Roger Waters has delivered a sweeping critique of artificial intelligence, social media and modern warfare, arguing that apparently separate developments share a common thread: the concentration of power. Speaking to RT, the veteran musician warned that AI-generated culture could undermine human creativity while algorithmic platforms manipulate attention, emotions and political behaviour.
INR Report: Based on an interview with Roger Waters reported by RT HERE.
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has warned that artificial intelligence and social-media technology risk eroding some of the qualities that make people human, linking the rapid growth of AI to a broader system in which technology, politics and warfare can become instruments for accumulating power and profit.
Speaking to RT, Waters welcomed Australia's move to exclude fully AI-generated songs from its music charts and argued that the economics of streaming have already severely weakened the position of working musicians.
His concern is not simply that computers will make music.
It is that an industry already dominated by large technology platforms could increasingly manufacture inexpensive AI-generated content while audiences gradually lose the ability — or perhaps the inclination — to distinguish machine-generated material from human creative work.
Waters argued that many listeners may eventually struggle to tell the difference between AI-generated music and the work of artists such as Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Bob Dylan or The Beatles.
For musicians, he suggested, that represents another stage in a technological transformation that has already shifted much of the economic value of recorded music away from artists and towards the platforms distributing it.
From Streaming to Artificial Music
The economics of recorded music have changed dramatically since Pink Floyd emerged in the 1960s.
Physical record sales once generated substantial revenue directly connected to individual albums and artists. Streaming has replaced much of that model with subscription services offering enormous catalogues in return for monthly payments.
Waters argues that musicians have paid the price.
He characterised streaming royalties as minuscule and described the concentration of music distribution in large technology platforms as destructive to musicians' livelihoods.
Artificial intelligence potentially takes that transformation another step.
If platforms can distribute machine-generated music requiring neither traditional performers nor conventional songwriting and recording costs, the commercial incentive to produce enormous quantities of inexpensive synthetic content is obvious.
Whether audiences actually embrace such music at scale remains uncertain.
But Waters' underlying question is larger than copyright or royalties:
What happens to human culture when machines can imitate its products cheaply and almost endlessly?
‘It Reduces Everything Human’
Waters' criticism becomes considerably broader when discussing AI assistants and social media.
He argues that dependence on such technology can weaken people's capacity for independent thought.
“It reduces the size of your brain and your capacity to think and your capacity to feel,” Waters told RT.
“In fact, it reduces everything human about anybody who goes in that direction.”
That should be understood as Waters' opinion and rhetorical warning, not as a scientific finding that AI literally reduces brain size.
But behind the provocative language sits a genuine debate about cognitive dependence on technology.
Search engines already changed how people retrieve information. Social media changed how information is distributed. Generative AI now potentially changes how people write, research, analyse, create images, produce music and even formulate ideas.
Waters' concern is that convenience can become dependence.
The Algorithm Isn't Neutral
Social media sits at the centre of his argument.
Waters says modern platforms do more than simply provide a neutral space where people communicate.
Their algorithms determine what users see, what receives attention and what content is repeatedly placed in front of them.
He argues that this can influence political attitudes and emotional responses while encouraging repeated engagement through psychological reward mechanisms.
“So where do you draw the line? I'm not sure,” Waters said.
He suggested that a factual, library-like information system could be beneficial, but argued that modern platforms go much further by influencing “our political motivations and our feelings and our emotions.”
This distinction is increasingly important.
The central question is no longer merely whether AI can provide useful information. Clearly it can.
The deeper issue is who controls the systems through which information is selected, ranked, generated and presented — and what incentives govern those systems.
Who Controls the Machine?
That is where Waters connects technology with politics.
AI systems require enormous amounts of computing infrastructure, capital, energy and data. The most capable models are therefore predominantly developed by governments and some of the world's largest technology corporations.
Social-media platforms similarly concentrate extraordinary influence over information distribution within a relatively small number of companies.
That does not establish Waters' broader claim that these systems are collectively designed to manipulate society.
But it does make questions of ownership, transparency and accountability legitimate.
Who decides how algorithms rank political information?
How are AI systems trained?
What biases emerge from those datasets?
