The Concentration of Power Behind the Intelligence
Much of the debate about AI focuses on the technology itself: whether machines can really be creative, whether they diminish human value, whether they will take our jobs, or whether artificial intelligence might eventually become an existential threat. These are legitimate questions. But they can also distract us from a more immediate problem.
Intelligence is not something that suddenly appeared with human beings and belongs exclusively to us. Nature has produced many forms of perception, learning, adaptation, communication, and problem-solving. Human intelligence is an extraordinary development in that larger story, and we are now creating machines capable of performing some intelligent behaviours at extraordinary speed and scale. Whether machine intelligence is ultimately the same kind of intelligence as our own is an interesting philosophical question. It is not, however, the most urgent political one.
The more immediate question is who controls this new intelligence. AI requires enormous concentrations of computing infrastructure, data, capital, and technical expertise. Much of that capacity is accumulating within a relatively small number of corporations and among some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. AI can therefore amplify not only human capabilities, but existing concentrations of economic and political power.
That is why warnings about the future power of AI should be accompanied by equal scrutiny of the people and institutions building it. When technology billionaires warn that AI could someday become extraordinarily powerful, we should take the possibility seriously—but we should also notice how extraordinarily powerful the corporations controlling AI are becoming today.
The greatest danger may not be that AI becomes too powerful. It may be that AI makes already-powerful humans and institutions vastly more powerful. The question is not simply what AI will become, but who will control it, whose interests it will serve, and how its benefits and power will be distributed.
Last Updated on August 20, 2026 | Published: August 20, 2026