Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror. Some observers have suggested that opposition to AI is due to poor PR from industry leaders. If tech titans hadn’t been so convinced that boasting of their apocalyptic powers was the best way to raise capital, the argument goes, then the American public would be on board. Chinese public opinion, for instance, is considerably more favorable.
But these discrepancies can be read another way. The taste for liberty is not independent of culture and history. China has not known freedom for some time, but citizens of the United States have a long experience of it. It is a testament to Americans’ retention of the spirit of liberty that they mistrust AI so much. The various gripes against AI are manifestations of a largely inarticulate intuition that its widespread adoption cannot be reconciled with a free society. Americans are groping toward the realization that, even if AI does not end life on earth, it will destroy our way of life.
In order to make the case against AI, one need only quote the industry’s leaders. They have foretold the creation of a “permanent underclass” once AI agents (imminently, they think) surpass us in all cognitive capacities, and have long warned that misaligned AI could even lead to the extinction of humanity. This is a far cry from anything America has seen before from its captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie never promised to bring on the apocalypse. While industry leaders have softened their rhetoric of late, now disavowing the goal of complete human economic obsolescence, the major AI corporations remain officially committed to the development of artificial general intelligence, defined as an AI system that “outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” Already, AI is outpacing what humans can do in many research areas, and AI-generated text and music are overwhelming the digital landscape.
It is impossible to know what will actually come to pass. But given the extraordinary pace at which the technology is progressing, it would be foolish to underrate AI’s disruptive capacity. The present moment is awash in schemes for regulating AI, some in radical ways. Plans for partial nationalization of the AI companies, endorsed by figures from right-populist guru Steve Bannon to leftist hero Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.); Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R.-Tenn.) sketch of regulations that will protect “children, creators, conservatives, and communities”; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D.-NY) proposed moratorium on data center construction; the Trump administration’s recent interventions to halt the distribution of new models deemed to jeopardize national security; the escalating calls for an international treaty to ban superintelligence—these are all salutary signs of an awakening to the threats that AI poses.
And yet even these critics do not seem fully to reckon with the fact that AI portends not merely adverse economic or security impacts, but an irrevocable change in human life. Even now, AI is having deleterious effects that legislation to redistribute income or transfer control of the technology will do little to address. In particular, the most vocal skeptics have not fully reckoned with how anthropomorphic AI—models that mimic human personality traits, emotional states, and patterns of thought, as currently commercially available generative AI models do—is currently in the process of unsettling human psychology and the social fabric.
“There are also good reasons to oppose generative AI as we already know it.”
In other words, the present AI resistance speaks almost entirely of preventing risks still to come. But there are also good reasons to oppose generative AI as we already know it. It is necessary to oppose not just what AI may become and will likely do to the country, but what it is now and is already doing to our society.
Given what we have already seen of AI, we can be confident that its widespread adoption will create a less free society, a less virtuous people, and a degraded culture. A movement recognizing these facts would not call merely for caution and regulation, but for limiting the diffusion throughout civil society of anthropomorphic AI that competes with human authors and artists in creating new text, audio, and images, and for ending the pursuit of superintelligence.
So far, opponents of AI have overwhelmingly focused on predicting its economic effects. But AI is more than just another industrial revolution. It is—already—a moral and cosmological cataclysm. For generative AI has done nothing less than change the place of human beings in the cosmos. More than the printing press or the internet, perhaps more than anything since the rise of agriculture, AI alters the relationship of human beings to their world by undermining our status as the distinctive bearers of language. While Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis have both pointed to the loss of control of our destiny as one of AI’s great risks, no leader has yet reckoned with how astonishing it is that the only form of general intelligence in our world is no longer human intelligence, nor contended with the truth that widespread interaction with machines endowed with conversational language abilities and superhuman cognitive power is the greatest social-psychological experiment the species has ever run. AI skeptics by and large have not focused on the loss of human distinctiveness that large language models have brought about, nor have they gamed out all the ways in which, even if (an unlikely proposition) “safety” could be guaranteed, moral and cultural harms will ensue from its rise.
