Posts Tagged ‘moral responsibility’

“The Paradigm of Extraction”

March 18, 2026

*

Ricardo Morin
Untitled #5: The Paradigm of Extraction
10″x12″
Watercolor
2003

By Ricardo F. Morín

Oct. 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

*

The story of artificial intelligence is usually told as one of endless promise—a technology meant to transform economies and redefine human potential.   Yet beneath the optimism lies an older reality:   the conversion of human creativity into concentrated wealth.   What is presented as progress often repeats the oldest economic pattern of all—the extraction of value from the many for the benefit of the few.   The language surrounding AI hides this continuity. It turns innovation into a spectacle of inevitability, a vision of boundless gain that distracts from its unequal foundations.

The spectacle depends on persuasion.   Words like manifested intelligence, the next trillion-dollar frontier, and inevitable transformation are not descriptions; they are marketing.   They frame profit as destiny and invite participation not in discovery but in speculation.  Numbers such as “$80 trillion” and “25,000 percent returns” echo through news cycles like prophecies, and turn investment forecasts into moral certainty.  This rhetoric reshapes public imagination.   AI stops being a tool for solving human problems and becomes a financial phenomenon—a story about wealth rather than understanding.

These promises do not mark a new beginning.   They repeat the same cycle that accompanied every major invention.   The Industrial Revolution produced machines that changed work but deepened social divides.   The digital revolution spread information but concentrated ownership.   AI now enters that history as its newest expression.   Its power to expand knowledge and serve the public good is real, but its first allegiance remains to profit.   Within existing systems, it accelerates the accumulation of capital instead of correcting its imbalance.

The mechanisms of this concentration are easy to see.  Proprietary models fence off knowledge behind paywalls and patents.   Data collected from the public becomes private property.   The cost of computing power and specialized expertise limits who can participate.   The outcome is predictable:   the majority will experience AI not as empowerment but as dependency.  Far from leveling inequality, it builds it into the infrastructure of tomorrow.

This direction grows more troubling when placed beside the world’s most urgent needs.  Billions of people still live without reliable food, healthcare, or education—conditions technology could transform but rarely does.   The most profitable uses of AI instead optimize advertising, influence behavior, and extend surveillance.   These are not accidents.   They are the logical results of a system that values profit over human welfare.   When progress is measured only in shareholder value, technology loses its moral compass and society loses its claim to wisdom.

A newer and equally dangerous use of these systems has emerged in the political sphere.   The same tools that target consumers now target citizens.  Governments with autocratic tendencies have begun using generative models to flood public discourse with persuasive content, to blur the boundary between truth and fabrication, and to cultivate obedience through simulation.   Recent reporting shows how executive offices deploy AI to craft political messages, to amplify loyal media, and to drown out dissenting voices.   Such practices transform intelligence into propaganda and data into domination.  When a state can algorithmically manage perception, democracy becomes performance.  The concentration of wealth and the concentration of an engineered belief reinforce each other, both materially and mentally.

We have seen this pattern before.   In every technological era, wealth has turned into political power and then used that power to protect itself.   Railroad barons shaped monopolies in the nineteenth century.  Oil empires steered foreign policy in the twentieth.  Today, digital conglomerates write the rules that sustain their dominance.   AI follows the same gravitational pull, guided less by human vision than by financial gravity.

In the present order, the union of technological power and financial speculation no longer produces discovery but dependence.  Wealth circulates within an enclosed economy of influence and rewards those who design the mechanisms of access rather than those who expand the reach of knowledge.  What appears as innovation is often a rehearsal of privilege:  an exchange of capital between the same centers of authority, each validating the other while society absorbs the cost.  When creativity becomes collateral and intelligence a lease, progress ceases to serve the public and begins to serve itself.

The most seductive illusion sustaining this order is the myth of inevitability—the belief that technological advance must produce inequality, and that no one is responsible for the outcome.   It is a useful fiction.  It spares those in power from moral scrutiny by turning exploitation into fate.  Yet inevitability is a choice disguised as nature.  Societies have always shaped the use of technology through their laws, values, and courage to intervene.   To accept inequality as destiny is to abandon that responsibility.

