AI, AGI, ASI, and the Fight Over Human Liberation - Who gets power from this AI revolution?
Every transformative technology eventually forces society to ask the same question:
Who gets power from this?
- Not who gets convenience.
- Not who gets productivity.
- Not who gets a shinier app.
Who gets power?
That is the real question surrounding AI, AGI, and eventually ASI.
Because artificial intelligence is not just another software tool.
At a certain level of capability, it becomes strategic infrastructure.
It becomes a way to:
- Reason
- Plan
- Persuade
- Organize
- Automate
- Surveil
- Design
- Predict
- Govern
That means AI has two possible futures.
It can become a tool of human liberation.
Or it can become the most advanced control system ever handed to the current hierarchy of power.
The Liberation Scenario
The hopeful version of AI is not hard to imagine.
Imagine every person having access to a tireless:
- Tutor
- Researcher
- Analyst
- Translator
- Strategist
- Designer
- Creative collaborator
Imagine workers using AI to better understand:
- Contracts
- Labor law
- Workplace policies
- Benefits
- Wage theft
- Safety violations
- Retaliation
Imagine patients using AI to become more informed participants in their own healthcare.
Imagine small businesses gaining capabilities that once required entire departments.
Imagine local communities using AI to understand policy, organize around shared problems, create media, challenge misinformation, and participate more effectively in democracy.
Imagine people without elite credentials gaining access to first-pass expertise in:
- Law
- Finance
- Education
- Science
- Coding
- Media production
- Political organizing
For most of human history, expertise has been scarce.
Expertise has been expensive.
Expertise has been gated by class, geography, credentials, institutional access, and social status.
AI has the potential to change that.
Not by replacing experts.
Not by pretending machines are wise.
But by lowering the first rung of the ladder.
That matters.
A person who once had no access to legal language can now begin to understand a lease, a workplace policy, or an insurance denial.
A worker who once had no organizing resources can now draft messages, compare rights across states, document patterns, and prepare better questions for a labor attorney or union organizer.
A small nonprofit can create training materials, analyze data, write grants, and communicate more effectively.
A student can get patient explanations without shame.
A citizen can ask better questions of power.
That is liberating.
Not because AI is magic.
Because information asymmetry is one of the oldest tools of domination.
The powerful often understand systems.
Ordinary people are forced to navigate those systems through fog.
AI can burn off some of that fog.
The Dyad, Not the Machine God
The liberating version of AI is not about surrendering human judgment.
It is not about asking the machine to decide.
It is not about treating AI as an oracle, priest, boss, or replacement brain.
The liberating path is the human-AI dyad.
A disciplined partnership.
The human brings:
- Values
- Lived experience
- Moral judgment
- Context
- Intuition
- Creativity
- Skepticism
- Responsibility
The AI brings:
- Speed
- Pattern recognition
- Synthesis
- Drafting
- Comparison
- Memory support
- Simulation
- Endless patience
Used well, AI can help people think harder.
It can help us ask better questions.
It can help us challenge assumptions.
It can help us see arguments from multiple angles.
It can help us translate complexity into action.
The goal is not artificial intelligence above humanity.
The goal is human agency amplified by intelligence.
That distinction matters.
Because a society that teaches people to obey AI is building a new priesthood.
But a society that teaches people to question AI, interrogate it, collaborate with it, and use it creatively may be building a new form of mass literacy.
The Darker Scenario
But there is another path.
And we need to be honest about it.
AI, AGI, and ASI could also become tools of repression.
Not in some cartoonish science fiction way.
Not necessarily with killer robots marching through the streets.
The more realistic danger is quieter.
AI could become the nervous system of the existing power structure.
A way for governments, corporations, billionaires, security agencies, and entrenched institutions to preserve and expand their dominance.
Imagine employers using AI not just to improve productivity, but to:
- Monitor workers
- Predict organizing activity
- Evaluate loyalty
- Flag dissent
- Automate discipline
- Suppress wage pressure
Imagine governments using AI to:
- Monitor populations
- Anticipate protest movements
- Profile citizens
- Shape narratives
- Identify political threats before they fully form
Imagine corporations using AI to:
- Manipulate attention
- Personalize propaganda
- Exploit emotional vulnerabilities
- Steer behavior at scale
Imagine insurers, lenders, employers, landlords, schools, and agencies using opaque AI systems to make decisions people cannot see, understand, or challenge.