AI should worry those of all ideological stripes, but it is notable how muted conservatives have been on the subject. For not merely the prospect of superintelligence, but also the present widespread deployment of anthropomorphic AI, threaten the things that conservatives profess to hold dearest: capitalism, the work ethic, personal responsibility, individual freedom, and common-sense moral standards.
Although Americans have not looked kindly on the rise of AI, no organized movement has yet developed against it. One reason for this, perhaps, is the cult of the new, which is the closest thing to an American civic religion that still exists. This penchant for exaltation of novelties is, curiously, reinforced by an equally powerful tendency to deny that there is anything new under the sun. Libertarian-leaning thinkers in particular defend their embrace of anthropomorphic AI by deriding critics as Luddites and chiding them for giving off the “same energy” as people who shut down nuclear power plants and would have resisted the steam engine had they been alive for the industrial revolution.
But there are, in fact, new things under the sun, and generative AI is one of them. Critics of AI are not arguing against the latest auto transmission or better solar panels. There is a difference in kind between a technology that makes material processes more efficient in some discrete domain of activity (as previous innovations did), and one expected to surpass all humans in creative and cognitive capacity.
The line of defense that likens AI to prior industrial advances and insists it is a “normal technology” requires adopting a patronizing attitude toward the industry’s own leaders, who do not believe that they are merely bringing about a new industrial revolution, but who instead think they are developing a technology that will cause an even more far-reaching set of societal changes and indeed even alter (or displace) human nature itself. The implicit suggestion is that the reason we should take a hands-off approach to AI is that the sector’s own leading figures are so deluded as to misunderstand what they are up to.
Claims based on analogies to the history of economic innovation function as a genre of moral blackmail, an insinuation that having objections to AI is equivalent to wanting to give up on modern medicine or mass production. Fortunately, most Americans are able to make common-sense distinctions. That we managed to adapt in the past (often with much greater hardship than we now recognize) to railroads and factories and telephones gives us no reason to be sanguine about the effects of this unique technology on our society.
Instead of deferring to novelty, it is our duty as citizens to evaluate new technologies with as much skepticism as we do new policy proposals. Perhaps the most astonishing technical feat of modern bioscience is the development of the capacity to clone humans, but regulations and social conventions severely limit the practice. We could increase GDP by rescinding environmental standards of a century ago or by relegalizing child labor, but we rightly do neither. There are more goods in life than increased productive capacity, and there’s no more reason to imagine that every technological development or economic initiative will benefit us than to think that every new political or moral idea is correct. There is no way around judging the value of each innovation for its own sake. That is what democratic citizenship demands of us.
Unfortunately, AI-critical argumentation has been flawed. The same progressives who have led the charge against AI have recently embraced degrowth ideas, and have even held up the very idea of economic progress as a pernicious myth. Claiming that AI will consume too many resources or cause unacceptable environmental harm reflects this tendency—and is empirically overblown. Likewise, progressives have expressed their concerns about AI in an anti-capitalist idiom. All of this makes it easy for AI apologists to portray any critique of AI as issuing from a general hostility to business success and an insatiable appetite for regulation. To most Americans, this mindset is perverse and alienating. What is needed is an anti-AI movement that accords with broadly held American values.
“Sanders and others are right to frame AI as endangering democracy.”
It would be wrong, though, to be too hard on progressives. They are coming to the fore, and they do have a few resonant themes to play upon. For years now, progressivism has conflated ordinary policy disagreements with threats to democracy. Here, however, their diagnosis is apt. Sanders and others are right to frame AI as endangering democracy.
Democracy simply cannot survive if the economic contributions of most people are rendered irrelevant, an eventuality which AI leaders foresee and have often seemed to revel in. In a world of robot soldiers of the sort some AI champions envision, in which the willingness of the average citizen to fight and die for his country is no longer necessary to the well-being of the state and national elites, there will be much less reason for governments to accord citizens rights. Along similar lines, artificial general intelligence creates a technological version of the “resource curse”—the theory that abundant natural resources can impede countries from democratizing and modernizing because they provide a source of revenue independent of the need to tax productive, laboring citizens. If citizens no longer have economic or military value, they will become subjects.
If AI swallows the rest of the economy, then either the AI companies will directly rule us, supplanting the traditional state (a prospect about which some of their promoters fantasize), or the state will be able to extract more revenue from the companies than from taxing citizens. In either case, normal people will have less of a claim on the concern of those who govern them.
