Look out — the corporate cat is out of the bag!

This particular "cat" is the fast-metastasizing software technology called "artificial intelligence." A cadre of multibillion-dollar high-tech giants has surreptitiously been advancing AI for a couple of decades, literally creating a new, autonomous species of thinking beings. These are computer-powered humanoid bots, increasingly able to do the intellectual, creative, managerial and other complex jobs that millions of human beings now do.

The billionaire pushers of this brave new bot economy know that this amounts to placing a neutron bomb in the American workplace, so they have intentionally lied about its job-obliterating impact. However, after years of hush-hush development, the AI technology is now so advanced and the corporate investment in it is so gargantuan that the perpetrators no longer care what the public thinks.

This year, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and other Silicon Valley oligarchs have been feverishly dumping hundreds of billions of dollars each into a global corporate gold rush to supplant humans with AI bots in practically every economic sector. They expect to automate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. And one Silicon Valley outfit (bluntly named "Mechanize") calculates that its plan "to fully automate work" can be achieved within 30 years. Indeed, BotWorld is now urging today's AI technology to create super-intelligent systems that can out-think humans. Yes — bots themselves are working to produce more powerful bots to speed up AI's bot takeover of work.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... If you think that, surely, this isn't really happening, note that President Donald Trump's GOP Congress recently imposed a 10-year ban on any state laws attempting to regulate AI. Just unleash the bots ... and see what happens.

Big Oil's Slick Attempt to Greenwash Its Massive Plastic Pollution

Let's all sing the holiday classic: "All I want for Christmas ... Is Something Not Made of Plastic."

Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water ... and us. And don't forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It's a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe's top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil's lobbyists assure us that gabillions of plastic bags, bottles and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except... they're lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today — Big Oil knows that 94% of U.S. plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can't be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: "Advanced Recycling." They say it's a magical process dubbed "pyrolysis." Only ... it doesn't work, it's inordinately expensive and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste! But that's not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year —and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Sigmund at Unsplash