AI is sold as progress we cannot refuse. As innovation that will make us more productive, more competitive, more efficient.
In the real world, AI does something else.

Despite historic levels of investment, studies show that AI delivers little of what it promises. Productivity gains remain limited and uneven. What does scale rapidly is extraction: corporations take data without consent, outsource and traumatize labor, consume energy and water at industrial scale, and channel public money into private infrastructure. A small group of mostly US-based corporations accumulates wealth, power, and control; while the costs move downward; to workers, marginalized communities, the Global South, and our children growing up in societies that prioritize machines over basic care, even in the richest countries on earth.

AI is not neutral. Corporations design it to extract value from everything they can measure, scrape, or automate. They devalue care, creativity, and emotional labor, shift responsibility onto individuals, and force institutions to adapt to platform logic. Being told to “use AI responsibly” is a political distraction. Individual choices cannot fix a system built to concentrate power.

This logic relies on speed and inevitability. Move fast. Scale first. Debate later.

But this talk argues that AI is not only a technological debate; it is a class question. It is about who owns infrastructure, who controls the future of work, who gets protected, and who gets sacrificed in the name of innovation. We are witnessing a massive upward redistribution of wealth, power, health, resources, education, and future opportunity; justified by hype and enforced by the claim that there is no alternative.

The future is not decided yet. But it will not change through ethics guidelines, voluntary commitments, or better prompts. It will change through collective pressure, regulation with teeth, redistribution, and democratic control over digital infrastructure. “Never gonna give you up” must mean this: not giving up on justice, on care, and on the right to decide together how technology shapes our lives.