Moreover, while Tech Right leaders such as Elon Musk used to complain about censorship and cancel culture, it’s clear already that AI is a far more powerful technology for the suppression of unwanted expression than social media algorithms. Its ability to identify and track speakers across platforms will make anonymity impossible, and the inevitable encoding of bias and partiality into its models pose great threats to discursive freedom. If free speech is an integral part of democracy, then we have good reason to fear AI.
Progressives are hardly responsible for the current administration’s accelerationism. Ostensibly, America’s conservative party is in power. But the Trump administration’s firm embrace—at least until its recent haphazard actions—of AI accelerationism shows how weak a political force conservatism really is in American life. While much of the American populace retains a kind of instinctive conservatism, this hardly registers on actual policymaking. Social conservatives tend to be reluctant to empower the government, partly due to a justified perception that public services and regulations skew leftward sooner or later. But without conservatives in the coalition, the possibility of an anti-AI movement with broad appeal is negligible. It is conservatives who have the intellectual resources to articulate a resistance to AI that eschews degrowth and climate doomerism and appeals to time-honored American values.
In our present context, a conservative antagonism to AI would be based entirely on it being a special technology. It would not be about the inherent evil of billionaires, or about capitalism being a depraved system, or a comprehensive distrust of new technologies that improve our lives. It would be grounded entirely in the disjunction between generative AI and other innovations, and on the unlikelihood, with this sui generis technology advancing so quickly and unpredictably, that suitable brakes and recalibrations could be applied at the critical juncture.
The obvious conservative response to a technology whose downsides are unfathomable is suppression, not encouragement. “Move fast and break things” might be an ethos conservatism can accept when the object being broken is the B2B SaaS status quo. But it cannot do so when the objects in question are human intelligence, sociability, agency, and existence. And precisely because conservatives distrust the capacity of regulators to be effective and impartial, they cannot consistently take a wait-and-see approach to an innovation with such evident downsides. The perversity of government regulation is axiomatic to modern American conservatism. From this perspective, the hope that a future government can establish effective “guardrails” to AI deployment must look naïve. The idea of letting artificial intelligence advance and then regulating it later is not Burkean prudence, but technocratic hubris. The appropriate conservative response is rejection, not regulatory fiddling.
For as long as there has been institutional conservatism, its primary purpose has been to speak for those who are “fundamentally happy” with the social order, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington put it; the heart of conservatism is “enjoyment” of the present, as the great Victorian writer Walter Bagehot observed. For this reason, the characteristic fault of conservatives is to be too complacent about injustice, to mistake mere vested interests or ill-gotten advantages for essential parts of the national heritage. But at the very least, this disposition should insulate conservatives from the typical error of the left, which is to rush into untried experiments from a failure to appreciate what we have.
Anyone who thinks our present society has so little to recommend it that it is worth taking existential gambles with AI is not a conservative. This is why the tech industry has been for most of its history aligned with the left. Silicon Valley has long sought to transform the human condition, which it sees as riddled with imperfections that need to be overcome. It is no coincidence that Clinton and Obama identified with the supposed liberatory potential of the internet and social media, and that tech supported them back. One would expect those who saw the country as irredeemably unjust, rather than those who believe it a place of freedom and goodness, to be the ones making a risky bet on AI.
“Conservatives view sudden change as something to be lamented.”
Even the rate at which new AI models are being released on the consumer market reflects a problem from a conservative standpoint. Conservatives view sudden change as something to be lamented, for it unsettles those traditions and habits on which human beings depend to orient themselves morally. They are sensitive to the importance of being “at home” in one’s society in order to live well. A home can preserve its identity while having a new wing added on, a new roof put in, the kitchen renovated, and so on over decades of being lived in, but it can’t survive being burned down overnight and replaced with an entirely new structure.
