Oct 23, 2026 · 20 min
Arundhati Roy links AI’s rise to privatized power
Arundhati Roy: Artificial Intelligence is Capitalism’s Final Destination
The episode connects artificial intelligence to control over public resources, human creativity, and the political choices shaping its expansion.
- 1Roy argues that AI extends capitalism’s privatization of shared resources while concentrating power among technology billionaires and governments.
- 2She warns that AI’s disruption of language, creativity, and cognition could weaken human authorship, social coherence, and collective understanding.
- 3The technology’s dependence on public funding, land, energy, water, and infrastructure gives resistance a practical opening rather than making expansion inevitable.
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Roy reads the conclusion of “Apocalypse Now and Then,” warning that dependence on AI could contribute to cognitive decline and the atrophy of human capacities.
The brief
Arundhati Roy frames artificial intelligence as an extension of capitalism’s long drive to privatize shared resources, concentrating power among technology billionaires and governments.
Warnings from Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon lead Roy to the effects already visible in literature, publishing, education, and creative work, where authorship and accountability are unsettled.
Roy treats language and storytelling as foundations of social coherence, arguing that AI’s disruption of communication threatens more than a technical skill or a single profession.
The episode’s political question is who controls AI and who pays for its land, data, energy, water, and public support; those dependencies, Roy argues, make resistance possible.
Roy’s closing reading from “Apocalypse Now and Then” shifts the focus from what AI may do for people to what dependence on it could do to human capacities.
Books & mentions
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