The political side of Tech

January 26, 2026

At the Davos summit, three subjects have dominated the conversation: Trump, AI, and Big Tech. These three subjects are intimately related.

AI is characterized by its strong potential to disrupt existing practices, which is similar to Trump's operating mode. AI is not easily auditable, doesn't mention systematically its source, doesn't care too much about the existing laws, which is another common feature. AI tends to tell people what they should think, and requires some blind faith without accountability. There is some kind of magic, quasi-religious blind faith implied in believing as truth what AI says, without the ability to develop a critical thinking and oppose other points of views. Again, this is how Trump reigns.

Big Tech derives its power from its ability to handle a huge quantity of data. The size of the data that is addressed requires an enormous computing power, and eliminates the ability for smaller players to be part of the game. The technical needs for AI processing push these limits further. Therefore the amount of investments necessary to be in is so high that only a handful of companies can thrive in that market. AI can be seen as the last iteration of the push for more and more power. The power of the tech companies resists to attempts of regulations. The abilities for tech companies to own most private data goes against the democratic rights and the legal systems. To survive in this environment, the big tech companies need less and less regulatory mandates. That goes well with the Trump agenda. Democratic values therefore are thrown away, silently, and apparently due to technical constraints.

Thinking about a technical strategy is not just selecting the right tool for the task. It implies that the decision makers have to think about the political, ethical, and long-term implications of the choice. There is a dichotomy of possible choices, and an infinite number of nuances and variation between the two extremes. The opposite poles are as follows: on one side, the choice for tech is what matters to people who are in power and increase their power. They can decide to replace a number of jobs by AI agents, to expect an increase of productivity due to the adoption of new tools, and to set in place the ways to measure those gains from a managerial perspective. On the other side, people may be worried about the side effects of AI-related tools that they may decide to skip them altogether and to preserve what they have without looking any further.

However, this dichotomy is somewhat misleading. It omits the fact that computers have always been data processing machines, and AI is simply the last iteration of this fact.