The industrial revolution shook all Western societies to their roots and disrupted citizens’ sense of everything from the proper organization of society to the purposes of human life. And that disruption played out over decades, amid a great deal of trial and error as people sought to achieve justice and social peace in the context of modern industry. By contrast, today we have arguably our most influential economist warning people to “work harder” right now to avoid falling victim to the potentially imminent bottoming out of the value of human labor. Even if one bets against the most drastic scenarios coming to pass, there is still reason for concern over the pace of change. The fact that a momentous shock comes from technology, as opposed to natural disaster or ideological insurgency or political revolution, should not make it any more tolerable to conservative eyes.
Already, anxiety about the pace of AI progress is spreading. Of course, change is inevitable. But this does not negate the fact that radical uncertainty about the future is one of the most appalling conditions for human beings to find themselves in. Indeed, any student of political theory knows that this is one of the ills which the state itself exists to prevent. The foundations of modern political philosophy lie in the idea of escaping the state of nature, one of the primary ills of which is that the absence of civil authority makes it impossible to engage in any long-term projects because the future is so unclear. In this light, allowing rapid, unpredictable technological and economic revolutions to befall the citizenry should be seen as a sign of state failure no less than losing the monopoly on physical force or ceding control of territory.
As was well-captured in a speech by the Berkeley statistician Will Fithian, the breakneck pace of AI development is already fraying the ties between parent and child, between established and rising cohorts. Young people have little idea if the preparations they have made for life will prove pertinent, and those further on in life who are supposed to occupy the position of mentors have little clue what wisdom they might offer to those on the come-up. In academia, counsel to the next generation already seems futile. It is a psychic wound not to be able to pass on advice, and to doubt whether anything from your own experience will be relevant to the world your kids will inherit. AI progress has created the moral and psychological equivalent of trying to drive in a dense fog.
Preserving the conditions for the intergenerational transmission of wisdom has been a cardinal goal of conservatism since its inception. AI is on the cusp of confronting us with the same crisis that Burke believed the French Revolution had brought upon Europe: “the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”
American conservatism has always framed itself as the party of liberty and personal responsibility. But rapid technological change makes a mockery of the idea that we are living autonomous, self-directed lives. To make a reasonable choice, one has to have some sense of what the future holds. Fumbling about in the dark is not freedom, even if the government is not directly responsible for turning the lights off. Picking between door one and door two when one has no sense of what might lie behind them is not liberty. Where the future becomes opaque, the moral difference between free and compelled choices vanishes. Democracies that celebrate themselves for securing personal freedom must therefore act to prevent abrupt technological discontinuities. Likewise, conservatives who believe in upholding individuals’ responsibility for how their lives go cannot allow the social preconditions that make such responsibility possible to disappear.
Any real democracy contains an intrinsically conservative element, because democracy means the people doesn’t just get run over by the future. As social democrats do not wish for the market to override the interests of the public, so a democratic conservative wishes to protect the public from those who claim that there is no alternative but to barrel ahead along some course of social or technological change. If the ability to say no to what some powerful faction—be it an industrial or an ideological one—considers progress is taken away, we are no longer in a democratic order.
Although the Republican Party not long ago favored less restrictive immigration policies, conservatives have come around to Trump’s appeals on immigration because they recognize in rapid demographic change a threat to the American way of life. One can hardly expect cultural continuity when an unprecedented proportion of residents were not raised in that culture. Many old-school liberals also acknowledge that mass immigration has a highly disorienting effect. But new technology can be even more destabilizing, rendering society unrecognizable even more than does the onrush of many new arrivals.
By the same token, social conservatives should see that the transhumanism in which many AI developers believe is even more repugnant to the way of life they seek to protect than is transgenderism. And Republican politicians should note that if they force the electorate to choose between these two trans ideologies, enforced pronoun usage and mastectomies on confused teenagers may well come roaring back. Whatever else a government is, if it cheers the end of humans’ status as the most creative, productive beings on the planet, it’s not conservative. But that is the avowed goal of many in the AI industry. Faced with these truly species-altering challenges, allowing this industry to proceed and then figuring out a way to regulate it later or coax it to “be moral” is a proposition no conservative should entertain.
Anyone who believes in the value of capitalism, as American conservatives do, should look on AI skeptically. The Tech Right’s leading figures floridly hate “commies,” and paint opponents of AI as just the latest installment of a perennial anticapitalist resentment of success. Yet the closer we get to the AI corporations’ explicit goal of superintelligence, the greater the likelihood that capitalism as we know it vanishes. One can see this in the promises from Musk himself that once AI imminently transcends human capacities, most people will need to be sustained by a universal basic income. Or take the various suggestions that, when it becomes economically inefficient to continue with human labor, the government should enforce a jobs guarantee to make sure we can all continue to earn a paycheck.
