Ordinary humanity faces an emerging threat from the combined might of the Human Elites (billionaires and the military-political class) working with perhaps the greatest power the planet has ever seen: artificial intelligence. Their combined might has the potential to totally screw us. Happy New Year everyone.

2025 is set to be the ‘break-out year’ for artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg says we will see the arrival initially of thousands but soon billions of AI ‘agents’ who, via the major tech companies, will integrate themselves into our lives and perform an increasing number of tasks for us. An agent can be defined as “a software-based entity powered by artificial intelligence designed to perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions autonomously or semi-autonomously to achieve specific goals”. Some are calling it the dawn of the Age of AI or the Agentic Age.

For the time being AI will work foremost in the service of the lucky few. Deloittes forecasts that by the end of this year 25% of companies that currently deploy AI will have agents; by 2027 that will have grown to 50%. We all need to come to grips with AI concepts like ‘10,000 graduates’, ‘Einstein in the Basement’, ‘Prompt Engineering’, ‘The Singularity’, ‘Agents’, ‘Generative AI’, ‘Artificial General Intelligence’, ‘Large Language Models’ and more – because the future has arrived and most of us are not up-to-speed.

Most people in the West have yawned their way through the genocide in Gaza – in part thanks to the sterling efforts of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI algorithms on Facebook. Luigi Mangione became a cult hero in the US for gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, partly because the company used an AI algorithm known as nH Predict that denied and overrode claims for millions of likely legitimate claimants. The war in Ukraine and on Palestine has accelerated research........

© Pearls and Irritations