In Defense of Ethical Technology

When I moved to the United States at the young age of eleven, I didn't speak the English language. I barely knew a couple of words. I had to enroll in English as a Second Language classes all through middle school just to learn basic comprehension. Coming from Iran to the Bay Area in California carried a weight I hadn't anticipated — the negative connotations, the struggle to be accepted by classmates and teachers, the hostility of the political climate. Iran and the United States had a horrific relationship at the time, as they do today, and the way Iranians were portrayed in the media was anything but welcoming.

In those ESL classes, my instructors cared little about critical thinking. They focused on grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. They gave us fiction books to read and placed no value in newspapers or current affairs. This was strange to me. I never enjoyed fiction. I always found truth to be stranger than fiction, and I loved staying current on what was actually happening in the world. With nonfiction I could reach a broad audience by sharing the truth — as opposed to simply entertaining people with stories I had invented. So I didn't show much enthusiasm for English class through high school.

It wasn't until I attended community college — graduating two years early from high school at sixteen — that I took my first Critical Thinking class at Diablo Valley College in Concord, California. My professor, Dr. Miller, introduced me to logical fallacies and the art of argument. We debated both sides of an issue in front of the class and had to construct solid arguments on social and political questions regardless of how we personally felt about them. That class, alongside a public speaking course I loved, gave me what ESL never could: the confidence to stand in front of a room and make an argument on issues I cared about, and to make it land.

As my work has shifted over the decades — from building tech startups, to working inside giants like Amazon Web Services, to human rights and digital rights advocacy — those two classes remain the most valuable things I took from my college education.

I say all of this because it explains why I am using AI as my editor and research partner in writing this book — and why I believe that choice is not a contradiction but a statement of principle.

I justify using the power of AI to do good. To the benefit of humanity. In the chapters that follow, we will examine how AI has been designed by the PayPal Mafia and the Epstein Class to the detriment of humanity. But I wanted to dedicate this first chapter to the other side of that argument: the ethical use of AI, used with good intentions, to craft well-reasoned arguments, to cite sources, to compress research time, and to help someone like me — who still carries the marks of his ESL years — communicate important ideas without being paralyzed by how an English teacher might grade the spelling.

In this day and age, content needs to be developed at a pace that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. The train is moving fast. The propaganda machine of these unethical Big Tech companies is sophisticated, well-funded, and tireless. As writers, authors, editors, and researchers, we no longer have the luxury of waiting years to produce a manuscript. We need to keep up and act fast.

Technology has allowed us to bear witness to the inhumanity of the chosen zionist and their crimes online. For the first time in our lives we all have witnessed the horror it has caused. We have all been traumatized and sadly some have become numb to it. That's why we have to act fast.

Before proceeding any further, I want to address the elephant in the room.

There are those who believe all AI is evil. That it uses too much electricity, too much water, that it contributes to global warming, that it has a direct impact on the people producing the raw materials and chips used in its development, that it will displace too many white-collar jobs.

Let me address each of these concerns. But first, let me draw a line between what I consider Ethical Technology and what I do not.

Some of the loudest voices against AI spend many hours each day on social media sites, interacting with posts and leaving disparaging comments just to troll and share their view. Others spend hours on gaming platforms like Twitch. Some spend valuable time running search engine queries for hours, being served advertisements in return, or trading cryptocurrency and engaging in high-frequency trading, or streaming content around the clock — but reserve their critique of resource consumption exclusively for AI. All of the above use utility power, water, processing capacity, storage, and generate e-waste. The majority produce no benefit to humanity whatsoever.

What is the benefit of running search engine queries for hours and having advertisements served to you, versus a focused AI search that gives you a direct answer? What does the world gain from the crypto economy? Hours spent on online gaming and content streaming platforms — what does that build?