In such projections, we see a revival of the formative promise of socialism, going back to the Revolutions of 1848: government provision of work, irrespective of market demand. In either case, a bedrock of the capitalist system—that the principal portion of economic activity is carried on via a free market in labor, with remuneration set by the market—will cease. Market-based wages and salaries would cease to be the most important vehicle for the distribution of income. That would be the death knell of capitalism.
There’s a reason that one hears only of fully automated luxury communism—it’s because fully automated luxury capitalism is a contradiction in terms. The Tech Right seems to think that economic growth and economic freedom march in tandem, but this is just a pious incantation. The idea that economic development always favors freer markets is historically untrue. Marx was wrong, in the mid-nineteenth century, to expect that capitalism would imminently fall to proletarian revolution; but he was not wrong in expecting that the great increase in the scale of industry would mean that the laissez-faire of early industrialism would not be sustained. In every country that has modernized, economic growth has involved an increase in state intervention. As a society gets richer, the relationship between different interests become more complicated and the potential for catastrophically harmful economic activity grows—and the state has to grow, and indeed historically has grown, to meet these challenges.
“America’s loudest anti-communists might wind up proving Marx right.”
To listen to the Tech Right, you would think that Marx and his disciples predicted that capitalism would simply sputter out impotently. But in fact, early Marxists argued that capitalism would be destroyed by its own success—it would become too productive to persist. Ironically, America’s loudest anti-communists might wind up proving Marx right. Indeed, Marx thought that the perfection of machines—the goal of AI entrepreneurs—was one way capitalism might come to an end. As he wrote in the late 1850s:
to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labor time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. Real wealth manifests itself … in the monstrous disproportion between the labor time applied, and its product … Labor no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself … The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth … With that, production based on exchange value breaks down.
Here Marx is predicting that capitalism will end when technology has attained such efficiency that all jobs except those of—to use today’s parlance—“humans in the loop” have disappeared.
Marx’s vision is not far from the one industry leaders such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have enunciated. Amodei’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace,” for instance, has nothing to do with the history of liberal, capitalist, or conservative ideas, but instead belongs squarely within the socialist tradition. It depicts a world from which the essential features of liberal capitalism—competition, the striving to acquire through one’s own efforts, the postponing of short-term interests to long-term projects, the work ethic, deliberation among contending interests for how to address externalities—are absent. Our cares have vanished; differences in skill, devotion, and frugality make no mark on our fates, since the machines provide everything. It is a vision of perfectly equal ease. Indeed, our very individuality seems to have vanished. Since everyone is a recipient of constant bot-based welfare, it’s unclear how the experiences through which personality is forged would take place. Amodei’s objective of “a country of geniuses in a data center” that will perform unimaginable feats without our needing to contribute anything is fully automated luxury communism taken to a hitherto unimagined extreme; it is the apotheosis of the long literature of utopian socialism. And it is an open announcement of our replacement as world-making agents.
If the right accuses the left of seeking to import a new electorate because they’ve tired of the native one, then how much louder should be the condemnation of a project that explicitly seeks to found a new world in which we will no longer need to abide the decisions made by the imperfect intellects of our frail species?
The idea that the world could become too wealthy and efficient for capitalism isn’t exclusively a socialist one. David Hume, a decisive influence on Adam Smith’s economics, made a similar point a century prior to Marx. Hume, who was the furthest thing from a communist, recognized that justice—by which he meant the enforcement of the package of property rights on which commercial capitalism rested—would cease to be relevant if there were “profuse abundance of all external conveniencies.” A “partition of goods” would be unjustifiable, Hume thought, if prosperity appeared as it were as a gift of God (or a God-machine, as the AI worshippers would see it), unmediated by human effort. In this case, the “cautious, jealous virtue of justice” would not be tolerated once it had been made “useless” by a world without scarcity.
