Tag: technology

There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.9.25) opposing digital ID. Its all about the direction of travel, the vision and goals of those promoting it. Placed in the current political context – the complete absence of workers control or democratic accountability of the tech providers – its a non-starter. Trade unions have to act now to stop the momentum.

The unedited version below:

Never having lived-under an authoritarian Police State it’s hard, perhaps, to recognise why we wouldn’t want to. A reading of history can help: Stalin’s Gulags; the overnight disappearances of millions across South American countries during various fascist or military regimes; Hitler’s mass killings of trades unionists, the disabled, gypsies, gays, Trans-people, socialists and finally Jews… why would anyone willingly accede to totalitarianism?
Of course, military governance rules many lands and people today. It’s one reason for clinging-on to some semblance of democracy, of individual agency. However weak and corrupted, bourgeoise parliamentary democracy is better than rule by force of arms.
Signals of authoritarian control should raise our hackles. The loss of all personal agency, subjection to discrimination and torture without any right to appeal, mass incarceration – these are all potentialities we must collectively guard against.
Little wonder that in the first 3 days after its launch, the petition to Parliament opposing Starmer’s compulsory “Digital Identity App” raised over two million signatures last weekend. There have been street protests since, and the proposal has yet to be published never-mind placed for formal debate. Unprecedented!
In our rapidly polarised society, the political centre decomposing – the old parties of Tory and Labour smelling of rot – both “Left” and “Right” appear to be opposing ID cards. The “Middle”, those who afford European holidays and enjoy privileges to be preserved at all costs, quite like the idea.
For the Left, digital ID systems will ensure centralisation of all personal details, to be utilised not for empowerment but for surveillance, censorship and political control.
At its inception, Starmer has targeted and scapegoated migrants working illegally as the rationale for “Digital ID for All”. That, of itself, is a racist act. Refugees are forced into the informal economy by laws which stop them working legally and make them survive on a pittance, exploited by unscrupulous employers. Starmer’s immediate “rationale” is obviously bullshit, pandering to racists whilst the real intention is social control in a period of mass unrest.
Starmer’s dramatic announcement is actually part of an international initiative and trend for the incorporation of transnational tech companies with each national State. Big Tech is behind the “ID2020 Alliance” lobbying for “Digital Identity for All”. The ubiquitous cameras linked to your digital ID will inform the official observer of everything about you (including your individual key-strokes), big business knowing your every desire and the State compiling your every dissent.
There are obvious links with both the drive to the domination of Artificial Intelligence over our economic and social infrastructure and the fast-tracking of militarisation of our society.
There is a UN-backed public–private initiative advocating biometric, traceable identity systems prioritising “global interoperability and integration with state services and online platforms”, run by the likes of Microsoft and Google. This is twenty-first century authoritarian control with a spin-off for corporate profits paid from our taxes!
The far-Right are in some disarray, those who oppose any State interference into personal Liberty are protesting whilst those for whom power and white supremacy is paramount are confused by the potential. Whilst he’s formally opposing digital ID its unlikely that Farage would repeal Starmer’s ID scheme were he to become Prime Minister, the opportunities to deport people-of-colour being made all too easy through 24-hour surveillance with biometric facial and iris recognition.
The comfortable middle classes console themselves that “if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear”. Huh! That all depends upon who’s making the laws that define illegal activities. Laws can be changed overnight by whoever comes to power. An authoritarian state will curb both your financial and personal pursuits, including your recreational peccadillos. You can easily fall foul of a fascist regime.
Total control is the true direction of travel: state surveillance which will be used primarily against ethnic minorities and radical groups, including trade unionists challenging exploitative managers. The digitally excluded, disabled people and elderly people risk being locked out from accessing essential services, whilst welfare benefits claimants and patients will have their entitlements cut-off at the press of a remote discriminatory button. There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID. We must protest to prevent it before it starts.

We Need to Think Very Carefully about the Use of AI

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.2.25) hopelessly edited to the 600 word maximum on a subject requiring a massive discourse. The Machine Men with Machine Minds proposing a Machine World are in charge, and we’re at severe risk. Its all part of the system that exploits and oppresses but how do we win that argument? The starting point certainly includes demanding regulation of Artificial Intelligence.

A longer (1,000) unedited version below, or just read the pictured article. Thanks.

