Why tech favors tyranny

Harari explains in this piece. Especially note the concluding paragraph. Hence the most urgent need to maintain net neutrality. It really is a life or death issue.

"The same technologies that might make billions of people economically irrelevant might also make them easier to monitor and control. [...] We should instead fear AI because it will probably always obey its human masters, and never rebel. AI is a tool and a weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further."

"We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems.  Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. [...] However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze."

"If you find these prospects alarming—if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy."