex, but of course they are intimately connected to the reasons that ambitious politicians and capitalists have for increasingly placing their hopes and desires in these technologies in the first place.