One can think as well here of the greatest political philosopher of private property, John Locke, for whom property was justified by the fact that the earth was not spontaneously bountiful and we instead had to work to find prosperity. Indeed, most Christian thinkers have held that in the Garden of Eden there would have been no private property. Capitalism and private property find their fundamental justifications in their claim to be the superior way of managing production and distribution in conditions of scarcity, which make human industriousness and intelligence central factors in the production of wealth. What the AI apostles promise us—a world in which what humans do matters less and less for the planet’s economic output, asymptotically approaching zero—is a kind of machine-based Eden. Perhaps some find this outcome desirable, but it is the antithesis of capitalism. A system in which effort is completely detached from reward means the economy has become a mere game of entitlements and incumbency. That’s an unattractive proposition, and certainly not a capitalist one.
There is no reason, moreover, to think that Smith, Hume, or other classical liberals would conclude that AI must be welcomed just because it would make us richer. People do not just want to be rich; they also want valuable things to do with themselves, they want their efforts to make a difference, even if a small one, in the shape of their world. We are now well past the level of general wealth at which John Maynard Keynes presumed we would have more or less stopped working. But we have not. Striving, the urge to make something of oneself, the creative spirit that underlies even much of the drudgework in entrepreneurial and professional occupations—these continue to animate millions of our fellow citizens even as we have become unimaginably richer, along many dimensions, than our forebears were.
None of this would have surprised the leading lights of the classical liberal tradition. Its great thinkers never imagined that the commitment to capitalism meant embracing growth without any regard to moral consequences. Quite the opposite. The heroic age of liberal theorizing from roughly the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century featured abundant appeals to the moral good that a market system produced. Capitalism was not affirmed by them as a morally agnostic system of maximizing production. Indeed, modern capitalism came about in a time when there was intense debate about whether or not moral progress proceeded in tandem with economic and technical advance, and the great figures on the side of what would come to be called capitalism—Smith, Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire—argued full-throatedly that it would improve morals. They took for granted that if it did not, then getting richer would not compensate for that loss. A capitalist economy, they thought, encouraged the growth of independent and upright agents, providing opportunities for them to pursue their life-projects in a non-zero-sum manner and affording myriad venues for the display of human excellence and the development of our capacities. Optimism that economic expansion facilitated the development of such virtues as trustworthiness, cooperativeness, reliability, creativity, tolerance, and honesty came to be called the theory of doux commerce.
Morally inflected defenses of capitalism have been with us ever since. Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the other twentieth-century champions of capitalism also adopted robustly moral language. Friedman’s most popular book is called Capitalism and Freedom, its title appealing to the most potent value in the Western arsenal. Great theorists of capitalism never suggested that support for it required accepting technological or other developments that compromised our freedom or the conditions in which we could achieve a good character.
Conservatism, likewise, has never been an alibi for capitalism at all costs. In Europe, the Christian Democratic parties after World War II sought to defeat communism but also to shape capitalist development in such a way as would strengthen the civic fabric and accord with Christian teaching. In America, neoconservative theorists such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell refused to identify fully with the cause of capitalism, with Kristol asserting that capitalism only warranted “two cheers” because its modern corporate version had many lamentable qualities and Bell worrying that consumerism undermined the restraint and industry on which capitalism’s productive side depended. Capitalists and conservatives have nonetheless often been aligned because they both feared dependence on an overmighty state and abhorred radical egalitarianism.
None of the lineages of modern conservative thought can be reasonably enlisted on behalf of the total automation of economic life. Giving greater priority to economic growth over other concerns was more justifiable in our impoverished past than it is today. The goal in our already wealthy modern America should be to conceive of and develop a humane capitalism. Rather than barreling down the path of a technology whose effects are uncertain at best and catastrophic at worst, conservatives and liberals alike should be seeking to come up with platforms to spread property as widely as possible, and to secure rewards to those who are conscientious savers and investors. The goal should be a property-owning democracy, not a system of widespread dependence, however lavish. Even the best-case scenario of artificial superintelligence, government-distributed UBI, should be dismissed as inconsistent with our dignity as a species whose telos is to produce and achieve rather than merely to consume.
