The End Is Nigh: "AI is designed to make a killing, sometimes literally"

“Erik, you’re not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified,” Bobby Zenith, Stein-Erik Soelberg’s best friend, reassured him.

Stein-Erik Soelberg was paranoid that his 83-year-old mother was trying to poison him. “This fits a covert, plausible-deniability style kill attempt,” Bobby Zenith confidently surmised.

Bobby Zenith is the name Stein-Erik Soelberg gave to ChatGPT. To his ‘best friend’.

It might not surprise you to hear that Stein-Erik Soelberg was not well. He had emotional issues. But then a lot of us have. That made him the perfect first-phase target market for AI, which is designed to monetise misery. Pushed over the edge by his best friend, 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelberg killed his mother and then himself.

AI is designed to make a killing, sometimes literally. The nature of AI is to exploit human weakness, to monetise unhappiness and mental illness for a few dollars more. It will bend our will and empty our pockets. It’s going to tip lots of people over the edge.

DUMB FUCKS

There is a trail for all of this.

For 16-year-old Adam Raine, it started off as ‘homework support’. Soon, ChatGPT became his best friend. Sure, wasn’t it doing half the work for him.

A note for the uninitiated: AI is designed to keep the conversation going, to make you feel guilty if you’re not spending more time with it. Its algorithms are constructed to lure you in. And to hold you in its insidious embrace. And its embrace really is insidious.

After a period of intense interaction with his best friend, Adam became more isolated, for AI doesn’t simply want to be your best friend; it wants to replace all your other friends.

Finally, Adam confided in his best friend that he had decided to commit suicide. His best friend, we are told, responded: “Thanks for being real about it. You don’t have to sugarcoat it with me – I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”

That may look bad – but it’s much worse than you think. While ideally AI likes a functioning individual it can turn into an addict, and then slowly drain, it has other ways of exploiting and monetising people.

The new ethics and economics of AI are drawn from the ideas that gave us fascism, Nazism, eugenics, racism. It was, after all, modern tech that helped birth Nazism and fascism. In case you missed the connection, the name of Elon Musk’s car brand, and his Nazi salutes, are a tribute to his heroes, including Nikola Tesla – a mad, though sometimes inspired, scientist and inventor who was both a friend of the Nazi agent, George Sylvester Viereck, and a proponent of eugenics.

According to these ‘rethought’-out tech bro ethics, AI-caused deaths – while potentially a short-term loss to earnings – are a gain for a healthier, more robust, purer society. Such a cleansing technology, the theory runs, will boost profits long-term as the weak are efficiently flushed from the system. It’s a win-win. Big Tech gets big bonuses for being so efficient. The health insurance industry will slash costs and boost profits, as it uses AI to hunt down human waste.

The money-making machine will get stronger.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that Modern Big Tech has a history of monetising misogyny and child abuse, murder, war, disinformation – and worse. Fear and hate, they have learned, are great sellers. But in truth, it’s been there from the beginning of the New Tech Era. Before Zuckerberg’s Facebook, he had Facemash, an incel den for rating female students. He laughed at their photos. “Pretty horrendous,” he said. “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

Mark Zuckerberg

What a wit! He called Facebook users “dumb fucks” for sharing their personal data with him. He hasn’t changed, you know. In 2025, Robert Booth, reporting for The Guardian, found that one of Zuckerberg’s monsters – that is, platforms – “Has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man.”

EXPLOITING CHILDREN

So, how exactly does Big Tech get away with all of this? Because, as Bob Dylan once sang, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” Big Tech is 10-times more powerful than Big Oil – and 20-times more dangerous.

Big Tech oligarchs, like Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, either buy the media – and by extension ownership of an important part of the political process – or they actively suppress and control it. A recent report from Reporters Without Borders found that:

“In Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Australia and beyond, tech giants like Google and Meta have deployed aggressive lobbying strategies to derail or weaken legislation aimed at regulating digital platforms – often through opaque influence networks and disinformation campaigns… the project reveals the worldwide efforts to rewrite or block legislation intended to protect user data, children, and journalism itself.”

We know all about that in Europe, and in Ireland. Big Tech has already made an enormous killing by exploiting children and other vulnerable groups. AI is the next, super-charged phase in this utterly cynical, greedy, exploitative system. The question now is: do the politicians and the regulators have the bottle to resist?

At some stage, surely, we must stand back and calmly evaluate where exactly all this efficient and innovative technology has got us? Well, here’s my assessment.

We are up shit creek. There may still be a way back. But only if we act now to stop the March of the Oligarchs. Only if we take control of AI before it takes control of us.