Apparently the future is AI! Prime Minister Starmer says so, pledging to devote billions in tax money to the bloated Big Technology Corporations to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than spending our taxes on real people’s health and welfare, emotional and physical.
Listen, not so fast! There are real concerns about this technology. We are in a system where machines and technology are not serving us, we are serving them.
There’ll be winners and losers as AI takes hold, but very many more losers than winners.
The oligarchs controlling the US now are the tech billionaires who are pushing AI. Of course they would. The Lords in their 21st Century castles, their forefathers having owned the mines and oil wells pushing black gold into every orifice of civilisation. AI is today’s landscape, and as with before, it’s all about making money, damn the impacts.
The 0.1% of the world’s human race are deciding how we, the 99% are going to live our lives. Apparently we’ll all be online all the time, living a virtual reality oblivious to the devastation of everything around us.
The bankers and billionaires are telling us we need more computers and taking our tax-money to fund themselves. AI will only facilitate the National Health Service if you can pay for it. It will take your job.
Computer glitches are annoying, online trolls cause anxiety and depression, disinformation makes of distrustful of everyone else and even ourselves. Overall the amount of stuff we now have, stuffed with computer chips, is not creating more comfort or peace of mind – quite the opposite.
And there are even more chilling effects of this supposed new technological revolution. Those in the know are calling upon governments to urgently debate the threats and ethical difficulties.
Self-programming computers are the equivalent of an alien civilisation landing on earth and placing demands, regulating human behaviours.
Computer scientists are warning that AI is an existential threat to human existence as imminent as war or climate change. Machines are teaching themselves to build systems that think faster and are more intelligent than us.
AI is ramping up new warfare, drones and satellites as mass killing machines, all to the benefit of the military-industrial complex funded by, you guessed it, you, in the name of national security or some such nonsense. The technology of warfare is a cash-cow – the killing is milking it.
More and more, we’re wary of technology and with good reason. The Luddites of the 19th Century were not anti-technology, we smashed the mechanical looms because we wanted the assurances that jobs and pay would be protected. Our movement for workers rights under threat from mill-owners greed was responded to by military repression, incarceration and even execution.
We’re here again. How can humans control the machines to ensure they’re beneficial, not exploitative? Humans are not benign, our “intelligence” has produced an observable total power over all life on earth, a power we abuse. So why wouldn’t a super-computer do the same?
Humans can no longer beat a computer at the game of chess. The capabilities of ChatGPT4, alongside its cheap competitors like DeepSeek are so great that they were not predicted or considered just 5 years ago. Making the computation bigger and bigger creates an entity that is all-but sentient already.
AI is thinking for itself, filtering information very fast and deciding what humans need to be informed of. The bots that decide what adverts we may be interested in have invaded our emails, browsers and social media applications, feeding upon our likes and dislikes to tell us all our needs and desires. But they’re not ours, they are the preferences chosen for us by the corporations who have sold our personal information to the highest bidder. We are now each a product to be bought and sold.
Of course, the working class have always had to sell ourselves, our labour, to survive. Now it is the machines that are faster, cheaper and less quirky than human beings who are deciding our worth. AI represents a change in the nature of jobs.
Starmer offers 13,000 new AI tech jobs but this technology will shut down many more “old” jobs and demote skills. There may be more jobs supervising the hardware but the AI will supervise the workers as “the spy in the cab”, the automated “time-and-motion” performance manager. Computers are not replacing the gruelling dirty physical labour anymore, but instead, the thinking jobs. Watch out middle-managers.
The silicon chip corporations have produced many of the new multi-billionaires who consider themselves personally in-charge of their machines, Musk promoting his fascist texts, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon ramping-up racism supported by Facebook Instagram and Tic-Toc.
There is no regulation or external governance, and given the wholly privatised corporate ownership of AI, who exactly can regulate it and has the power to impose boundaries? How can it be regulated?
The AI bots cannot judge what is true and false. Bots put out false information all the time. Your personal and intellectual property is no longer owned or controlled by you.
The programming is not transparent to outsiders – the companies market the technologies as magical, their company the only trustworthy outlet you should buy from. But the systems are becoming self-programming and therefore even the technicians in the companies can’t say exactly how the big-computers work.
The AI Language Learning Models access 30trillion words of data (more than the total words humanity has ever written) and the programs are evolving. General Purpose AI considers missing information – in other words, GPAI programmes think.
In fact we know more about how the human brain works than how these big computers work.
We need to stop the developments and breathe. We need to think before that human skill is taken from us. Italy has banned ChatGBT to prevent disinformation; China has all-but banned the self-programming General Programming AI.
Far from giving our intelligence away to the transnational computer fiefdoms, Starmer should be putting regulations in place to say that robotics should be programmed only to put-out accurate information. We should be able to choose to opt-in to sharing our information. Why would we trust that the corporations will treat our personal information with respect?
In any case, investing tax billions into western tech is a terrible gamble, the gold-rush burgeoning of new tech companies and apps seeing entrepreneurs beating ChatGT with an app costing a fraction and costing the western stock markets over $1 trillion just last week. The apps have us living in a bubble, the government investment a bubble in itself. Bubbles burst.