I don't think they plan on voters being an insurmountable problem.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
778 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
89480 readers
4377 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
That’s the unsettling part. When billionaires spend fortunes shaping elections, it’s reasonable to ask whether they see voters as citizens to persuade or obstacles to manage. Democracy becomes a lot less inconvenient when you can fund the candidates, influence the platforms hosting the debate, and lobby the people writing the rules. All perfectly legal, of course.
Y'all should stop using the word lobby and call it what it is. Bribery. The only reason your country isn't stupid corrupt at face value is because you legalized bribery.
Annoyingly it also turned the word "lobby" into a contaminated dirty word, even though lobbying is a healthy and important part of a functional democracy.
Any group collectively arguing in favour of their interest to the government is a lobby. That group can be anything from employers, to unions, to civil rights advocates.
The problematic part is the bribery, not the fact that there is interest groups lobbying the government.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Turns out telling people your technology will replace their jobs, devour their electricity, and possibly end civilization isn’t the winning sales pitch billionaires imagined. Imagine spending hundreds of millions buying political influence, only to discover voters don’t enjoy being treated like obsolete hardware.
telling people your technology will replace their jobs, devour their electricity, and possibly end civilization isn’t the winning sales pitch billionaires imagined.
"but what you guys aren't getting is the fact that it'll make me a lot more money."
AI is still not viable business. All that fear mongering is to create an alternative revenue sources.
"look, I created a monster that can destroy us all. Please give me money to contain and tame it. We can't destroy it because our enemies are creating their own monsters."
They recognised that actual sales revenue pales in comparison to inflated stock prices (Teslas model) and to-big-to-fail government bailouts (2008).
You forgot to cite Patrick Boyle here ;)
I can only hope this is true. Most voters aren't paying a bit of attention to where the money comes from.
They're using AI. They think it's wonderful, they've barely heard about the controversy around data centers, and think "data centers are where the internet it, yOU lIkE thE inTErNeT, Don'T yoU?"
The Top 10 AI Uses in 2025 (none of which it does very well):
- Therapy and companionship
- Organizing my life
- Finding purpose
- Enhanced learning
- Summarizing content
- Generating ideas
- Generating code (for professionals)
- Improving code (for professionals)
- Creativity
- Visual art and design
My thoughts exactly. I know two folks who are going all in with AI and haven't even considered any controversy. Feels like they live on another planet. Hell, one of the guys was even showing off his pervert glasses and when I called them pervert glasses he laughed and said he hadn't heard that before.
I really hope those folks are in the minority.
I sleep at night by telling myself they're the minority
So, you also cannot discern the difference in traditional DCs and AI DCs? I feel like you know and I'm missing something.
Scale. Older data centers fit in the "light industrial" zoned parts of town and required some minor grid upgrades to the local electrical distribution.
Planned data centers require as much power as an entire rural state and are the size of a small town and get buit too fast to wait for any new power generation to be added to the grid.
their efforts aren't buying the political capital they'd hoped for.
Trump did get elected by "AI money" and they all celebrated on stage with him, you know.
Midterms? Yeah, when you are an indisputably shitty President who has broken every campaign promise and is openly deranged, you will likely lose the midterms no matter how much you try to pump Republicans. Diminishing returns.
Usually the "winning" party only holds power for a couple terms, then, after their incompetence has disgusted yet another generation of voters, they lose, only to be replaced by the other party that will repeat the process.
bOtH sIdEs, YeS, oH My
I vote in every election, and you should too. Because it's funny
load more comments
(1 replies)
Capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
Expect bipartisan legislation to increase the anonymity of PAC money before the year is over.
I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of democrats would be ok to give republicans more power so that they can squash progressive wing of democrats who are making people realize how useless half of democrat party is.
Definitely half the Senate; they've been there the longest, and seem more interested in internal party structures and hierarchies than governing. Some of them seem genuinely shook by the way Trump has upended Democratic norms, but even then they seem like they just want to get back to business as usual.
