It always starts to read as little paranoid when we bring up the topic of surveillance. I get it.

Yet here we are. And it’s impossible to talk about the power of AI to multiply productivity without pausing to note that any tool can be wielded by different hands, with different intentions, working on vastly different ends.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? The creators of these systems remind us with every self-promotional explanation of their genius that these are tools to grease the wheels of capitalistic pursuit. Industry will move faster. Business will grow smoother. Human effort is not being replaced so much as amplified.

Numerous scholars have cited the power of propaganda and mass communication had in the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s ^[1] , suggesting frequently that the real power of rising fascism of the era was linked to the multiplicative effect of being able to speak and coerce thousands or millions of people with a single speech thanks to even something as simple as a amplification system.

Those same tools can be used for amazing things: entertainment, performance, emergency alerts, education and more. And yet it retrospect it is hardly paranoid to suggest that such systems in the wrong hands led to terrible ends.

AI multiplies, amplifies, computational efforts—the oversight of data, the organization of information, the analysis of what might have once been though benign personal knowledge. Put in the wrong hands, paranoia is justified.