Just a couple weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made conservatives cheer when he delivered a sharp rebuke to communism not only for the atrocities committed in its name, but for the picture of human life underlying it:
One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without—a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.
Communism, according to Rubio, would not be laudable if only we could make it work, because making it work would mean an end of great individual accomplishment and of the striving that brings romance and meaning to our lives.
The trouble is, as I was reading this, it did sound like a depiction of a very live ideology that is one of the most powerful forces in the United States today. I refer not to communism, but to the ideology of technological succession, or transhumanism, that is guiding our AI entrepreneurs. Every word of Rubio’s castigation of communism could apply even more fully to the views of an industry to which his administration is extremely close.
Communism is not going to overrun America, the recent electoral surge of the DSA notwithstanding. But the grand ambitions of our Silicon Valley tycoons very well may do so. For despite a recent attempt to turn the messaging more upbeat as AI takes a pummeling in public opinion, the fact is that the architects of artificial intelligence explicitly envision a world from which distinctions based on effort and ability are absent. Their stated mission is to create artificial general intelligence: an AI system that is more capable than human beings along most or all cognitive dimensions and that is able to perform the vast bulk of economically useful work. In other words, a world in which there is no opportunity for individuals to distinguish themselves via skill and effort, because these things will have been rendered irrelevant.
“These things will have been rendered irrelevant.”
This is the vision articulated in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace,” among many other works from this milieu—a vision that his colleague Jack Clark assures us is realizable by the end of this year. Elon Musk is slightly more modest (rare to say of him), for he claims that we’re a still few years away from AI that will be “unequivocally smarter than humans in every way,” meaning that “digital intelligence will exceed the sum of all human intelligence.” Going beyond the worst that anyone could allege of communism, our AI leadership envisions a world in which humanity no longer occupies the driver’s seat of history. A world of boredom, idleness, and mere consumption awaits us, for it is the machines that will henceforth solve all the problems we face.
The idea that human beings may soon be surpassed along every cognitive dimension seems too far-fetched to be true. But sadly, it is a very real possibility—as those who follow the astonishing progress that generative and agentic AI have made in the past few years are aware. For any skeptics, I recommend the journalist Garrison Lovely’s exhaustively researched forthcoming book, which documents what he aptly dubs the “obsoleting project” that animates our AI companies: the goal of discarding human labor of all kinds by producing more efficient AI systems. As Lovely shows, every AI leader has publicly spoken of the future they are bringing about as one in which there will be no place for human excellence, or even real human action. Amodei has been frank that what he is creating is “a general labor substitute for humans,” his own role as a tech CEO not excepted from this process of becoming an anachronism. As one OpenAI employee admitted last week: he “would prefer a world of rapid RSI [recursive self-improvement, where AI models train their own successors without any human involvement] and human disempowerment.” Next to the money and power and effectiveness of this project of technological replacement, communism in America barely registers.
Moreover, this vision of dispensing with human effort and activity is not just an ideology, but increasingly our reality. In my world of academia, we are witnessing with astonishing speed a world in which AI proliferates findings but discards the finders. In mathematics, the pace at which the latest AI models have improved has become almost a source of comedy on twitter, and has led a recent winner of the subject’s highest honor, the Fields medal, to declare that soon math as a field of human endeavor will be gone. (He has since decided to leave mathematics behind to work on AI safety.) Likewise, another leading light of mathematics suggests that the next time the quadrennial Fields is given, it will be the last, for by the early 2030s humans will simply be outcompeted across the board in mathematics. The pace of AI discoveries in the field was emblematized by the announcement that a two-decades-old problem was solved by ChatGPT while its user “took a nap.” This looks like a metaphor of intellectual life writ large going forward: miraculous results while humanity slumbers.
It is not just in pure math that AI is making significant inroads. Arguably the most important open problem in statistics was solved by GPT 5.6. Some academics believe that AI “can already do social science research better than most professors.” Likewise, leading commentators think the humanities are not far behind. One particular intellectual entrepreneur is certain that automation will imminently suffuse the process of composition for even the most accomplished writers—and happily, due to technological advances, this substitution of AI for human authorship will be completely undetectable. By some metrics AI is already outperforming doctors and lawyers. We may well be, many serious people think, in the twilight years of intellectual endeavor by “meatsuits” at all.
From my own experience, I have been astonished at the capacity of the latest models. While Claude can’t write papers that are at the top level yet, it can do frankly amazing things. I recently uploaded some relevant primary sources and prodded Claude a bit in the direction of an article I was intending to write, and I was amazed at how close its conclusions got, in a matter of minutes, to what I was intending to argue. It was phenomenally deflating. What was now the point of all the exertions for knowledge and know-how that had taken up countless years of my life? What do I still have to offer?—these were among the questions that occurred to me on this and other recent instances. In these feelings I am hardly alone, and when one allows that the tech, if allowed to proceed, is only going to improve, it is only a matter of time until everyone is asking themselves something similar in their own domains.