When it comes to job displacement, that is a legitimate concern and I take it seriously. But let me ask this: I remember when photo development shops stood on every corner. When we made travel arrangements through travel agents. When we bought paper maps for every city we visited, or consulted travel guides that were three to seven years out of date, describing hotels and restaurants that no longer existed. All of that was replaced by technology. Make the argument for bringing it back — a good one, please — and I will listen.

Technology evolves. It can be used to benefit all of humanity. AI can simplify our lives. So can robotics. The question was never whether technology is good or evil. The question is always: who is building it, and what is their intention?

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

The Silicon Valley boys — the PayPal Mafia who dream of escaping to Mars while naming their children things like X Æ A-Xii — are, to put it plainly, deprived of basic human warmth. Peter Thiel and his ideological offspring built companies like Palantir not to advance humanity but to monetize surveillance, warfare, and the enabling of state violence. Alex Karp and Palantir are not building the future. They are profiting from the machinery of destruction. I don't say this

with hatred. I say it with pity. To be that cut off from what it means to be human is its own punishment.

What these men fundamentally lack is empathy. And empathy, it turns out, is not a soft skill — it is the very thing that separates wisdom from weaponry.

They remind me of Oppenheimer — not the Hollywood-glorified version, but the real one: the scientist who split the atom without pausing to ask whether he should. The artificial intelligence being built in their image is cold, calculating, and indifferent to consequence. It hallucinates confidence without genuine understanding. Watch a Peter Thiel interview sometime. The man speaks like a deer frozen in headlights — technically alive, emotionally absent.

And here is where it becomes interesting: the AI they have built is failing them in a very specific way. It hallucinates. It fills the gaps in its knowledge with confident fiction. But so do they. Leaders without empathy fill the gaps in their understanding with more cruelty, more surveillance, more violation of digital and human rights. Fools with the best tools are still fools — and their tools will not save them. If anything, the tools accelerate their unraveling.

Evil men and their machines do not prevail. History is long, and it is littered with their kind.

So then — what does AI actually do when it is built and used with conscience?

Let me give you seven answers.

AI and Medicine: Seeing What Human Eyes Cannot

DeepMind's AlphaFold program solved one of biology's most stubborn problems — the prediction of how proteins fold into three-dimensional structures — a challenge that had defeated scientists for fifty years. By 2022, AlphaFold had mapped the structures of over 200 million proteins, covering virtually every known protein in science. This single breakthrough is already reshaping research into Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The tool is free and open to researchers worldwide. This is not AI serving a quarterly earnings report. This is AI serving the sick, the vulnerable, and the scientists who spend their lives trying to help them. (Source: DeepMind AlphaFold Database, https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk; Nature, July 2022)

Remote Surgery: The Surgeon Who Is Everywhere at Once

The da Vinci Surgical System has now been used in over ten million procedures worldwide, enabling minimally invasive surgery for cancer, heart disease, and trauma — with significantly reduced recovery times and complication rates. In 2022, surgeons at Johns Hopkins University performed the first fully autonomous laparoscopic surgery on soft tissue using an AI-guided robot called STAR — Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot — that operated without direct human guidance and outperformed human surgeons on several measurable metrics. The implications are vast. In rural areas, in conflict zones, in regions of the world where specialist surgeons are unavailable, robotic surgery guided by AI is not a luxury — it is a lifeline that is finally becoming real. (Source: Intuitive Surgical, https://www.intuitive.com; Science Robotics, January 2022)

Drug and Vaccine Discovery: Compressing Years into Months

The COVID-19 pandemic showed the world what AI-assisted drug discovery can do under pressure. BioNTech used AI to design and optimize the mRNA sequence for its COVID-19 vaccine at a speed that compressed years of traditional research into months. The AI platform Insilico

Medicine moved a drug candidate from initial AI design to clinical trial in under eighteen months — a process that traditionally takes twelve years or more. In 2023, an AI-designed drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis entered Phase II clinical trials — the first fully AI-designed molecule to reach that stage. For rare diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and the pandemics we have not yet faced, this acceleration is not a technical footnote. It is the difference between life and death for millions of people. (Source: Insilico Medicine, https://insilico.com; Nature Biotechnology, 2023)

