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If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and technology oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity. Institutions that structure public governance, rule of law, education, healthcare, journalism, and families are all on the chopping block to be “optimized” by AI.

. . . AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems erode expertise, short-circuit decision-making, and isolate people from each other. They are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.

AI taking over Big Tech’s investments

• Meta Lays Off Thousands of VR Workers as Zuckerberg’s Vision Fails (Futurism, Jan 18, 2026): “The division has lost over $77 billion since its inception in 2020.”

• Meta’s Reality Labs division generated $2.2bn, lost $19.2bn in FY25 (GamesIndustry.biz, Jan 29, 2026):

Meta’s Reality Labs metaverse-focused arm generated $2.2 billion in revenue for the 12 months ending December 31st, 2025, but clocked up a $19.2 billion operational loss. Since the division was set up in 2020, the company has lost $83.6 billion on Reality Labs.

• Big Tech Needs $2 Trillion In AI Revenue By 2030 or They Wasted Their Capex (by Ed Zitron, Oct 31, 2025):

How does any of this become worthwhile? . . . [I] have ultimately come to a brutal conclusion: due to the onerous costs of building data centers, buying GPUs and running AI services, big tech has to add $2 trillion in AI revenue in the next four years.

AI’s real-world effects

• Apple, Google host dozens of AI ‘nudify’ apps like Grok, report finds (CNBC, Jan 27, 2026):

A review of the two app stores conducted in January by Tech Transparency Project found 55 nudify apps on Google Play and 47 in the Apple App Store, according to the organization’s report that was shared exclusively with CNBC. . . . “The fact that they are not adhering to their own policies, which are designed to protect people from non-consensual nude imagery and non-consensual pornography, raises a lot of questions about how they can present themselves as trusted app platforms,” [TTP Director Katie] Paul said.

• Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show (NYT, Jan 22, 2026): “Over nine days, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot generated and posted 4.4 million images, of which at least 41 percent were sexualized images of women.”

AI spreading into the government

• Government by AI? Trump Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using Artificial Intelligence (by Jesse Coburn at ProPublica, Jan 26, 2026):

The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations. “We don’t need the perfect rule,” said DOT’s top lawyer. “We want good enough.”

. . . These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?

The answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT’s version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds.

• Trump Department Responsible for Airline Safety Using AI to Write New Regulations, So They Can Be Churned Out as Fast as Possible (Futurism, covering the ProPublica article above, Jan 27, 2026

• Pentagon clashes with Anthropic over military AI use, sources say (Reuters, Jan 29, 2026):

The Pentagon is at odds with artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic over safeguards that would prevent the government from deploying its technology to target weapons autonomously and conduct U.S. domestic surveillance, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

AI spreading into education

• Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless (The Economist, Jan 22, 2026): “Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.” As one commenter online put it, Imagine if all that money had gone to teachers instead.

• Google’s work in schools aims to create a ‘pipeline of future users,’ internal documents say (NBC News, Jan 23, 2026):

One internal November 2020 presentation slide said acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.” Another undated slide deck suggested imagining a world where “Parents ask their children ‘Why aren’t you watching more YouTube?’” and “School Administrators shift budgets from Textbooks to YouTube subscriptions.”

. . . While Microsoft Windows gained ground in the 2000s, schools shifted toward Google after it debuted the Chromebook in 2011, and the company has dominated the education computer hardware market for the past decade. Schools now account for 80% of all purchases of Chromebooks, according to market research firms. Google said in 2017 that more than half of all American public school children use Google applications and products for classwork and stated in 2021 that over 170 million students and teachers worldwide use them.

AI spreading into healthcare

• I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data. Then I called my doctor. (by Geoffrey Fowler, Washington Post, Jan 26, 2026):

I gave the new ChatGPT Health access to 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements. It drew questionable conclusions that changed each time I asked.

. . . when it comes to your fitness tracker and some health records, the new Dr. ChatGPT seems to be winging it. That fits a disturbing trend: AI companies [are] launching products that are broken, fail to deliver or are even dangerous.

. . . There was another problem I discovered over time: When I tried asking the same heart longevity-grade question again, suddenly my score went up to a C. I asked again and again, watching the score swing between an F and a B.

(Like the world's most expensive Magic 8-ball.)

• Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries, study suggests (Guardian, Jan 24, 2026): “German research into responses to health queries raises fresh questions about summaries seen by 2bn people a month.”

In one case that experts said was “dangerous” and “alarming”, Google provided bogus information about crucial liver function tests that could have left people with serious liver disease wrongly thinking they were healthy. The company later removed AI Overviews for some but not all medical searches.

AI and Google’s Waymo

• Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica (by past Techtonic guest Sean O'Kane, TechCrunch, Jan 29, 2026):

Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” The company did not release a specific analysis of this crash.

AI and Big Tech’s TikTok

• New US TikTok Spinoff Will Be Controlled by Trump-Aligned Billionaires (Truthout, Jan 28, 2026):

Trump-aligned tech barons are now set to control nearly all major US social media platforms.

. . . a new U.S. TikTok spinoff has been announced, set to be owned and overseen by a tight-knit consortium of tech and financial megabillionaires, many of whom have had direct business relationships with Trump and members of his administration and family.

The deal puts Trump-aligned tech barons — Oracle’s Larry Ellison, X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — in firm control of virtually all major U.S. social media platforms.

In addition to its ominous bodings for media freedom in the U.S. — one-fifth of Americans get their news from TikTok — the deal comes as many TikTok users are already alleging censorship of content ranging from criticisms of federal immigration agents’ killing of Alex Pretti to rebuttals of the Department of Homeland Security’s rationales for entering homes without judicial warrants.

• TikTok blocks Epstein mentions and anti-Trump videos, users claim

Flock, ICE, and Amazon’s Ring

• Activists Say Ring Cameras Are Being Used by ICE (Futurism, Jan 21, 2026):

“Smash your Ring doorbells,” progressive activist Guy Christensen urged his 3.5 million followers on TikTok. “You need to smash your Ring doorbells. Amazon owns Ring, and they’ve decided to begin sharing surveillance collected from your front step with ICE and Flock Safety, weaponing surveillance against the American people.”

. . . A Ring spokesperson pushed back sharply against the rhetoric, saying that the collaboration with Flock isn’t yet live, and that even when it does get deployed, ICE won’t be able to access it. However, they stopped short of saying that video collected by Ring devices couldn’t be obtained by ICE or other federal agencies through legal means.

• ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows (Joseph Cox, 404 Media, May 27, 2025):

Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.

• Inside the AI police tech firm whose data is being fed to ICE (The Independent, Jan 19, 2026):

Cities across the nation are cutting ties with the Atlanta-based police tech firm [Flock Safety] after revelations that Donald Trump’s deportation squads have repeatedly gained access to its data.

. . . many cities are cancelling or suspending their subscriptions after a string of scandals over Flock's data being accessed by immigration authorities racing to fulfill Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda. . . Among the cities that have ended or paused their relationships with Flock are Austin, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Olympia, Washington, Santa Cruz, California, Eugene, Oregon, Oak Park, Illinois, Staunton, Virginia, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Hillsborough, North Carolina.

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