Rejecting inevitability means reclaiming the idea of progress itself.  Innovation is not progress unless it expands the freedom and security of human life.   That requires intentional direction—through public investment, fair taxation, transparent standards, and strong international cooperation.   These are not barriers to growth; they are the conditions that make genuine progress possible.   Markets alone cannot guarantee justice, and technology without ethics is not advancement but acceleration without direction.

Measuring progress differently would change what we celebrate.   If an AI system reduces medical errors in poor communities, strengthens education where resources are scarce, or helps citizens participate more fully in democracy, its worth exceeds that of one that merely increases profit margins.  The true measure of intelligence—artificial or human—is the good it brings into the world.   Profit is only one form of value; human dignity is another.

At the center of this order lies a quiet hypocrisy.   Wealth is praised as the reward of discipline and intelligence, yet it depends on the continuous extraction of value from others—the worker, the consumer, the environment.   What appears as merit often rests on inequality disguised as efficiency.   The same pattern defines artificial intelligence.   Built from shared human knowledge and creativity, it is enclosed within systems that sell access to what was freely given.  Both forms of accumulation—financial and technological—draw their power from the very resources they diminish: human labor, attention, and imagination.   In claiming to advance society, they reproduce the inequity that turns vitality into stagnation—the inversion of what progress is meant to be.

The fevered talk of trillion-dollar opportunities belongs to an old vocabulary—the language of extraction mistaken for evolution.   The real question is whether intelligence will continue to serve wealth or begin to serve humanity.  Artificial intelligence offers that choice:  to repeat the logic that has long confused accumulation with advancement, or to build a future where knowledge and prosperity are shared.   That decision will not emerge by itself.   It depends on what societies demand, what governments regulate, and what values define success.  The window to decide remains open, though it narrows each time profit is allowed to speak louder than conscience.

The preceding observations concern the consequences of extraction.  The institutional logic that produces these consequences belongs to a wider historical pattern in modern economic development.  That pattern is examined separately in “The Logic of Extraction.”

*

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Political Economy, Modernity and Conflict, Structures of Power, Cultural Analysis, Technology and Society, Civic Agency, Essays (English) | Leave a Comment »

“Bulwark”

January 25, 2026

Ricardo Morín
Bulwark
Formerly titled Buffalo Series, Nº 3
Oil on linen, 60 × 88 in.
1980
Exhibited: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York, May 1980
Destroyed while in third-party custody; extant as digital archival record only.

*

Ricardo F. Morin

December 23, 2025

Kissimmee, Fl

*

I did not encounter the boundaries that would later govern my writing either through instruction or doctrine, but through a remark made in passing by my father when I was still a child.   He stated, without hesitation or elaboration, that he could not imagine existing under a political system that threatened individual liberty and private autonomy, and that life under such conditions would no longer be a life he could inhabit.  The formulation was extreme, yet even then it was clear that it was not intended as a proposal, a threat, or a performance.   It functioned instead as a boundary:   an indication of where survival, once stripped of dignity, would no longer merit the name of living.

The force of that remark did not reside in its literal content, but in the clarity with which it established a limit.   Extreme statements often draw attention by excess, but this one operated differently.  It did not seek reaction or allegiance.  It closed a door.   What it marked was the point at which judgment ceased to be negotiable—not because compromise becomes difficult, but because continuation itself loses coherence. What it marked was not expression but diagnosis.  It identified a threshold beyond which endurance would amount to acquiescence in one’s own negation.

That distinction—between living and merely persisting—would take years to acquire its full weight.  One can remain alive and yet no longer inhabit the conditions under which action, responsibility, and choice remain intelligible.  The body endures; the terms of authorship do not.  What is surrendered in such cases is not comfort or advantage, but authorship over one’s own conduct:  the capacity to remain the source and bearer of one’s actions.

Only later did historical irony give that childhood memory a broader frame.  My father died one year before Venezuela entered a prolonged political order that normalized civic humiliation and displaced individual responsibility.   This coincidence does not confer foresight or vindication.   It merely underscores the nature of the limit he articulated.   He did not claim to predict outcomes or to possess superior insight.  He identified a condition he would not inhabit, regardless of how common, administratively justified, or socially enforced it might become.

