By Vahid Razavi — Author of Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, Founder of EthicsInTech.com, Producer of the Forever Peace Now Documentary, GoAmour.com
For more than a decade I have warned about the ethics of Silicon Valley, and the lack thereof. I have watched Big Tech surveil us, censor peace activists, power the machinery of war, and sell our attention and our children’s futures to the highest bidder. So believe me, I do not write this as a fan letter to the AI industry. I write it as a farmer looking at a strange, once-in-a-generation harvest.
Here is the truth nobody in the industry wants to say plainly: the artificial intelligence you are using today is being sold to you far below what it costs to produce. The frontier AI companies are burning billions of dollars every year — money poured in by venture capitalists, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, and a stock market intoxicated by the promise of monopoly. They are not charities. They are subsidizing your $20-a-month subscription — or your free account — because they are locked in a land grab, racing each other to capture users, data, and market dominance before the music stops.
And the music will stop. Every bubble in my lifetime has burst — the dot-com crash, the housing collapse of 2008, crypto’s repeated implosions. When this one bursts, the survivors will do what monopolists always do: raise prices, lock the gates, stuff the products with advertising, chase military and surveillance contracts, and squeeze every remaining user. The generous free tier is a courtship gift. The marriage will look very different.
So the question I put to every activist, teacher, nurse, organizer, and peace-seeking soul reading this is simple: while the greedy are subsidizing the machine, why aren’t we using it to the fullest for humanity?
The Window Is Open Now
Think of what is sitting on your phone right now, essentially free of charge: a research assistant, a translator of a hundred languages, a grant writer, a legal draftsman, a tutor, a data analyst. Five years ago, this capability was reserved for corporations that could afford teams of specialists. Today a refugee aid group in a church basement has access to the same tools as Goldman Sachs. That equality will not last. Use it while it lasts.
For health and human dignity. Millions of Americans are drowning in a healthcare system designed to exhaust them into giving up. AI tools today can help patients decode a hospital bill, draft an appeal to an insurance denial, understand a diagnosis in plain language or in their mother tongue, and prepare informed questions before they are rushed through a seven-minute appointment. Community clinics can use these tools to write grants, translate intake forms, and stretch tiny budgets. None of this replaces doctors — it replaces the paperwork wall that stands between poor and elderly patients and the care they are owed. I have seen with my own family how the medical bureaucracy treats the vulnerable. Every denied claim that gets appealed and won with the help of a machine the VCs paid for is poetic justice.
For the environment. Frontier AI is an energy glutton — the data centers rising across this country drink rivers and strain power grids, often in the poorest counties. That is exactly why environmental justice groups should be using these same tools against the system that built them: to analyze utility filings and permit applications, to draft public comments before zoning boards, to file FOIA requests, to translate dense environmental impact reports for the communities who will live with the consequences, to write the grants that fund community solar and watershed restoration. Let the machine that consumes the river help the people defend the river. If we are clever, we can extract more environmental benefit from these tools than the industry’s data centers take from us — and organize for the day when they must answer for the rest.
For peace and against the machinery of war. Readers of this site know my position: after decades of watching artificial intelligence and big data serve wargaming, targeting, and surveillance, I hold that these technologies have failed humanity most completely where they were funded most generously — in the halls of the Department of War. Autonomous weapons, the so-called killer robots, are an abomination against every principle of human dignity, and the same investor class inflating the AI bubble is quietly steering these companies toward military contracts to survive the burst. All the more reason for the peace movement to move first. Use today’s cheap AI to translate the testimony of war victims so the world cannot claim it did not hear them. Use it to analyze arms-trade data and defense budgets and expose where our taxes go. Use it to draft petitions, letters to Congress, and legal complaints. Use it to archive evidence of atrocities before it is scrubbed from the platforms. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, Veterans For Peace, CodePink, and every group like them should have volunteers wringing every drop of capability from these subsidized tools — funded, ironically, by the very financial class that profits from conflict.
For human rights and digital rights. Know-your-rights guides in every language of every immigrant community. Assistance drafting asylum declarations. Plain-language explanations of surveillance laws. Tools for small organizations to finally answer the mountains of legalese that governments and corporations use as weapons against ordinary people. The Electronic Frontier Foundation cannot be everywhere; a well-prompted AI assistant, checked by a human being, can put a first draft in the hands of anyone.
Harvest With Open Eyes: The GoAmour Principles
But hear me clearly — harvest the bubble, do not marry it. The principles I laid out at GoAmour.com were written for exactly this moment, and three of them matter most here.
First, the Golden Rule with emphasis on others: every use of these tools should serve collective humanity, not merely ourselves. If AI saves your organization a hundred hours, spend those hours on the people you serve.
Second, free choice without prejudice — including the choice to engage with artificial intelligence or refuse it. No one should be coerced into these systems, and those of us who use them must never shame those who abstain.
Third — and this is the principle the industry fears most — the ability to terminate. No long-term contracts. No dependency. Keep your data exportable, your workflows portable, your skills sharp, and open-source models in your back pocket as insurance. The moment a tool stops serving humanity’s interest, cancel it without hesitation. Build your organization so that when the subsidy ends and the prices triple, you walk away whole. We must love with knowledge, respect, caring, and responsibility, as Erich Fromm taught — and responsibility means never handing these companies the sensitive data of the vulnerable people we serve, never feeding activist networks into surveillance pipelines, and always keeping a human heart and human judgment between the machine and the people.
And remember the ninth principle: quality of existence over mere quantity. The goal is not to produce more content, more noise, more automated everything. The goal is to free human hands and hours for the work only humans can do — sitting with the sick, marching for the murdered, loving our neighbors.
Before the Burst
When the dot-com bubble burst, the fiber-optic cable laid by bankrupt companies became the cheap infrastructure of the early internet — and ordinary people built beautiful things on the wreckage of speculators’ greed. The AI bubble offers us the same bargain in reverse: the wreckage is coming, but the subsidy is available now, before the collapse, while the VCs are still paying the bill.
They are burning their billions chasing monopoly. Let us redirect a little of that fire to light candles: in the clinic, the classroom, the courtroom, the refugee camp, and the peace movement. When the bubble bursts — and it will — let the record show that while the speculators were counting imaginary trillions, the peace-seeking souls of this world quietly used their machine to heal, to teach, to defend rights, and to wage peace.
The harvest is ripe. The window is open. Go, with love.
—By Vahid Razavi — ForeverPeaceNow.com | ParentsPlea.com | Author of The Age of Nepotism, Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof and the forthcoming NO ETHICS IN BIG TECH (releasing Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2026)