Who determines what is restricted, promoted or suppressed?
Can users understand why they are seeing particular information?
And when AI systems become integrated into education, government and business, who audits their decisions?
Those questions are considerably more useful than simply dividing the debate into whether AI is “good” or “bad.”
Waters Connects Technology to War
Waters then widened his argument dramatically, moving from technology to international politics and warfare.
“We live in a world that is controlled now by gangsterism,” he told RT.
He cited Israel's actions in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories and accused Washington of using coercion to take Venezuela's oil wealth.
These are Waters' political characterisations and should be distinguished from independently established factual conclusions.
His comments on Ukraine were similarly forceful.
Waters blamed the failure of the Minsk agreements and the collapse of the 2022 Istanbul negotiations for allowing the conflict to continue, arguing that Western governments prevented a negotiated settlement.
That interpretation remains politically contested.
Russia and Western governments have presented sharply different accounts of why negotiations failed, what commitments were genuinely available and whether a sustainable agreement was achievable.
What is clear is that the conflict has subsequently evolved into an increasingly technology-intensive war.
Drones, Missiles and the Future of Warfare
Waters highlighted drones and missiles as examples of how warfare itself is becoming increasingly technological.
Ukraine has demonstrated this transformation dramatically.
Relatively inexpensive unmanned systems can now destroy equipment costing millions of dollars. Surveillance drones continuously observe battlefields. Long-range unmanned aircraft can strike infrastructure hundreds of kilometres from front lines.
Artificial intelligence is also increasingly being incorporated into military intelligence, targeting, surveillance and autonomous systems internationally.
That development creates a very different AI debate from whether computers can write songs.
When machines assist decisions involving lethal force, questions of human judgement and accountability become considerably more serious.
Waters' conclusion is bleak.
“Just who gets killed, nobody cares anymore,” he said, arguing that financial interests have become more important than human consequences.
Again, that is his political judgement.
But the broader issue he raises — whether increasingly automated warfare risks creating greater psychological and physical distance between those making decisions and those experiencing their consequences — is a legitimate question for governments developing these technologies.
AI Is a Tool — The Question Is Who Uses It
There is an important counterargument to Waters' position.
Artificial intelligence can also expand human capability.
It can accelerate medical research, translate languages, assist people with disabilities, analyse enormous scientific datasets, improve engineering, automate repetitive work and make sophisticated creative tools available to people who previously could not afford them.
Even in music, AI could become another instrument rather than a replacement for musicians.
The technology itself therefore does not dictate a single social outcome.
The more consequential question may be how it is deployed and under whose rules.
An AI system controlled transparently and used voluntarily to augment human ability is very different from an opaque algorithm designed primarily to maximise engagement, influence behaviour or make consequential decisions without meaningful human oversight.
Waters' warning is strongest when viewed through that distinction.
Does This Affect New Zealand?
Very much so.
New Zealand is a technology importer. Most of the AI systems, social-media platforms and streaming services used here are controlled overseas.
That means New Zealanders increasingly rely on digital infrastructure whose underlying algorithms, training systems and commercial incentives are largely determined outside this country.
The implications extend well beyond entertainment.
AI is moving into workplaces, schools, journalism, advertising, government administration and professional services.
For New Zealand, the important questions therefore include whether citizens know when they are interacting with AI-generated material, whether creators retain meaningful rights over their work, how personal information is used, and whether consequential automated decisions remain subject to human review.
There is also a media-literacy challenge.
As synthetic text, photographs, voices and video become increasingly convincing, simply seeing or hearing something will provide less assurance that it actually occurred.
Waters' argument may be deliberately provocative, but the underlying challenge is real.
AI can potentially make people enormously more capable.
It can also make it easier to outsource thinking, manufacture culture, manipulate attention and automate decisions previously requiring human judgement.
The technology is advancing rapidly.
The political and social rules surrounding it are struggling to keep pace.
And perhaps the most useful question raised by Waters is not whether artificial intelligence will become more powerful.
That appears inevitable.
It is whether human beings remain firmly in control of what we choose to do with it.
Source
AI erodes our humanity while elites profit from war – Roger Waters
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.