Is there any Big Tech boss who didn’t make a million-dollar donation to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund? There were the usual suspects of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, but also Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook (CEOs of Open AI, Google and Apple respectively). At Trump’s inauguration, such was the scrabble for Big Tech to ingratiate themselves with the new President, they actually ran out of gala seats and tickets as perks for VIP donors.
No subtlety, nor attempt to pretend they had been motivated by genuine do-gooder instincts in the first place. It’s odd to think these are leaders who were once cosy with the Obama administration.
For one thing, Big Tech and all its effects, including being the dominant reason invoked for the unhappiness of the youth of today, is in America’s hands.
Now it feels hopeless. Can you imagine how much worse things are set to become under a President who openly reversed his policy on TikTok after crediting it with his winning the youth vote? The fear that consumer data could end up in the Chinese government’s hands can be brushed aside according to how much the app in question helps one man.
Trump’s initial actions over Artificial Intelligence have been further proof of deregulation. He has revoked Biden’s executive order which required AI developers to share safety results and gave government agencies the power to enforce against AI’s impacts on bias and privacy. Trump has instead introduced the “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” bill. It promises to ditch legislation “inconsistent with enhancing America’s leadership in AI”.
Keir Starmer refused to sign the subsequent summit declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence, which some put down to his desire to follow the US’s lead.
Why Big Tech stands to win from a Trump presidency
Read MoreOpen AI is probably the most important tech development currently under way (it’s set to be valued at $300bn). Its systems are used everywhere from Salesforce to Reddit; its products such as Chat GPT are in use by over 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, often described as the world’s “town square”, involved the elimination of both content moderators and rules against hate speech. Following this, the rate of anti-black slurs on the platform tripled, while right-wing posts and profiles sharing disinformation gained more prominence.
In previous decades, the abiding fear was of a “military-industrial complex”, as warned of by President Eisenhower in his 60s farewell address. The military industry and government scratching each other’s backs was said to lead to a concentration of power in their hands, at the expense of ordinary people. Joe Biden’s farewell address coined the phrase “tech-industrial complex” – an ominous premonition of what is already happening, weeks into the Trump presidency.
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