This article was originally published on Medium. It’s part of a series exploring the risks of artificial intelligence technology.

Tech creeps into our lives, extracting from us. Tech corporations patch profit-making machines into a monstrosity. We feed a big dead body.

Big Tech grows at four levels:

1. Bots feed on our social media to spread fake posts between persons.
2. Bots act as coworkers until robots sloppily automate our workplace.
3. Robot products are hyped up and misused everywhere over society.
4. Robots build more machines that slurp energy and pollute nature.

Level 1: Disconnected Persons

Trillion-dollar corporations grab what we share online. Spontaneous selfies, texts and vids funnel into machines, mixed with art, novels and songs that took years to craft. All is copied without consent as ‘free content.’ The machines are feeding off culture: what we share in relationship.

Machines process our personal data to predict better what we would share next: what humans repost, what humans reply with, what humans make. Then tech acts as our middle person. When we go online, a machine can recommend which friend’s post to read first. Or reply to us if our friends are away. Or make a fake post for us to share with our friends.

Tech splits us into personal bubbles, manipulating us inside for profit. Machines spread divisive content — made to pornify teens, scam mums or smear politicians. It is bait to click, reply or repost. We scroll alone, disconnecting more from our friends. Outside people look less human.

Level 2: Dehumanised Workplace

A corporation is a hierarchy. Investors pick managers. Managers direct lower workers. A corporation starts up as fixing a community problem (e.g. mailing us books). But its structure is disconnected from communities. The power-hungry make bogus promises to get into higher positions. Promising growth and benefits, our higher-ups proceed to squeeze as much out of us as they can.

Managers divide workers into dumbed-down jobs, cheaper to hire for. Machine algorithms track each worker and direct them to do their job faster. Engineers then build more machines to automate out each job. Lower workers are forced to work along, until fired.

Translators, copywriters, graphic designers, artists, and voice actors are the first to go. Managers ignore their quality work, pushing to create cheaper materials. As workers become alienated from their products, products become mediocre. Managers automate mediocrity. They buy bots to imitate professionals, and then throw out the professionals.

As corporations automate professional work, entry-level workers can no longer find projects to hone their skills. Fewer skilled workers are left to hire. Again, managers resort to machines that do sloppy work.

Level 3: Destabilised Society

Big Tech markets using its sloppy automation machines on schoolkids, hospital patients and helpline clients — with little evidence of safety.

The tech industry resembles the 1800s medicine industry, back when start-ups could market concoctions of chemicals to solve all problems. Consumers got hurt badly. Experts advised governments to regulate product safety.

Big Pharma got regulated. Regulators now require a medical company to specify the intended uses of a new product, safety-test the product in its context of use, and get vetted by an independent auditor. Before the company can bring to market — let alone market — their product.

Big Tech still markets concoctions of code to solve all problems. But engineers cannot run comprehensive safety tests on code ‘learned’ by machines, when the machines are released for any human uses everywhere. That’s running mass experiments on humans, not safety testing.

Here ‘safety’ engineers help market products. We get the impression of safety, rather than actual safety. Ignored failures cascade across society.

Level 4: Destroyed Environment

Corporations scale resource-intensive machines. Society heads for collapse.

Machine hardware alone can gobble up more electricity than 100 homes use in a year, just for one model to learn to better predict the sentences we write. To generate replies, ChatGPT burns as much electricity as a small city. By 2027, all models may burn as much energy as a small nation, to process our data. Data centres would suck billions of litres of drinking water, to cool hardware overheated from processing. Data centres would emit billions of tons of greenhouse gases warming up our atmosphere.

Inside data centres, hardware wears down and gets replaced every four years. Producing that hardware takes dozens of cancerous chemicals. Materials needed were melted down and reassembled in blazing heat. The ores were extracted from mines with drills and dissolving acids.

Hardware is toxic to our environment. Corporations hide the toxicity. We don’t see the mines, refineries, factories, data centres, and dumps. We don’t see the bulldozed lands, hellish infernos, and leaking chemicals.

Hardware burns an astounding amount of energy. States are forced to keep coal plants running to cater to data centres. This has happened before — the crypto boom got so bad that Texas gave millions in tax dollars to get a bitcoin company to stop draining so much electricity.

But cryptocurrencies go bust. Hardware there produces little of value, other than alternative money to trade in. Machine learning too is in a bubble, but here hardware can automate work sold on the market. Automated machines can move things faster, to produce things faster. To consume more energy, and make more profit for corporations.

Big Tech then invests its profits back into scaling the toxic machines. Slowly setting off a vicious feedback loop. Stripping countrysides and killing animals. Accelerating the sixth mass extinction.

At each level, Big Tech is growing in power:

1. A machine programs searched-for data into code to predict more data.
2. Workers design this machine to cheaply automate out more workers.
3. Corporations sink profit into working machines for more profitable uses.
4. Markets produce infrastructure for the production of more machines.

Big Tech scales machines to feed on surrounding resources it invests back into scaling machines more. It’s a feedback loop.

As Big Tech takes power, we the people lose strength. Tech disconnects us from comrades, removes us from positions where we have a say, and plunders us into poverty. This is how harms of new tech do not get solved, but grow worse. We lose influence over the corporations wielding the tech.

Big Tech grows technology in four stages. Stage one is the imitative bot.

Next chapter: Imitative Bot