The digital dictatorship is not coming from AI but from its human owners.
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After reading yet a new portion of hysteria linked to the imminent takeover of the world by artificial intelligence (AI) — followed, as usual, by enthusiastic reviews of benefits of the AI revolution — I began wondering why the same people who warn us about AI’s dangers are simultaneously promoting and accelerating it.
What is the goal of these people, super wealthy and super powerful?
First to remember is that every revolution is about power. The major change after any revolution is who controls the resources. The difference between a positive and a negative outcome is the concentration of power — the more hands it is spread among, the better.
The AI revolution is not different.
Secondly. Historically, three broad categories of resources have repeatedly generated enormous wealth and remain among the world’s most valuable assets:
· foods and water
· energy and earth extracted commodities
· information, knowledge and intelligence
Then, there is a third element: ownership.
The three are deeply connected. Whoever controls a valuable resource can extract value from it, accumulate wealth and, eventually, acquire political power.
Let me explain each aspect, starting from the last one.
Consider the Industrial Revolution. In Britain, common land that had traditionally been used by local communities was progressively enclosed and converted into private property. One important driver was the expanding wool industry: land that had been shared for grazing and other customary uses became commercially managed land, increasingly used for profitable sheep farming.
Long before industrial capitalism, aristocracies had accumulated control over large areas of land and extracted rents, taxes or agricultural production from those who worked it.
A similar process occurred with other resources. Water, minerals and later energy became subject to increasingly elaborate systems of ownership, extraction rights and commercial control. Something that existed in nature could become a source of enormous private wealth once someone gained control over it.
This pattern helps explain the history of economic power.
For most of human history, food — including the land and water required to produce it — was the fundamental source of wealth. Then industrialization elevated energy to an equally strategic position. Wood, coal, oil and later nuclear energy became the foundations of industrial production, transportation and modern economies.
Those who controlled energy could increasingly control the production, processing and distribution of food as well.
In the digital age, a third resource is rapidly acquiring even greater importance: information and data. And unlike the previous two, it can be used to influence and control both of them.
Artificial intelligence is an extraordinarily powerful instrument that allow a small group of individuals to capture control and monetize that third resource.
Today, information can be collected, copied and transmitted on a scale that previous generations could barely imagine. AI, however, makes it possible to do something more consequential with it: turn enormous quantities of information into automated cognitive power.
This is why the struggle over artificial intelligence is not simply a struggle over a new technology. It is a struggle over who controls the machines that can extract value from humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
And here the story becomes profoundly different from previous economic revolutions.
Why knowledge is different
Almost everything that makes today’s AI systems useful was produced, recorded, organized, explained, tested, criticized or refined by human beings during thousands of years.
Books, scientific papers, newspapers, encyclopedias, photographs, films, music, court decisions, imperial orders, laws, historical records, discussions, software, websites and apps, tutorials and reviews. Plus billions of individual contributions to the enormous digital record of human civilization.
No single person created this intellectual inheritance. It is humanity’s shared legacy.
No corporation owns all of it.
Yet a small group of companies has acquired the computing power, data, capital and infrastructure necessary to ingest vast quantities of it and transform it into proprietary artificial-intelligence systems.
And those systems are becoming enormously valuable.
According to Israeli-Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, the six largest corporations behind the AI revolution spent $22 billion on lobbying during the first half of 2026 alone, or more than $3.6 billion a month. Most of this amount refers to the United States.
Pause for a second and think about it. $3.6 billion a month is almost half of what UNICEF spent worldwide in an entire year helping children around the world. My country’s 2026 state budget authorizes 526.3 billion lei in budget expenditure. At roughly 4.3–4.4 lei/$, $3.6 billion is around 3% of Romania’s entire annual state budget.
Belkovsky, although an informed analyst, did not provide the methodology or evidence behind the figure, so let us treat it as his estimate rather than an independently established statistic. At the same time, it is worth noting that many lobby activities take the form of donations, charity, investments and other classifications, and are therefore under-reported.
The precise number, however, is less important here than what it suggests: the companies driving the AI boom possess resources on a scale capable of reshaping economies, politics as well as technology itself.
And this is where the story approaches the purpose for which it exists.
The same billionaires who are building increasingly powerful AI systems periodically warn humanity that AI itself may become too powerful to control. Therefore, we all must brace for the inevitable AI governance, according to them.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman in a July 2026 interview for Axios says he feels “a sense of urgency right now” because of AI’s growing influence and speaks of his responsibility as an “educator” for what’s coming. Although he confesses about being worried about singularity and AGI, he continues working to make AI even more powerful.
Demis Hassabis of DeepMind told Business Insider last June that AGI could potentially arrive as early as 2030 and described it as heralding a “new human era.” He warns that society has limited time to prepare for it in order to avoid collapse and that the decisions made in the next few years will be crucial. But he has not resigned to prevent society from collapsing because of his actions.
Even AI cautious Dario Amodei, in a January 2026 post on his blog, mentions the word “danger” 20 times and the word “risk” 104 times. But he has not shut down his company Anthropic to diminish that danger.
They all tell us about superintelligence, technological singularity, existential risk and machines potentially surpassing human capabilities.
There is an obvious contradiction at first glance. But then try to honestly answer three uncomfortable questions and assume the worst in order to see the whole picture:
· If AI is becoming so dangerous, why are the people warning us about the danger working so hard to make it more powerful?
· If these people own AI that will supposedly take control of humanity, who will actually control humanity?
· What happens when the people who control the third resource gain the ability to control what we eat and how we heat our homes?