I keep telling people that tech bros are creepy as hell and that the popular image of the harmless “nerd” is one of the greatest modern disguises of power.
Think about it.
Folks have been taught to look at these dudes as awkward and socially inept, wearing musty hoodies or Patagonia vests, hovering over computers all day while mumbling with boyish enthusiasm about coding and software. We don’t imagine them as the evil fraternal twins of white supremacists with their jackboots, torches, and snarling speeches fantasizing about eliminating whole populations of people. But a 27-year-old researcher who worked for OpenAI and Anthropic just gave new urgency to suspicions many of us have had about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
After he recently quit his job, the whistleblower Jacob Coxon turned to social media and warned: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” while one of his former colleagues placed the probability of AI wiping out humanity within the next decade at greater than 10 percent.
Kill. Us. All.
By the end of the decade, Y’all.
Screw the Book of Revelation end-of-days-Jesus-is-coming-back-again type predictions. Won’t be any plagues. No beasts. No blood moons. No seven seals, four horsemen, or the apocalypse riding in on a pale horse. At least the Christian god promised us a rapture. But not Silicon Valley. They’re gonna bring on the end of the world humming through a server farm, financed by venture capitalists, coded by tech bros and released in beta before anybody figures out how the hell to stop this evil shit.
According to Coxon, this all sounds like an amped up version of an international arms race with these companies moving speedily toward self-improving super intelligence while knowing they have no reliable way to control it. And the United States has to make sure it develops the best AI before some other hostile country that hates us gets their hands on it. Coxon says future systems could keep self improving and outthink human beings, hack critical infrastructure, disrupt electrical grids and financial systems, develop biological weapons, acquire resources and improve themselves without waiting for human permission to decide what that system should do, or whom it might destroy. And much of the media coverage keeps invoking The Terminator, and scenes of rogue machines turning on humans.
But let’s go back to Coxon’s warning for a sec: “Kill us all.” The media coverage keeps focusing on whether AI could really kill billions of humans. But there’s one enormous unexamined word in that sentence: “all.”
“All” is a tidy pronoun. It sounds like an equal-opportunity killer, right? But lemme ask Y’all somethin’ if Coxon is right that AI is gonna up and kill everybody, who do you think the people controlling it will allow the technology to kill off first? I ask because right now the conversation is too politically convenient and we’re being asked to fixate on a villain that’s some hypothetical superintelligence machine that we must make obey humanity.
Listening too all the breathless commentary over this tech-driven extinction predictions, you’d think that billions of people are just out here being one innocent, harmonious species about to be imperiled by a common enemy. Folks act like there ain’t no colonizers or colonized people in this story. Ain’t no racial caste system or wealthy nations vying to maintain global dominance either.
What’s bugging the hell out of me is that AI is already obeying tech elite with documented ties to racial hierarchy and colonial thinking. It’s already being built and financed inside Empire, and its being integrated into military and policing systems, and shaped by institutions with long records of racial violence.
If you study the past then you know good and damn well that catastrophe does not arrive everywhere simultaneously. Humanity ain’t never been endangered democratically. And, catastrophe doesn’t distribute suffering evenly, nor does it grant every population the same means of escape. What the brave Coxon and the media pundits who seem genuinely disturbed by these nightmarish possibilities, aren’t telling us is that this artificial technology is being aligned right now with Empire, capitalism, militarism, policing, borders and white demographic anxiety. And before this destructive technology threatens everybody, somebody is sitting behind the machinery deciding the people and communities who will be the testing ground and who will receive protection first.
These men designing this technology aren’t innocent geeks. They are, in fact, ideological actors who are shaped by overwhelmingly white, male environments where colonial fantasies have gotten rebranded as innovation. Think about it: they have already conquered markets. These evil m’fkers are trying to colonize Mars. They’ve been rapidly replacing human workers in many industries. They’ve disrupted governments, controlled media and pushed propaganda, and they’re transcending ordinary human limits every which way.
And they are racists.
Nope, they aren’t the white hood wearing kind of racists. The research has already given us the evidence of how racial bias is coded in the supposedly “neutral” technology they’re creating, from facial recognition and surveillance, to predictive policing and medical algorithms. So, if this kind of tech is being developed by biased programmers, then it is perfectly reasonable to argue that these new machines are primed to reproduce racial violence. And don’t be surprised when programmers try to blame their evil outcomes on the algorithm.
And don’t get me started on how some of the most influential figures in the tech universe have been busy conceptualizing and financing a whole evil-ass revival of eugenics so they can try to preserve a future world that will remain overwhelmingly white, Western, male and wealthy. This movement has been called a “tech reich.” Think Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Alexandr Wang, Palmer Luckey, Brian Armstrong, David Sacks, Ben Horowitz, Keith Rabois and Shaun Maguire. A number of scholars have already shown how the development of AI technology is rooted in and is continuing established patterns of racism, colonial extraction, military domination, and environmental destruction.
So you see, folks have got to stop mistaking these creepy tech bros as politically neutral geniuses. They are, in fact, a dangerous AF ideological class constructing technological power steeped in racism and genocidal fantasies inherited from their colonizer ancestors.
And just watch. I predict that we’re gonna start hearing urgent, amped up calls to “save humanity” while pushing for congressional action to put restraints on this technology. But we gotta ask: which kind of ‘humanity’ do they wanna save? Whose ‘civilization’ do they wanna preserve? Whose ‘values’ will they embed in the machines?
If you study history, I mean really study history, then you know that white supremacists have always portrayed their own loss of dominance and any movement toward racial justice as anarchy. Every demand for equality is an existential threat and proof that the end of their world is coming. Now those of us who’ve been targets and living in survival mode for centuries have to wage a new civil rights battle against civilization-altering technology being handed to white-controlled institutions marinating in that racial paranoia.
I need Y’all to understand that this danger goes beyond just a small circle of tech oligarchs. Coxon is right to sound the alarm about how AI technology can transform human life on Earth. But marginalized groups around the world better be at the table influencing any future legislation because at the end of the day, this technology doesn’t need to code the n-word or other racial slurs to hate Black and Brown folks or to carry racial slaughter. All they will need are instructions to protect borders, preserve stability, identify threats, maximize efficiency or allocate scarce resources.
Damn, Y’all.
Living in the afterlife of the horrors of the Middle Passage, centuries of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, medical experimentation, police violence, mass incarceration, and every other evil-ass mechanism of white supremacist aggression is exhausting enough. We are already intimately familiar with white supremacy’s terrifying ability to reproduce itself in new forms while strangling the hell out of our lives every which way. And now, we gotta worry about some damn venture-capital-funded digital demons escaping from a server farm and finishing the fucking job and calling another impending genocide “progress.”
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