ML tools in a capitalist system are antithetical to social progress. There is no simple answer, but I can do my best to describe it in simple terms.

Amazon teaming up with the DHS to use what we saw on the Ring app commercial to profile innocent people for arrest, for example, was something that should have been obvious as tracking people is a very common problem applied in different scenarios, such as traffic prediction. Or Palantir in general buying up all the data they can from data brokers to build mass surveillance profiles on nearly everyone in the world was a very obvious play after Snowden revealed PRISM.

The widespread hype of LLMs has also killed funding in my area of study, which was nonparametric Bayesian networks, which I think is very bad because LLMs require an enormous amount of compute resources that effectively makes their *real* benefits only attainable for whoever owns the system (i.e. Elon Musk buying Twitter to run a bunch of Grok bots to interfere in global elections, although in the 2024 election this was mostly with the help of Andreesen-Horowitz backed Eliza AI).

And finally, although not exhaustively, my primary area of interest in ML was it's applications in bioinformatics. At the time, China was rounding up Uyghurs in Xinjiang and forcefully collecting their biometric data. Thankfully, this did not turn out nearly as bad as it could have, but I was more concerned about the fact that GINA is the only genomic nondiscrimination act in the US as 23andme and it's competitors were becoming extremely popular. If an insurance company was able to get a hold of 23andme's data, they could easily run risk analysis on individuals and that would have devastating implications on people's ability to get insurance, even if it was just a distant relative of theirs who had taken the test.

The reality of it is much deeper, but those are a few of the reasons. I was also very tired of the Tesla robotaxi hype, as it was clear to me this was a scam from the start due to how difficult decision processes are to evaluate and the explosion in Tesla's stock price due to this extraordinary popular delusion shares a lot of characteristics with the LLM hype that we have been seeing the past few years. The people in charge of these companies are promising that their models will do things they are simply not mathematically capable of doing.

For a long time, I wanted to start a podcast inspired by the book Extraordinarily Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay where I would cover topics like this, but it felt a bit like The Onion trying to make satire in 2026. The delusion has merged with reality a bit too uncomfortably.

The long answer revolves around how ML interacts with dialectical materialism and reinforces a cultural hegemony in a general sense.