Empowerment or Exploitation: The Real Battle Behind AI
At the highest level of humanity, every age faces the same moral test — whether power will serve the many, or exploit them for the few.
By Trygve Olson
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the moment we’re living through — what it means, and what it will mean when the story of this era is written.
Over the past few months, I’ve been reading back through history —
The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow, 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Andrew Carnegie and The Chief by David Nasaw, and Titan by Ron Chernow.
These books aren’t just histories of industrialists. They’re mirrors.
Each tells the story of an age when innovation and ambition raced ahead of moral imagination — and power followed.
Morgan built modern finance. Carnegie and Rockefeller industrialized the world. Hearst monetized information.
All of them advanced humanity — but all of them also created systems that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few.
They built progress.
But they also built empires.
And if you look closely, you can see we’re living through the same story again — just written in code instead of steel.
History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Codes in the Same Language
The Industrial Revolution redefined what it meant to be human in an age of machines. It changed labor, wealth, and freedom. It also forced societies to decide who would benefit from progress — the public, or the few who controlled it.
Today, AI is our generation’s Industrial Revolution.
Data is the new oil. Algorithms are the new assembly lines. And cognitive capital — the ability to shape how we think — is the new monopoly.
Every industrial age creates its own version of a Carnegie or a Morgan. But this time, the scale is exponential.
We’re not just industrializing production — we’re industrializing perception.
The question is the same one that haunted the last Gilded Age: Will this revolution empower the many, or exploit them for the enrichment of the few?
The Political Physics of Power
Power always flows toward control unless it’s counterbalanced by accountability.
AI, like steel and oil before it, is power.
And unless we build democratic accountability into how it’s developed and used, that power will consolidate — not democratize.
The same dynamic that produced the Robber Barons of industry is producing the Tech Barons of AI. The tools have changed, but the human impulses haven’t.
Autocrats Understand This Better Than We Do
I’ve spent years working with democracy movements in places where power is the only currency — Belarus, Russia, Georgia. Autocrats understand technology instinctively.
They see it not as innovation but as infrastructure for control.
When you can monitor behavior, you can manipulate it. When you can predict dissent, you can prevent it.
That’s what AI looks like under authoritarianism — digital repression in real time.
Here at home, the threat looks different. It’s not oppression — it’s apathy.
We’re surrendering our agency to algorithms because they make life easier. We’re outsourcing discernment to machines built by people whose incentives are profit, not progress.
The autocrats use fear to control people.
We’re letting comfort do the same thing.
Democracy’s Challenge: Play the Game You’re In
Rule #1 for fighting autocrats is simple: Play the game you’re in, not the one you wish you were in.
We’re not in a competition of innovation — we’re in a struggle over control.
Autocracies are designing AI for manipulation and dominance. Democracies are still debating ethics panels.
If we don’t understand that this is a zero-sum contest — empowerment versus exploitation — we risk losing both democracy and the moral foundation that sustains it.
Learning from the Reformers
History gives us reason for hope. After the last Gilded Age came the Progressive Era — Roosevelt, trust-busting, labor rights, journalism that told the truth.
Citizens forced accountability back into the system.
We can do that again.
AI doesn’t have to be the next gilded cage. It can be the next great democratizing tool — if we demand that it serves humanity rather than harvests it.
That means governance, transparency, and moral imagination. It means remembering that democracy works because it assumes the best in people — and guards against the worst in power.
Three Things You Can Do Today
People often ask me, “OK, I get it — but what can I do about AI, about democracy, about all of this?”
Here are three things that actually matter — right now.
1. Ask Who Benefits.
Every time you use an app, click “accept,” or share data — ask the most subversive question in any democracy: Who benefits?
If the answer isn’t the public, then push back.
Delete it, question it, tell others why. Civic awareness is the new civic duty.
2. Demand Transparency in Technology.
Democracy dies in darkness, and algorithms are the darkest places in modern society.
Support leaders and companies that believe in open-source governance, data transparency, and accountability.
If they can’t explain how the system works, they shouldn’t control it.
3. Reclaim Human Connection.
Autocrats and exploiters win when we stop seeing each other.
Talk to your neighbors. Read local news. Show up in the real world.
Every act of connection is a small act of resistance against a culture trying to turn citizens into consumers.
In the End
Each generation gets its own test of democracy.
For Morgan and Carnegie, it was industrial power.
For us, it’s informational power.
And the question hasn’t changed: Will this revolution empower the many, or exploit them for the enrichment of the few?
The difference this time is speed — and stakes.
We won’t get a century to fix what we break.
So start today.
Ask who benefits. Demand transparency. Reclaim connection.
That’s how democracy endures in the age of algorithms — not by accident, but by intention.
And if we choose wisely, maybe one day history will say that when power came for the future, the people of democracy remembered what they stood for — and chose empowerment over exploitation.
Trygve Olson is a strategist, pro-democracy fighter and a founding Lincoln Project advisor. He writes the Searching for Hope Substack. Read the original column here.
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