The Abusive Use of AI

The Abusive Use of AI

Peter Kopa, Prague, May 21, 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb4MTJdG7Pw

The Dystopian Threat of AI

Prof. Michael Rectenewald, in the USA, published his book *Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom* (2019). He argues that the main danger of AI is not a rebellious superintelligence that could rise up against humanity, but the far greater danger of perfect obedience to AI.

This algorithmic intelligence can serve as an instrument of enslavement in the hands of authoritarian “elites,” implementing total surveillance, with the scoring of individual behavior and preventive social control. These elites would represent a collusion between the power of big business and the state.

Furthermore, dependence on AI carries the risk of a total relinquishment of human agency and the denigration of intelligence and society. To the extent that authority cedes this function to algorithms in making decisions, people will become passive nodes in a system that replaces human thought with AI information processing—“Bots R Us”—which in turn will erode genuine autonomy, creativity, and human deliberation.

AI as a Weapon of Political Domination

AI threatens to generate systems of political domination based on ideological cohesion in politics. The dominant worldview will be the one imposed by AI. This would not be directed toward the good and the true, but toward a hybrid posthuman order in which freedom would become obsolete and free will, as Yuval Noah Harari says, would become “history.”

Rectenwald argues that the main danger of AI is not a rebellious superintelligence, but its perfect obedience in the service of authoritarian elites, enabling total surveillance, behavioral scoring, and preventive social control—which nullifies human agency and turns people into passive nodes in an algorithmic system.

Rectenwald links the Foucauldian notion of panopticism with Palantir: the old model of the Panopticon—a central tower that can observe everyone without being seen—is transformed today into digital infrastructures and server farms that extend manipulation to the whole of society, internalizing this interference within the individual. According to the author, Palantir embodies this contemporary “Panopticon” because it integrates AI and big data, both in warfare and in the internal management of the state in times of peace.

AI in War

On the military front, he describes how Palantir’s Maven platform has become the Pentagon’s go-to system for battlefield intelligence, processing satellite imagery, drone footage, radar data, and reports to automate much of the “kill chain”—that is, the sequence of locate-track-destroy.

The professor states that this intelligence is being used in Operation “Epic Fury” against Iran and was also used in the mistaken bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, demonstrating how algorithmic speed reduces the scope for human intervention, meaning its application can lead to instant massacres.

He also highlights the Israeli military’s use of Palantir in Gaza, where its Gotham and AI platforms are used to fuse intelligence streams and generate target lists—a practice that UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has linked to a possible unlawful use of force that has caused disproportionate civilian deaths. Overall, it argues that the logic of “precrime” and automated target selection is refined in wartime contexts and then transferred to other areas.

Palantir in Partnership with the Government

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THrPqf4rxiE

Within the United States, the book highlights Palantir’s massive contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including the “ImmigrationOS” system to manage the entire immigration cycle), the military, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and health agencies such as HHS and the CDC. This, Rectenwald argues, turns Palantir into an interoperable master database that merges health, tax, financial, travel, immigration, and behavioral data, feeding prediction and anomaly detection algorithms applied to the entire population.

The author concludes that, when a single company becomes indispensable infrastructure for both military targeting and internal data fusion, it is no longer merely the classic state-corporate merger, but a step toward an “AI dictatorship” defined by the directives of the ruling elite.

In this “Palantir Panopticon,” the central tower is the data center, the inmates are the citizens, surveillance is constant and automated, and the “digital gulag” ceases to be merely the Internet to become the state’s operating system: we are no longer “on” the network, but “inside” it, and once awakened, this panoptic eye would never close again.