Economic inequality, super AIs and the possible coming of the apocalypse

The New Yorker magazine cover of Oct. 27, 2025, depicts a malnourished person wearing only shorts hugging himself as he lies shivering on a bed next to a well-dressed man covered by a currency bill that has at least 25 zeroes. It is a portrait of the country's stark economic inequality.

The 20 richest Americans are worth $2.7 trillion, Forbes reported, and the richest one percent have 1,000 times more wealth than the poorest 20 percent. An Oxfam analysis found that, between 1989 and 2022, a household in the top 0.1 percent gained about $39.5 million in wealth; it was less than $8,500 for the bottom 20 percent.

This disparity is not new nor is the fact that it is a racial inequality. Federal Reserve data cited by The Washington Post showed that the median net worth of European Americans is nearly 10 times that of African Americans.

But the disparity is more than one of race; it is one of class. Grant Suneson, writing in USA Today, noted that, the South, where the population is overwhelmingly European American, has the highest poverty level. West Virginia heads the list, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics. Others include Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee. Those are states whose citizens have been so mis-educated and under-educated that they vote against their own self-interest, such as opposing affordable health care.

The very wealthy few have shown little inclination to help close the gap, focusing mainly on expanding their fortunes which they hide in offshore banks and other tax havens.

They buy or build huge mansions and super yachts and invest in very expensive paintings which they display in their boats or hide in foreign locations. Some are relocating from states such as California to Florida to enjoy tax benefits. Some are buying expensive citizenships of foreign countries, just in case. Some use their fortunes to influence politics.

Some are prepping for a supposed coming apocalypse, as Douglas Rushkoff, who wrote the 2022 book "Survival of the Richest," noted in The Guardian, and are building survivalist bunkers. Tesla founder Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Palantir's Peter Thiel wants to reverse the ageing process. Sam Altman and Ray Kurzwell want to upload their minds into super-computers.

Such men are "preparing for a digital future" that has "less to do with making the world a better place" than it does "with transcending the human condition altogether," Rushkoff wrote. "Their extreme wealth and privilege," he added, serve "only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us." But it could all be in vain.

A race is on to build the most powerful computer with mind-boggling capabilities, an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) powered by data centers which will each house at least 100,000 GPUs (advanced graphic processing units), what Timothy Pratt, writing in The Guardian, called "power-hungry facilities" that "are notorious for using huge amounts of energy and water."

A single GPU for a data center will cost up to $30,000, for a total of about $3 billion, for these chips alone. Besides needing huge amounts of electricity to operate and water to cool them, they will produce massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

Such data centers are already being built by Google, Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI and, Michael Klare reported in The Nation, each will take up as much space as a small airport. Some in the planning stages will be the size of a small city.

OpenAI expects to build five data centers which will have a combined electricity demand equivalent to three million households. A recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the data centers could need as much as 12 percent of total U.S. electricity use in 2028. That will almost certainly drive-up electricity costs for ordinary people.

Then President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order, "Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence," in October 2023. It stated that "irresponsible use [of AI] could exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation; displace and disempower workers; stifle competition; and pose risks to national security." The order required AI companies to conduct rigorous testing of their advanced AI models "to identify (and correct) any potential failures."

However, President Donald Trump rescinded that order, issuing his own "AI Action Plan" last July 23 at a "Winning the AI Race" summit. "America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it," Trump proclaimed. "My administration will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the United States can build and maintain the largest, most powerful, and most advanced AI infrastructure anywhere on the planet."

The administration claims, according to Klare, that superintelligent computers will have the capability to "enable scientists to find cures for diseases and discover novel solutions to climate change—as well as equip robots with a capacity to locate and attack enemy forces on their own."

Politico's Brendan Bordelon and Gabby Miller reported that polling has found that "most voters are blasé — even mildly positive — about the possibility of having a data center in their area, associating them with new jobs and other economic benefits."

Still, opposition is growing and Georgia has taken the lead to ban or tightly regulate the data centers.

Evidently with an eye to the mid-term elections, the President has also called on major AI companies to agree on a "compact" to ensure that they will not increase the cost of electricity or adversely affect water supplies, Political reported Monday.

But there is another aspect to the race for AI dominance that has been receiving little attention: What will happen if a super-computer becomes so intelligent that it will be able to avoid being controlled by its creators?

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, co-leaders of the non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, have warned that AI development is reaching the point where rogue AI can come into existence and pose an existential threat to humankind. They do not believe that the tipping point has been reached and they asked, in a 2025 book, for people to ponder "what comes after machine intelligence that is genuinely smart, smarter than any living human, smarter than humanity collectively."

They added, "We are concerned about AI that surpasses the human ability to think and to generalize from experience and to solve scientific puzzles and invent new technologies and to plan and strategize and plot and to reflect on and improve itself."

Yudkowsky and Soares wrote that there is still time to inject sanity into this version of the arms race before artificial intelligence reaches the point where it will determine that humans are irrelevant and exterminate them, using not robots but a bioweapon.

They have called for the establishment of a global organization to monitor any further AI development, with the goal of shutting it down. The alternative is given in the title of their book: "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies – Why Superhuman AI would kill us all."

That is the future where tech billionaires and their political allies plan to take the human race into, rather than sharing the wealth and implementing programs to close the poverty gap. But that state of mind is not new.

"Now listen, you rich people," apostle James warned more than 2,000 years ago, "weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire."

Unfortunately, such an Armageddon will happen not only to rich people but also everyone on the planet, if Yudkowsky and Soares are right. The question is whether it is worth the risk to continue to ignore them.