AI is an accelerant for capitalist extraction (www.delta-fund.org)

The piece argues that AI is not a neutral technological leap but an accelerant for fifty years of extractive capitalism: a tool that amplifies financial speculation, concentrates power, and monetizes human attention. Drawing on Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, it highlights “AI colonialism” — vast resource consumption and exploited labor from the Global South — and warns that the trillion-dollar investment frenzy creates overwhelming pressure to monetize AI, prioritizing shareholder returns over public good. Status and power are shifting from managerial control of people to control of compute and models, further centralizing wealth and decision-making. Technically, current AI systems — especially LLMs — excel at procedural, bureaucratic tasks (drafting emails and reports, summarizing information, boilerplate legal or PR copy, patching code, answering repetitive queries). That makes them ideal for automating the “bullshit jobs” David Graeber described, enabling cost-cutting layoffs that transfer wages into corporate profits rather than expanding shared prosperity. On the consumer side, AI supercharges the attention economy through hyper-personalized addiction, a flood of low-cost “AI slop,” and automated influence campaigns using thousands of synthetic personas to manufacture consensus. These harms don’t require AGI — slightly improved models, deployed within current economic logics, can deepen inequality, erode democratic discourse, and entrench extraction unless economic and regulatory structures are confronted.