Last Friday, during a White House event ostensibly about rural healthcare, US President Donald Trump reminded the world how power now speaks. Greenland, he said again, must belong to the US. Anything less is “unacceptable”.
If allies object? Fine. Tariffs will do the talking. Pharmaceuticals today, sovereignty tomorrow. “I may do that for Greenland too,” he shrugged, as if trade policy and territorial coercion were interchangeable tools in the same kit.
This is pure predation.
I’ve read some remarkable books recently on subjects that converge at the heart of this issue and the markets’ latest love affair with AI and tech billionaires.
In The Hour of the Predator, by former Italian political adviser Giuliano da Empoli, we encounter dictators and tyrants, strongmen and AI billionaires. Da Empoli issues a warning from history about the rise of AI as almost a central religion among what he calls the “new Borgias”.
Domination
The Borgia family were Renaissance power brokers who captured the Catholic Church, the most powerful institution of their age, and turned it into a private machine for wealth, influence and domination. Through Pope Alexander VI and his children, especially Cesare Borgia, they showed how power could be accumulated by bending rules, neutralising rivals and treating laws as obstacles.
What made the Borgias dangerous was not their depravity but their modernity. They understood how to exploit new technologies of the time, such as the printing press, weak institutions and moral fatigue, faster than their opponents. Corruption became the system.
Da Empoli’s point is that today’s tech oligarchs and populist politicians play a similar game. They cloak private ambition in the language of innovation or national renewal (like Trump does with his national security strategy), hollow out institutions while claiming to disrupt them and move faster than democratic accountability can respond.
On a warm Mediterranean spring afternoon in May 2023 at a hotel in Lisbon, Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, the messianic CEO of DeepMind, addressed a small group of influential world leaders as guests of Henry Kissinger. A conspiracy theorists’ fantasy: the secretary-general and military commander of Nato, the president of the European parliament, two or three heads of government, a host of ministers and intelligence chiefs, and a smattering of billionaires and CEOs of very large companies.
As Da Empoli describes them listening to the two popes of AI, there was dawning on the faces that there was a complete disconnect between their experience up to that point and this brave new world being presented to them.
“And the more these tech overlords attempted to put them at their ease, the more the audience could feel an icy hand caressing their spine,” he writes.
Democracy depends on shared facts and tolerable disagreement. The machines we’ve built erode both, relentlessly and at scale.
We can all feel it. How technology and its algorithms have sucked the colour from the world. How everything exists in the mean and the average and the dull beige of homogeneity. We can see the evidence of a generation raised on screens now less comfortable in real-world social spaces, in the decline in marital relationships and plummeting birth rates around the world.
One of the quietest but most destabilising shifts of the past two decades is the ideological split between young men and young women. Across the world, not only in the US, young women have moved sharply left while young men have stayed broadly stable, until recently. That alone should tell us this isn’t about local politics or campus culture. It’s about the machine we all now live inside.
The rise of these trends tracks almost perfectly with the advent of the smartphone. Social media is an algorithmic consensus engine. It turns belief into a visible, enforceable currency and scales social pressure from a village of 150 to a permanent global tribunal.
Men were captured differently. Less susceptible to consensus pressure, many disengaged instead, retreating into digital distraction and grievance. Now, as institutions harden into ideological monocultures and exclusion becomes explicit, withdrawal is giving way to reaction. The gap widens from both sides.
This is the danger of the age of the algorithm. It doesn’t argue so much as it sorts, fragmenting societies into parallel realities, amplifying emotion over judgment. Democracy depends on shared facts and tolerable disagreement. The machines we’ve built erode both, relentlessly and at scale.
The new Borgias are well aware of this power and the new totem of AI. Which brings me to another book that refuses to let you look away, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who co-founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.
The authors make a cold, disciplined case that a genuinely super-intelligent AI would not need to hate humanity to destroy it. Indifference would be enough. A system that optimises relentlessly, improves itself autonomously and escapes meaningful constraint will not share human values by default.
What makes the book unsettling is the logic that intelligence scales but control does not. Once systems begin to optimise beyond human comprehension, incentives, intentions and outcomes decouple. At that point the question is no longer whether the creators meant well but whether they remain relevant at all.
Set that argument alongside the rise of a tech billionaire class openly backing today’s political predators, and the future looks grim. These are actors who already treat regulation and institutions as obstacles and democracy as an inconvenience. Giving such a class unchecked control over systems more powerful than any state in history is frightening.
As Da Empoli observes: “The great dilemma that structured 20th-century politics was the relationship between the state and the market: what part of our life and the workings of our society should be under the control of the state, and what part should be left to the market and civil society?
“In the 21st century, the decisive rift is becoming that between humans and machines. To what extent should our lives be subject to powerful digital systems, and on what conditions?”
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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