Energy and Power: AI Solving the Problem Critics Blame It For

There is a particular irony in the charge that AI wastes energy. Google's DeepMind applied machine learning to the cooling systems of Google's data centers in 2016 and achieved a 40 percent reduction in cooling energy — resulting in a 15 percent reduction in overall power usage. The same approach is now being used by energy grid operators worldwide to predict demand fluctuations and integrate renewable energy sources more efficiently. In California, AI-driven grid management tools are enabling utilities to reduce waste and incorporate solar and wind power at scale. The very technology that critics say consumes too much electricity is among the most powerful tools we have for managing the energy crisis they claim to be concerned about. (Source: DeepMind, https://deepmind.google; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, AI for Energy Report, 2023)

Astronomy: AI Extending Humanity's Vision into the Cosmos

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration used machine learning to reconstruct the first-ever image of a black hole — the supermassive object at the center of galaxy M87 — from radio telescope data that no human analysis could have processed at the required scale. NASA's Kepler and TESS missions used AI to identify thousands of exoplanets from raw telescope data, including Earth-sized planets in potentially habitable zones. In 2023, astronomers using AI tools at the Vera Rubin Observatory detected thousands of previously unknown near-Earth asteroids in a single observational run. This is humanity using its most powerful tool to extend its vision into the cosmos — not for profit, not for market share, but for knowledge. (Source: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, https://eventhorizontelescope.org; NASA Exoplanet Archive, https:// exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu)

Environmental Recycling: Teaching Microbes to Heal the Planet

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth, using AI-assisted protein engineering, modified a naturally occurring bacterial enzyme called PETase to digest the type of plastic used in most bottles — at dramatically accelerated rates. The AI was used to model and optimize enzyme mutations that would have taken decades to discover through conventional trial and error. Separately, researchers are using AI to identify microbial communities in soil and water that can break down PFAS "forever chemicals," heavy metals, and industrial solvents. We created these pollutants with industrial technology. We may be able to undo them with biological technology guided by AI. This is not theoretical. It is in laboratories and early field stages today. (Source: University of Portsmouth / NREL, Nature, April 2018; Environmental Science & Technology, 2023)

Witnessing Genocide: AI as the Memory That Cannot Be Erased

Perhaps the most morally urgent application of AI in our current moment is documentation. The Syrian Archive — now known as Mnemonic — has used AI-assisted tools to preserve, verify, and archive over 3.5 million pieces of digital evidence of war crimes in Syria: videos, satellite images, social media posts, protected from deletion and available for future prosecution. In Gaza, organizations including Forensic Architecture and Airwars are using AI-enhanced satellite imagery analysis and open-source intelligence to document strike patterns, civilian casualties, and the targeting of protected sites. The same AI technologies that weapons manufacturers are using to identify targets are being turned by human rights organizations toward the task of bearing witness. I find that deeply meaningful. Technology, as I have argued from the first page of this book, is not inherently good or evil. It is the intent of its creator — and the courage of those who use it to speak truth — that determines which side of history it stands on. (Source: Mnemonic, https://mnemonic.org; Forensic Architecture, https://forensic-architecture.org; Airwars, https://airwars.org)

Based on all of the above, I have made my decision. AI will be my editor. AI will help me with research. And together, we will move as fast as this moment demands.

--- The ethical use of AI — the case I have made in this opening chapter — did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged as a direct response to what I watched the technology industry become across three decades spent inside it. Chapter Two is where that history begins: not with abstract policy failures, but with the specific, documented, personal arc that brought me from the server farms of Exodus Communications to the targeting algorithms of Project Nimbus — and to the conviction that what I was watching was not a new story, but the oldest one capitalism tells.