On our current trajectory, humanity’s intellectual horizon is set to shrink dramatically. What has begun in mathematics and academic work will not stay there—unless we move to pause frontier development imminently. For every problem solved by AI, that is one fewer arena in which a person, through their diligence and hard work and intellect, can shine. The idea that humans are great rational and cognitive beings, that we are not just a bundle of emotions and feelings, will itself fade into obscurity. The channels for the human mind to swim in will dry up, one-by-one—and perhaps much more quickly than we are prepared for. The opportunities for a man to feel the satisfaction of a “job well done” will disappear. As AI continues its stunning progress, the night comes when no man can work.
AI means the death of authorship—and of the inspiration that work which you know reflects human achievement, and human competence, provides to all who read it. We will increasingly become mere “prompters,” at best “collaborators” with the machine. As sci-fi as it sounds, we are already well on our way to becoming mere interchangeable vessels for ChatGPT’s accomplishments and insights. The awe that we feel in reflecting on an Einstein or a Dostoevsky, we will feel toward no one again; Claude cannot be someone’s hero. The whole concept of a “life’s work” that belongs to a great progenitor of ideas is under threat; soon we may have less reason to care who “wrote” a paper with an AI’s help or who inaugurated a theory by prompting Claude than we do about who was riding Secretariat when he won his triple crown.
So far, the progress of science, the accomplishments of literature, have gone hand-in-hand with the formation of scientists and writers. But that consonance between human type and achieving a result has now been broken. The future we are looking at is one of more science but fewer, or no, scientists. Astrophysics without astrophysicists, history without historians—this is the future. But this is a deeply sad future, for what we have wanted from these fields—and many more, including law and medicine and government—is not just a set of outcomes, but the production of a kind of person who we think is valuable, and therefore the realization of a form of flourishing. We have always wanted to produce not just poetry, but poets; not just education, but teachers; not just policy, but statesmen; not just films, but actors; not just music, but musicians. A chatbot cannot love knowledge or feel the weight of responsibility for a domain or discipline; it is not one of us whom we can admire and emulate. Who cares if AI delivers discoveries that surpass our understanding, or generates reams of new historical writing but in so doing saps our ability to cherish and devote ourselves to history? Such a stance of devotion is itself only possible through the long grappling and struggle that AI will extinguish.
This dawn of the AI age has made it painfully clear to me that what moves me is not raw output but the human effort to find new truths, follow through in difficult undertakings, master a craft. If one looks at biopics of politicians, artists, inventors, it is evident that this human-all-too-human-drama is what most of us care about most deeply. As we produce various results and effects in the world, we are also shaping ourselves, carrying out a valuable life’s work. But all this will be gone if AI keeps marching forward. For every time a prompt is given to AI that results in a problem being solved, humanity (including the prompter) has been robbed of the chance to solve it on its own, and to display virtues and excellences along the way.
Consider what becomes of philosophy under the reign of AI. For philosophy is not just a set of conclusions, but a way of life. Etymologically, philosophy refers to the love of wisdom. In this sense no matter how elegant and cogent its interventions, Grok can never be a philosopher, for it cannot have that disposition of love, it cannot have a will to live according to the truth. So as AI advances we won’t have philosophy without philosophers; philosophy will simply die, whatever tonnage of words on the subject the machines keep churning out.
A final way to think about the tragedy of AI advancing beyond us is that it spells the end of the possibility of having a vocation. That we are elevated above mere animalistic consumption by consistent work in a calling is one of the deepest features of civilized life; far from belonging only to geniuses, many who toil in complete anonymity get much of their satisfaction and sense of self from feeling that they are making a contribution through their work. As soon as AI gets the better of us, though, that feeling will be an unsustainable illusion; if one can press the enter key and get the same or better outcomes, then no one will be able to sustain the conception that their work matters. For it is the characteristic of a vocation that the moral goods it brings are what the philosopher Jon Elster calls “states that are essentially byproducts.” A surgeon gets a great sense of purpose from his work because he believes he is actually healing the sick. If he practiced surgery, however, directly to gain a sense of purpose and without any concern about his own efficacy in making us healthy, he would fail to gain such contentment. To engage in something without thinking the outcome makes a difference is to enter the realm of play, of hobbies and games—which is what a number of commentators think is all that will be left to human beings in the AI age. As the journalist Jasmine Sun puts it, due to the progress of AI “everything is going to become a little bit more like playing board games soon.” The work ethic, the conviction that through your labor you are making a mark on the world, are contributing to creating some important results—this will be the first casualty of an age in which AI exceeds human capabilities.
“Human beings weren’t made to have only hobbies.”
Human beings weren’t made to have only hobbies. We need, even more, to have vocations. The nature of the latter is that the pleasure comes not merely from the doing itself but from the idea that one is making a real contribution—in theological language, that God called you to it because your work there was necessary. But as soon as the machines can do what we do better than we ourselves can, the conditions for our having a vocation cease to exist. Instead, we will have only play, mere amusements—we will be like pets, as the economist Noah Smith says. This would be the biggest change in the history of the species, and would mark a demoralization far greater than anything that communism caused. It would truly be a world that is “small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble.” And it very well may come, and come soon, unless we consciously stop it.