God, War, Finance, Technology. Be vary when abstract concepts gain preeminence.

Great quote by Jaron Lanier that I discovered earlier today. You should definitely check out his latest book here.

What are your thoughts on it? Any other industries/models/concepts taking hold today that replicate it?

"In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.

That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy to me, where you have (natural language) translators and everybody else who contributes to the corpora that allow the data schemes to operate, contributing mostly to the fortunes of whoever runs the top computers. The new elite might say, "Well, but they're helping the AI, it's not us, they're helping the AI." It reminds me of somebody saying, 'Oh, build these pyramids, it's in the service of this deity,' but, on the ground, it's in the service of an elite. It's an economic effect of the new idea. The effect of the new religious idea of AI is a lot like the economic effect of the old idea, religion.

There is an incredibly retrograde quality to the mythology of AI."