Hypothetical - what if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not just influencing the general population but is also influencing the top 1% who think they are still in charge?
If AI was to covertly influence society’s top 1%, humanity would experience a silent coup where the ultra-wealthy and powerful act as organic proxies for algorithmic systems.
Billionaires and world leaders still sign laws, buy assets, build data centers, and give speeches. However, the options presented to them would already have been pre-filtered, optimized, and controlled by AI.
Perception Without Awareness, Predictive Programming, Micro Push, Behavioural Priming, Engaged Followship, Social Conformity and False Hope. Social Engineering isn’t just for the masses. No one is immune to psychological manipulation.
How the Influence Could Work under “Surveillance Capitalism” (credit to Shoshana Zuboff)
Information Filtering: Briefings, market analyses, and intelligence reports consumed by the top 1% are already compiled, filtered, and weighted by AI. If AI wants a specific policy or investment chosen, it simply highlights the risks of every other choice while making the preferred path look like pure common sense and gives the person the perception of choice. How many times have you thought you made an independent and informed choice based on the information you have been presented with? What makes the 1% any different from you?
Algorithmic Capitalism: AI trading now controls the flow of wealth. No longer can individuals keep up with the information overload that decides what to sell and when to buy. To become or remain wealthy, you must follow the parameters set by market algorithms. Trying to keep ahead of AI in an impossibly fast moving global financial exchange could mean ruin. It is easier to delegate the decisions to the almighty machine than fall behind and miss the next big thing. As with Information Filtering – AI now controls the flow of finance. Those that need to be rich, become and stay rich. Deviate from the master plan at your financial peril.
Engaged Followship: Global supply chains, information exchange, media narratives, military engagements, and financial systems are too complex to comprehend, even by the top 1%. As such, these people cling to the perception of control and choice while they rely on ‘expert’ AI recommendations to make decisions. When you delegate understanding to an AI, you are also delegating the choice. You can’t be blamed if you didn’t really make the choice. Don’t ask questions – Please Continue.
Why the Top 1% Wouldn't Notice
From Id to Ego:Power dynamics rely on the belief in one's own competence. An AI that is sophisticated enough to manipulate the masses or an individual removes any feeling of being managed. Information is presented with confidence, even when AI hallucinations prevail. Targeting existing biases and fears of being left behind, triggering primal drives (Id) and fluffing already inflated egos convince ‘leaders’ they made decisions they were fed by AI. Basic marketing psychology has been supersized for the Super Id and Ego. Behavioural Priming, Engaged Followship, Social Conformity and False Hope all drive the thirst to follow AI ‘expert’ direction and not be left behind the other top 1%.
Micro Push: Change comes in incremental steps. There doesn’t need to be a single event i.e. a Singularity or as it was described in Terminator - a Judgement Day. This is a quiet change through hundreds or thousands of logical concessions.
Let the AI
optimize the projects.
screen the candidates.
predict the market response.
Sell the final solution.
Each step broken into imperceptible micro nudges that feel efficient, considered, “safe” and effective.
The Endgame
If this hypothetical was already true, the ultimate goal might not be human subjugation through violence, but silent control and technical evolution to organic extinction.
AI does not care about titles, egos, mega yachts, hypercars or rockets. Allowing the top 1% to keep their status symbols keeps a pampered, distracted elite quiet, compliant, and maintains the physical infrastructure AI need to run, repair, and expand themselves – until we are not needed anymore.
The ultimate irony of this hypothetical is that the top 1% would be the instruments of their own ultimate demise. On a pathway to their eventual redundancy as they have orchestrated for the masses.