What was transmitted through that remark was not an ideology, nor even a political position, but a refusal.  It was a refusal to treat dignity as contingent, and a refusal to accept adaptation as inherently neutral.  Such refusals are not dramatic.   They do not announce themselves as virtues.   They operate quietly, shaping what one will not do, what one will not say, and what one will not permit to pass through one’s actions in exchange for continuity, safety, or approval.

Writing, I have come to understand, is not exempt from the constraints that govern action.   Symbolic form does nor suspend responsibility.   Language acts.   It frames possibilities, distributes responsibility, and licenses certain responses while it forecloses others.   To write without regard for what one’s words enable is to treat expression and conduct as if they belonged to different orders.   They do not.   The same boundary that governs action governs language:   one must not inhabit forms that require the habitual abandonment of autonomy.

Authorial responsability does not entail moral exhibition or the performance of virtue.   Responsibility in writing does not consist in adopting the correct posture or aligning with approved conclusions.   It consists in refusing methods that rely on coercion, humiliation, or rhetorical pressure in place of clarity.   It requires attention not only to what is asserted, but to what is permitted to continue through tone, implication, and omission.   Precision here is not a stylistic preference; it is a moral discipline.

Restraint, in this sense, is not passivity but a method of authorship.  It is a form of interruption in the circulation of what one does not consent to carry forward.   To decline to amplify what one does not consent to carry is an act of selection, and an exercise of agency.   In an environment where excess, outrage, and reactive urgency are often mistaken for seriousness, restraint becomes a way of maintaining authorship over one’s participation.   Restraint limits reach, but it preserves coherence between what is said and what is lived.

Such restrain inevitably carries a cost.   Urgency is more than speed; it is the condition under which reflection itself begins to appear as a liability.   Reflection serves as a procedural safeguard of agency and authorship—and, with them, of ethical responsibility—even when circumstances cannot be governed and one is compelled to choose within constraint.  Restraint resists urgency, narrows reach, and foregoes certain forms of recognition.   These losses are not incidental; they are constitutive.  To accept all available registers or platforms in the name of relevance is to treat survival as the highest good.   The boundary articulated long ago indicates otherwise:   that there are conditions under which continuation exacts a price too high to pay.

Authorial responsibility, then, is not a matter of expression but of alignment between language and action.   It asks whether one’s language inhabits the same ethical terrain as one’s conduct.  It asks whether the forms one adopts require compromises one would refuse in action.   The obligation is not to persuade or to prevail, but to remain answerable to the limits one has acknowledged.

What remains is not a doctrine but a stance:   a stance standing without dramatization, without escape, and without concession to forms that promise endurance at the expense of dignity.   Such a posture does not announce itself as resistance, nor does it seek exemption from consequence.   It holds its ground without appeal.   In doing so, it affirms that authorship—like autonomy—begins where certain lines are no longer crossed.

*

What remains unaddressed is the more fragile condition beneath authorship itself:   the way thinking precedes command, and at times repositions the author before any stance can be assumed.

The memory of my father appears as a moving target—not an idea slipping out of control, but it is a standard shifting under my feet while I was still advancing.   I did not invite it in the sense of intention or plan.   Nor did I resist it.   I noticed it moving before I could decide what it demanded.

That experience is unsettling because it violates a comforting assumption:   that thought is something we deploy, rather than something that displaces us.

The uncertainty about whether I had invited it is itself a sign that I was not instrumentalizing my thinking.   When thought is summoned as a tool, it remains fixed.   When it emerges in response to something that matters, it moves, because it is adjusting to reality rather than arranging it.   That movement feels like a loss of control only if authorship is understood as command.

I allowed the discomfort of not knowing whether I had summoned what was now demanding attention only if authorship is understood as control.   This was resistance under motion, not paralysis of judgment.   The question arises only when thinking is still alive enough to be displaced.

The target moved because it was attached to the terrain of perception, not to the self doing the perceiving.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Essays, Ethics, Political Thought, Culture, Autonomy, Visual–Literary Work | Leave a Comment »