Biden warns of dangerous threat of new age of ‘robber barons’ in final presidential address
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Biden warns of ‘tech industrial complex’ danger to democracy as he closes a half-century in public life with Oval Office address. President Joe Biden on Wednesday warned that a new gilded age of robber barons was in danger of eroding Americans’ hard-won freedoms unless the government takes steps to ensure that the ultra-wealthy pay a fair share in taxes and aren’t allowed to exercise outsized power as he capped a half-century in public service with a televised farewell address.
In remarks deliberately tailored to echo President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, Biden said he was just as concerned as Eisenhower had been about what he described as “a tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country” combined with a dangerous “concentration of technology power and wealth” that is forming a new “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”.
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power,” said Biden, who decried the end of fact-checking efforts by top social media platforms as letting the truth be “smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”.
“We must hold the social platform accountable to protect our children, our families and out very democracy from the abuse of power,” he continued, adding that the rise of artificial intelligence — “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time,” needs safeguards to prevent it from being able to “spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation.”.
