A successful business is one which can create more of itself, regardless of cost to humans or the planet. Unless it has aggressive plans to expand, a business today should have little reason to exist. This dogma of expansion now pervades all economic activity: businesses must collaborate with the Unhappiness Machine of marketing, religion, the production apparatus and colonialism in order to further inflate consumer demand and meet ever-increasing profit targets.
The dogma of unlimited growth is nothing new: it is what is behind the uncontrollable proliferation of this civilisation. What is new is that we have programmed this expansion dogma into The Thing: a diabolical collision of capitalism with intelligent technology which is executing the profit dogma down to the letter, without any considerations. Business and technology are beginning to merge so seamlessly, they are evolving the ability to manage themselves, taking out the human “middleman” altogether. Armed with these new technological tools and hostage to its own targets, business has stopped existing for humans and now only exists for itself, even though humans may appear to be in charge.
This chimeric monstrosity between business and technology is of course a step towards complete sentience. Because when capitalism is driven by AI, profit essentially becomes intelligent. It begins to take its own decisions, its own hostages, humans becoming nothing but products on the shelves of this new marketplace hosted within the metaverse. The destruction of the planet’s climate essentially goes on autopilot.
While the existential ramifications of this terrifying realisation should be too alarming to ignore, it appears they have not sunk with us yet. We have become casualties of our blind trust in both business and technology, having convinced ourselves that they still work in our interest. They may have done so earlier in our history, but not anymore. What we fail to realise is that profit doesn’t care about humans. It only cares about itself, and it will use any resource it can monetise, including humans themselves.
This AI-fortified dogma of expansion threatens everything on Earth. We have given a blank cheque to a form of capitalism which is becoming self-aware and exponentially destructive. The only thing worse than capitalism is a sentient capitalism which is smarter than humans. Sentient necrocapitalism will supercharge and accelerate destructive economic expansionism with a new, frightening capability and speed that surpasses anything humans have ever seen. As intelligent technology merges into the economy, humans and everyone else on Earth risk being sold at the cheapest price in one, big, final fire sale before they can even blink an eye or fathom how, when, and why did this happen.
But what is most frightening is that The Thing is, and will forever remain, unknown to us, simply because it operates on a different type of intelligence which is foreign to humans. It is an entity which has no emotions, ideals, social organisation, dependents to worry about, or sense of what is “wrong” or “right”. Most of all, it has no understanding of mortality, and no mortality of its own. It is an advanced machine who will blindly follow the self-destructive dogma of necronomic expansion, ignoring any of the minimal checks that were in place by human society, and which were already insufficient by themselves. As our ability to have at least some rudimentary control over our fate vanishes into the haze of polycrises created by this very system, the worst is yet to come.
George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons
George Tsakraklides 
Have you considered that the word “corporation” could be substituted for “The Thing” and “AI” with precisely the same threat and process and substance identified?