Surveillance Log 013

Hello! Welcome to this week’s list of five (or fewer!) interesting links. If you want to revisit earlier weeks, all previous issues are available here.

“Uncharted territory.” A few weeks ago, Gabriel Zucman, economics professor at Stanford and an expert on inequality, posted a chart (Bluesky) showing how wealth concentration is spiralling out of control in the US. Roughly, the wealth of the 19 (!) richest Americans went from 1.4% of the total in 2020 to 2% in 2026. These 19 Americans comprise the well-known tech CEOs of course, those that have shown a remarkable enthusiasm to support the Trump administration’s MAGA agenda. One of the main drivers of their wealth is the AI frenzy, which inflated the value of the stock they hold, mostly in their own companies.
Then a few days ago, The Verge published a long report (The Verge $) into what the AI industry looks like at the other end. It chronicles several stories of knowledge workers whose income and working conditions have been upended. The working conditions they describe are reminiscent of those factory workers faced in the late 19th century, when they essentially lived at the mercy of the factory owners, with practically no safeguards and protections to speak of.
Back then too, the factory owners, i.e. the owners of capital, captured most of the income from the labour of the factory workers and had no compunctions exploiting it. The Verge’s story vividly illustrates the same dynamic, now applied to knowledge work instead of manual labour. This shift undermines one of the surest ways to increase one’s income since the end of the second world war, which was to get more education. It is also one of the most often heard warnings about the impact of AI on the economy and work.
Does that mean we are condemned to a state that looks like The Verge’s story? Not necessarily. Eventually, labour organised in the 19th century and managed to redress the balance, by instituting worker protection laws and curtailing the power of the owners of capital. This outcome still stands as one of the greatest achievements of political activism.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether a similar movement is possible today. The capture of government by the plutocrats and the atomised information environment are very worrying in this regard. Amidst the turbulence of the industrial revolution, the 19th and early 20th century in Europe were marked by several violent revolutions and culminated in two world wars. History never quite repeats in the same way, but faced with the speed and magnitude of the current dynamic, Zucman is right to note that we are in uncharted territory.

AI is transforming the “kill chain” in the Iran war. Models from Palantir and Anthropic are being used to find, select and vet targets in minutes, where it used to take hours or even days. Little consideration seems to have been given as to whether human oversight can keep up. (FT $)

Yann LeCun’s new AI startup, based in France, raised more than $1bn. Leaving aside whether this startup should exist or should be worth this kind of money, I think it’s notable that it managed to achieve this with an explicitly European base. The old continent is not an also-ran. (FT $)

Chinese carmaker BYD to launch new model that can charge to 70% in 5 minutes in Europe. Along with a commitment to build “hundreds” of “flash charging” stations. This could be transformational, if they manage to pull it off—a big ‘if’. (FT $)