My dreams, at least the ones I remember, rarely stray from happy topics like the fluffiness of wombats. Anxiety has lately wormed its way in on one front, though, and I think it’s a legitimate fear: creeping A.I.
So far, the dreams aren’t all that terrifying. In them, I’m not being turned into a robot (yet). Instead, I’m doing things like chatting with some Generation Jones-ish Brooklynites about their worries they’ll soon be hearing the voices of A.I. “advisors” constantly playing in their heads alongside their own thoughts. I’ve leapfrogged that step in technological evolution, I suppose, by letting the A.I. into my dreams.
If remaining an old-fashioned, pre-A.I. human is valuable, and I think it is, I should take heart from the fact that even in the dream about the Gen Jones people, I was eyeing a café counter and, though very interested in the conversation, wondering whether I should eat a muffin or something. Perhaps events resembling these will recur one day, either in my dreaming or waking life, but with an A.I. voice track telling me muffin brand options—even if I’ve decided I’m not interested in muffins—and giving me calorie counts even though my weight hasn’t changed in 30 years.
The authorities have no better idea what the future will bring than do the rest of us, but they seem already to have decided which side they’re on. Dixon, IL cops, for instance, arrested a man for “stalking and intimidation” of a local official who favors building datacenters, even though the arresting officers, seen in footage of the incident, couldn’t explain what the man had posted or who said what in an online thread of his that allegedly constituted a violent threat, only that the man had said that if the official cared about his children and their future in the abstract, he should be opposed to a new datacenter. The cops at least pretended to think that was a threat to murder the official’s kids, not just an expression of concern for everyone’s future.
Understandably, our tech-bro oligarchs—or “broligarchs” as some have cleverly called them—have an incentive to interpret any resistance to a future of A.I. and datacenters as a threat to end their personal futures, whether in the physical or purely financial sense. That’s techno-fascist bullshit, and I encourage any of my fellow libertarians or capitalists defending it to think very carefully in the years ahead about, for starters, the difference between defending “progress” and subtly mandating it.
Cars with the latest standard tech doodads will now sometimes take away your ability to use the gas pedal and flash a message at you insisting you reposition your eyes to be registered/examined by the car’s sensors, asking while at it if the car’s A.I. may send your info to a “third party,” without succinctly clarifying who. While you’re driving, of course, the car computer may also not have time to clarify whether you’re doing something that makes it especially difficult to position your eyes for the sensor, such as pulling out into traffic, a move you certainly don’t want to be performing if and when it yanks control away from you.
I’m no lawyer, but perhaps cars and tech companies making systems like these should be sued out of existence now—or their executives simply jailed as kidnappers and terrorists. Lawyers of America, look into this, and don’t let any libertarians or conservatives tell you it’s a property violation to launch subsequent lawsuits, if they’re narrowly and carefully crafted. For a fee, I’ll explain to the jailed execs while they’re in jail why they’re merely being punished for fraud and physical coercion, not being, as they might claim, kept from selling useful products to a willing market.
Attempting to nudge any anti-A.I., anti-datacenter narratives into marginalized loony-bin territory, I see Fox News (among others, I assume) is now pushing the idea that a general network of “anti-American” protests over causes ranging from Gaza to health is funded by China—and thus that we should be especially worried by the protest networks’ targeting of datacenters, which the Chinese are trying to stymie to prevent competition with their own datacenters. Maybe, but we’ll have to evaluate tech advancements on their own merits, not by doing whatever the Chinese are doing except faster and harder.
If we’re going to play guilt-by-association games, though, the broligarchy has some dubious acquaintances of its own, including some of those population-control type of greens/environmentalists, who tend to share the broligarchs’ attitude that we (meaning they) don’t really need so many people around.
The machines might work in a freer, more unfettered, and ultimately even more profitable fashion (goes the thinking) without billions of humans around to mess up the environment, bicker over land or electricity intended for use by datacenters, potentially try to reprogram the A.I., or push back against the schemes of Peter Thiel, who, per his recent lectures about the Anti-Christ, apparently thinks the broligarchy steering humanity toward becoming an outer-space tech hivemind is the one way to create a detour around an authoritarian, global, Satanic system that is otherwise our theological/teleological destiny.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, with hardly any invocation of technology whatsoever, New York Democrats this month have shown how they define progress by passing a bill to replace “mother” and “father” with “gestating” and “non-gestating parent” in public policy (a couple of weeks before Father’s Day). This sort of leftism will dovetail nicely with the artificial wombs, population controls, residual climate doomsaying, and general robo-replacement on which the nominally more politically-centrist tech bros are working.
Throughout it all, a sense of potential global doom will be maintained through relatively old-fashioned political scams such as the World Health Organization’s recent report that expressed horror at a slightly increased number of heat deaths in the world even though the number of deaths from cold was about 250 times greater (but can’t as easily be blamed on the politically useful boogeyman that is global warming). Likely, the growing human population is simply skewing more elderly and fragile without people intuitively taking that into account when toting up deaths from any cause, as was the case during the overhyped and freedom-destroying Covid panic.
We can safely predict that whatever the alleged crisis du jour is, the default solution for some time to come will be to turn over more decision-making power to machines (or at least to those well-connected few humans promising to build machines that might in theory one day be capable of handling such responsibilities, even if those machines can’t reliably do basic arithmetic yet). No need to drive your own car, think your own thoughts, launch your own missiles: The broligarchy has an app for that, or might eventually if you invest trillions with them.
One man who admired the American Revolution enough that he might well have been dismayed by this colossal incipient loss of human decision-making was the semi-libertarian historian Gordon S. Wood of Brown University, who has passed away at 92 after being struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot. You can sense from the article about his life and death in The Independent that even with all the establishment acclaim he got, he still had to dodge politically-correct onslaughts and criticisms at times in order to function within the academy and make his perfectly logical points, such as that the American Revolution was a broad anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic social revolution, neither left-wing nor merely capitalist/secessionist. I think that’s right, and I hope we don’t undo that whole experiment by crowning a robot king.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.