AI is barreling toward us like a comet, burning with the heat of the sun and too massive to contemplate.
It is growing exponentially, almost too fast for us to keep up with its evolution, and it’s just getting started. It is already everywhere around us, having insinuated itself in just a few short years, and is proliferating in our homes, in businesses, in public places, and in government. It is unstoppable.
We have already been hit hard with the effects. Jobs are vanishing, but we ain’t seen nothing yet: the rate of attrition will soon be increasing exponentially along with AI’s stunning development, and it won’t be long before we must act collectively to do something about it, lest we be overwhelmed – at the economic, governmental and societal levels.
I’ll get into the details of all of that elsewhere. For now, I want to linger on a single point.
When this comet strikes us, we dare not have conservative Republican majorities in place in our policy-making institutions.
That’s a horrible thing for me to be saying, of course, especially when I’m the guy saying we must always be mindful of cognitive diversity.
But hear me out.
AI is going to obliterate the definitions of labor and capital that have driven our social and political frames for several centuries.
AI is now replacing not only our physical production capacity, as in manufacturing, but our mental productivity – it can now manage complex processes, and it is growing increasingly proficient at making complex decisions.
AI puts the lie to ideological frames of human nature, upon which conservatives base their understanding of society. Part of this is its emerging ability to find patterns in human behavior that we ourselves are not aware of.
AI is utterly decentralized; like the Internet, it cannot be controlled from one point. It defies the hierarchical authority preferences of conservative thinkers.
Put another way, AI is the worst enemy a conservative legislator can ever face: it defies conservative thought in every imaginable way, and flies in the face of conservative notions of ‘control’.
But even this is not the problem.
The true threat we will be dealing with if the GOP is in charge of America as the takeover of AI occurs is that we will need to remake our institutions, in some cases overhauling them top to bottom, in order to weather the changes without an economic or social collapse. We will have to be more innovative than we’ve ever been before; we will have to improvise, fail fast when trying new ideas, keep trying when things look bleak – and, above all, not descend into blaming each other.
We will need to consider solutions that make ‘socialism’ look downright feudal.
This style of thinking just can’t be found in the conservative wheelhouse. Consider:
We will need to not only embrace change, but embrace radical change, and do it in record time; conservatives resist and even eschew change.
We will be coping with complexities of a scale we’ve never had to collectively face before, dealing publicly with ideas that only a handful truly understand; conservatives distrust and reject complexity.
We will face a future more uncertain than anything we’ve ever thought possible – it’s easier to ponder the far side of a nuclear war than the havoc that AI could wreak on society.
Do I sound like Chicken Little? I imagine I do. But I’ve spent the past few years watching the GOP responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, which pales in comparison to what comes next, and I’m currently watching a GOP majority in the US House imposing paralysis across the federal government (yet again). I’m trying to imagine them rising to the occasion, when the time comes to rewrite the Constitution in order to adapt our world to the silicon gods we’ve unleashed upon it.
And I’m just not feeling it...
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