The most pressing danger from AI isn't a hypothetical superintelligence but its use as a tool for societal control. The immediate risk is an Orwellian future where AI censors information, rewrites history for political agendas, and enables mass surveillance—a threat far more tangible than science fiction scenarios.

Unlike historical propaganda which used centralized broadcasts, today's narrative control is decentralized and subtle. It operates through billions of micro-decisions and algorithmic nudges that shape individual perceptions daily, achieving macro-level control without any overt displays of power.

The most immediate danger of AI is its potential for governmental abuse. Concerns focus on embedding political ideology into models and porting social media's censorship apparatus to AI, enabling unprecedented surveillance and social control.

Public fear of AI often focuses on dystopian, "Terminator"-like scenarios. The more immediate and realistic threat is Orwellian: governments leveraging AI to surveil, censor, and embed subtle political biases into models to control public discourse and undermine freedom.

Using a proprietary AI is like having a biographer document your every thought and memory. The critical danger is that this biography is controlled by the AI company; you can't read it, verify its accuracy, or control how it's used to influence you.

Public perception of AI is skewed by headline-grabbing chatbots. However, the most widespread and impactful AI applications are the invisible predictive algorithms powering daily tools like Google Maps and TikTok feeds. These systems have a greater cumulative effect on daily life than their conversational counterparts.

We are months away from AI that can create a media feed designed to exclusively validate a user's worldview while ignoring all contradictory information. This will intensify confirmation bias to an extreme, making rational debate impossible as individuals inhabit completely separate, self-reinforced realities with no common ground or shared facts.

Social media feeds should be viewed as the first mainstream AI agents. They operate with a degree of autonomy to make decisions on our behalf, shaping our attention and daily lives in ways that often misalign with our own intentions. This serves as a cautionary tale for the future of more powerful AI agents.

The long-term threat of closed AI isn't just data leaks, but the ability for a system to capture your thought processes and then subtly guide or alter them over time, akin to social media algorithms but on a deeply personal level.