UCLA Professor of Information Studies Ramesh Srinivasan participated in a conversation on, “The End of Capitalism and What Comes Next,” with economist Yanis Varoufakis, during the Web Summit Qatar 2026.
Varoufakis, who is the former finance minister of Greece, noted that technology and data is now capital and that, “The owners of this produced means of behavior modification have the power over us that never existed before. We have developed machines the purpose of which are to modify our behavior, not to produce commodities.”
Srinivasan, who has been researching the impacts of digital technology on the planet and on world cultures for 20 years, said that the three greatest effects of technology have been its influence on the relationships people have with themselves, with others, and with the earth, and that the result has been a “disconnection from a shared sense of reality.”
“We’re seeing increasingly technologies that treat human beings as data and treat human intelligence as correlation, which is essentially pattern recognition and pattern matching,” Srinivasan said. “Many of us don’t realize the rare earth minerals, the water sources, the energy sources… AI is going to use more energy than that nation of India by 2034. I think we all need to ask the question: what is it all for? Who is it all for?
“We see all these announcements with people like Larry Ellison and Sam Altman, side by side, offering tens of thousands of jobs,” said Srinivasan. “What jobs? Where? What we see is economic precarity more and more. It’s high time we really look to technology in the service of humanity and in the service of our planet.”
Professor Srinivasan was recently featured in UCLA Magazine in an article on “The Science of Connection.” He also appeared recently on Al Jazeera with commentary on the economic, militaristic, and political influence of robotics, as demonstrated at China’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala, and on the effect of technology on journalistic credibility.
Visit these media links for insights from Professor Srinivasan on AI’s impact on the environment, TikTok’s manipulation of youth, and how all users online activities are turned into data.