The legendary musician says Big Tech manipulation and military confrontation stem from the same pursuit of power
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has warned that artificial intelligence and social media are eroding people’s ability to think and feel, while powerful interests exploit technology, politics and war for profit.
Speaking to RT on Wednesday, the veteran musician welcomed Australia’s decision to bar fully AI-generated songs from its music charts, saying streaming platforms have already gutted musicians’ livelihoods with minuscule royalties while concentrating ownership and profits in the hands of Big Tech.
“So that piracy has almost destroyed everything. But if they are then allowed to use AI to produce fodder for their very tame audience who pays so much a month to get any music that they want from anywhere… Unfortunately, we know that a large number of that audience won’t be able to tell the difference between AI and Pink Floyd, or Neil Young, or Bob Dylan, or The Beatles or anything else.”
Waters broadened his criticism beyond the music industry, accusing social media platforms of manipulating users’ emotions and political attitudes through addictive algorithms, while warning that reliance on AI assistants was undermining independent thought.
“It reduces the size of your brain and your capacity to think and your capacity to feel,” Waters said. “In fact, it reduces everything human about anybody who goes in that direction.”
“So where do you draw the line? I’m not sure,” he added. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a factual, you know, a sort of fact-based library, if that’s all there was? But it’s not. It’s controlling our political motivations and our feelings and our emotions, and also releasing dopamine.”
Waters then widened the argument to global politics, saying the same pursuit of power and profit had produced a world increasingly governed by force rather than international law.
“We live in a world that is controlled now by gangsterism,” he said. He cited Israel’s destruction of Palestinian communities in Gaza and the occupied territories, as one example, while accusing Washington of openly stealing Venezuela’s oil wealth through coercion.
Turning to Ukraine, Waters blamed the failure to implement the Minsk agreements and the collapse of the 2022 Istanbul peace talks, accusing Western governments of preventing a negotiated settlement.
Waters warned that the Ukraine conflict has since escalated “in a very, very dangerous way” and increasingly resembles the future of warfare, dominated by drones and missiles.
“Just who gets killed, nobody cares anymore,” Waters said, “because all they’re interested in is making money.”
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