Imagine the most powerful intelligence systems being available only to:
- States
- Militaries
- Intelligence agencies
- Mega-corporations
- The wealthy
In that world, ordinary people get chatbot assistants.
The powerful get strategic cognition.
Ordinary people get productivity tools.
The powerful get:
- Prediction engines
- Persuasion engines
- Surveillance engines
- Legal engines
- Financial engines
- Automated command systems
That is not liberation.
That is hierarchy with better software.
The Fable 5 Warning Sign
The recent situation involving Anthropic’s Fable 5 being taken offline after U.S. government action is important because it shows where this may be headed.
Whether one agrees with the specific government rationale or not, the deeper message is clear:
Advanced AI is no longer being treated as a normal consumer technology.
It is being treated as strategic infrastructure.
That changes everything.
Once frontier models are seen as national-security assets, access can be restricted.
Export controls can be applied.
Governments can decide:
- Who is allowed to use certain systems
- Where they can use them
- Under what conditions
- For what purposes
- Under whose monitoring
Some of those concerns may be real.
Powerful AI systems can be misused.
They can assist with:
- Cyber operations
- Surveillance
- Propaganda
- Weapons development
- Fraud
- Manipulation
- Other forms of harm
But there is a second danger hiding inside the first.
Safety can become the language of enclosure.
Security can become the language of monopoly.
Protection can become the language of control.
A society can say:
“This technology is too dangerous for ordinary people.”
While quietly ensuring that only governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, and corporate giants retain meaningful access.
That should concern us.
Because if AGI or ASI emerges inside that structure, the consequences could be enormous.
The Class Divide in Intelligence
The future may not simply divide people by income.
It may divide people by access to intelligence.
- Who gets the strongest models?
- Who gets the fastest compute?
- Who gets private systems with long-term memory?
- Who gets models that can reason deeply across law, science, engineering, strategy, finance, media, and politics?
- Who gets unrestricted tools?
- Who gets monitored tools?
- Who gets sanitized tools?
- Who gets denied access entirely?
This could become one of the defining class questions of the next century.
If intelligence becomes a subscription product, a military asset, or a corporate privilege, then AI will not flatten hierarchy.
It will reinforce hierarchy.
The people and institutions already at the top will gain the strongest leverage first.
They will use AI to:
- Automate management
- Optimize capital
- Influence public opinion
- Accelerate research
- Defend legal advantage
- Lobby governments
- Monitor threats to their power
Meanwhile, everyone else may be told to enjoy their approved assistant.
That is the danger.
Not that AI becomes too intelligent.
But that intelligence becomes too concentrated.
AI as Public Good or Private Empire
The key issue is not whether AI will be powerful.
It will be.
The key issue is how that power is distributed.
If AI is controlled by a narrow alliance of corporations and states, it becomes a private empire.
If AI is open, plural, transparent, accountable, and broadly accessible, it can become part of a cognitive commons.
That means the future of AI liberation depends on more than model capability.
It depends on:
- Ownership
- Governance
- Open-source alternatives
- Public-interest compute
- Privacy rights
- Labor rights
- Democratic oversight
- Worker voice
- Citizen access
- AI literacy
It depends on whether workers, citizens, educators, artists, organizers, patients, small businesses, and local communities get a real seat at the table.
We should not accept a future where the most powerful intelligence systems are built from human culture, human labor, public data, and public infrastructure, only to be locked away behind corporate walls and national-security gates.
The Real Question
AI could help ordinary people become more capable, more informed, more creative, more organized, and harder to dominate.
It could also help the ruling class become more efficient at preserving its power.
Both futures are plausible.
Neither is guaranteed.
The outcome will depend on the choices we make now.
Do we build AI as a tool of mass empowerment?
Or do we allow it to become a command layer for the already powerful?
Do we teach people to use AI critically?
Or do we train them to obey machine outputs?
Do we fight for transparency and access?
Or do we accept a world where intelligence is rationed by wealth, citizenship, corporate policy, and state permission?
The question is not just:
How powerful will AI become?
The better question is:
Who will be allowed to use that power?
And the deepest question is:
Will AI help humanity become more free, or will it help the current hierarchy make freedom harder to reach?
That is the fight.
Not someday.
Now.