Fan’s of the BBC series Yes Prime Minister may remember the episode titled Power to the People. It introduced the fictional concept of the Politician’s Syllogism when compelled to action, a logical fallacy that goes like this.  We Must do Something. This is Something. We must do This.

In the post-Berlin Wall era, which also saw the dawn of the climate crisis Western governments, having prevailed in the cold war and become master of the world under US leadership, went on a relentless pursuit of technology, not to outcompete a rival power, but for the sake of technology itself.

New challenges were perceived for attack, and previously impossible technological solutions presented themselves as the answer.

So were born extraordinary surveillance tools, data centres of hitherto unimagined capacity recording every data bit of existent information, and software to query and crosslink all the surveillance systems and the data they collected.

Electric vehicles were reborn a century after they went extinct, to solve the new crisis of climate change and to move the world into a future where Oil rich States could no longer disturb global stability and the new power structure.

Self-driving automobiles,  until now an idea in science fiction, became the desirable future, even as electronics took over virtually every interface between man and machine. Cars fitted with screens, menus, and built in sims could continually communicate with their manufacturers, report on movement and be disabled at will by the manufacturer or the authorities.

Stealth aircraft and then autonomous pilotless aircraft, or drones and other forms of “smart weapons” overwhelmingly became the focus of cutting-edge military spending.

The driving force was the Politician’s syllogism. Technology offered itself to politicians, to bureaucrats, to corporate boards, and to Venture Capital investors as the “Something” in “We must do something, This is Something, We must do this.”  AI is one such manifestation

The enormity of the AI bubble can scarcely be exaggerated. The investments are staggering, the stakes for the governments of the great powers, are........

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