The good news is that I don't think the current leadership is long for power. Schumer came across like such a weak imbecile in the shutdown negotiations that even centrists want him gone. Jefferies might hold on for another term because he kept the caucus together during the shutdown, but he's heavily tied to AIPAC, and that is now deeply toxic to most Democratic voters.
~~AI Billionaires Are Flooding Money Into Politics~~ are flooding politics with money, or pouring money into politics.
This is grade school stuff, FFS!
load more comments
(1 replies)
Which billionaires aren't flooding money into politics to influence elections? They were doing it long before all the AI drama.
Tbh, probably GabeN
All Dems have to do is run with Data Center Prohibition as their main issue, and they would win EVERY election, and destroy the MAGA movement. Even Republicans hate Data Centers, and ALL MAGA candidates LOVE them. No MAGA candidate cans say anything against them. Florida MAGA candidates are trying to ease it by claiming that they'll make sure that citizens won't pay the costs, but everybody knows they're lying. That's about the most opposition they're putting.
MAGA is the party of UNLIMITED Data Centers. Just slam that over and over, and NOBODY will vote MAGA.
Would the promise require dems to actually do something about data centers?
Election race promises are not legally binding unfortunately
Both sides are taking data center money, though.
Here in Michigan, Governor Whitmer (Dem) is all-in on AI, even doing photo ops at (extremely locally unpopular) data center groundbreakings. "Think of all the local jobs" is the supposed upside. (spoiler: there are no local jobs being created)
Hello Americans! Please vote! Sincerely, everyone else.
I’m not trusting the US voting system anymore. I think it’s going to be rigged and they won’t get over the republicans. I still hope that midterms will change the way USA behave, but I’m not going to hold my breath for it.
Yeah. Rigged or not it's not going to be the landslide everyone is waiting for.
Trump's claims of election rigging as so dumb because they can't even come up with a plausible way it could have happened. We have 90,000 polling places, across 50 states, all of whom run elections their own way. There's no central database to hackerman. Best anyone could possibly do is maybe sway the local dog catcher election. Maybe.
Well, all of our politicians are and that's the problem
By backfiring you mean they have nearly total control then yes. Those losers, it has totally backfired on them and now they are richer and more powerful than ever!
I'm sick of all the shiny shoes and the posturing. I need a serious person with substance.
The next step seems obvious: they'll take a page from the tobacco, gun, and meat industries and instead create fake think tanks or associations to funnel political money semi-anonymously.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Give us each $100,000 and I'll consider it.
I thought someone did the math and said if all US billionaires were slaughtered and the money divided amongst US population, we'd all get like $400k+.
I always wondered if it would've been cheaper in Iraq and Afghanistan to just pay everyone to hand over their weapons and leave.
That was literally the case for Vietnam. They already hated the Chinese, we just needed to invest in industry for them and they would have been our allies.
The only problem was that France didn't want that. They were too busy throwing a tantrum over losing their colony
Hell, we trained Ho Chi Minh in guerilla combat against the Japanese. The US was sympathetic to the independence of the old European colonies after the war. If it wasn't for the cold war and trying to woo France into NATO we likely would've sided with Vietnam.
IF the billionaires are really worth their money.
Unluckily the billionaires are only theoretically worth their money since it depends on the value of their shares in the companies, shares value that is only supposed.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Futurism articles are just written by AI tbh...
Low bar journalism and reporting.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Everyone who goes into politics wants money. Musk gives them money. Profit!
Musk should consider skipping the middle man and paying citizens directly for their votes. Proportional to his wealth. Like the taxes we used to charge the wealthy.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Don't forget cryptocurrency (UK Reform party big whoopsie)
You'd think if the crypto was any good, they could just bribe anonymously.
Turns out that taking hubris to far, thinking that the public will suck it all up just because they always did does have its turning point.
view more: next ›