If capitalism won’t survive artificial superintelligence, neither will another supposed American value: individualism. The Tech Right has often denounced individualism’s opposite, the collectivism whose supposed warmth was recently celebrated by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But if by individualism we mean people’s freedom to go their own way, to think their own thoughts, to chart their own paths without undue pressure or surveillance to bend themselves to fit the prevailing patterns, then AI will be the most formidable antagonist this value has found.
“AI is a flattener and a homogenizer.”
AI is a flattener and a homogenizer. Its answers are grounded in statistical inferences about likely—which is to say, average—human speech given the context. One can see the threat to individuality even in many of the more optimistic responses to AI. Some have predicted that AI can combat misinformation and conspiracy theories by speaking as an authoritative voice that discounts extreme or unrepresentative views. One can frame this as a boon for technocracy if one wishes, but it is also a blow to the individualist ethos that shudders at equating the modal point of conventional wisdom with the truth. This is especially worrying since, as we have noted above, even those who should know better have bene unable to resist the lure of treating the chatbot as an omniscient, benevolent friend rather than a model trained on data that can be biased in innumerable ways. The digital world has already proven an extraordinary engine of conformity, facilitating debanking, surveillance, and viral mobs that ruin people’s lives for wrongspeech. This is nothing compared with the power of AI to put out of play enormous swathes of human knowledge and belief, to make them seem as if they don’t even exist, and to naturalize a very partial view of the world until it seems an unquestionable consensus.
Indeed, when one looks ahead at generations who will have lacked a pre-AI formation, it is difficult not to be filled with despair. There is no greater threat to the individual’s intellectual sovereignty—and thereby, to his moral integrity—than reliance on AI chatbots. I have been troubled to learn of students who are reliant on AI not just for factual information but for matters that go to the very heart of one’s personality. I teach political philosophy, a discipline that raises questions that no one can answer but oneself. These are what the great philosopher John Rawls called “the burdens of judgment”: questions for which there is more than one plausible answer, and we have to look into our souls to discover what convinces us. Is equality more important than liberty? How much of the latter might be worth sacrificing to achieve more of the former? And what is freedom anyway? Outsourcing these questions to AI is not just “cognitive surrender,” but moral surrender. Taking the shortcut deters us from ever learning the harder pleasures of the long road. If all this is not the converse of any attractive conception of individualism, it is hard to see what would be.
With the ability to command an authoritative-sounding answer to any question at an instant, we are at risk of losing what has been, since Socrates, the first of the intellectual virtues: that of knowing what you don’t know. The ease with which the surface of knowledge can be called up will mean that fewer and fewer people actually know what it is really to know something, and conversely, will erase from the realm of human experience that salutary mistrust of oneself that comes from feeling that one does not really grasp something. Digital technology, by reducing friction and offering instant gratification across a wide set of tasks, had already made it easy for us to do things that we know in the long run are worse for us. Since its explosion in the ’90s, tech has done more than any other industry to prove the biblical apothegm about the weakness of the flesh overriding even the finest of minds. With seeming omniscience in our pockets all the time, we will become an unknowing but arrogant, impudent, incurious appendage to the machines that do the thinking for us. We will know far less, but in the instant we have called up an answer from ChatGPT, even for subjects of which we hadn’t previously given the faintest study, we will feel infallible. A culture of obstreperous self-certainty coupled with underlying ignorance is what AI has us headed for. For intellectual life, AI is like the picture of Dorian Gray, making us look good on the outside while hiding the extent to which we are fundamentally atrophying.
Of course, even if it is far from enhancing individualism, AI is nevertheless intensely individualizing. By bringing down the cost of generating intellectual and cultural products, it promises to allow every person to have their tiniest inclination catered to. Claude is like a genie who grants you infinite wishes when it comes to listening, watching, reading. Like the king in Le Petit Prince who rules an empty planet, we will each have our own unique Libraries of Alexandria, with collections completely tailored to our own requests.
Which is to say, AI may well eliminate—it is already on the way to eliminating—any common culture. All that will be left are isolated nodes of individual whim, themselves shaped by a prior cultural legacy that becomes ever more attenuated every day. Everyone will have his own bespoke series of romantasy slop or manual listing “rules for life” in a hectoring voice, and reading material shared with others will become a memory.
After dispatching a common culture—which can after all contain within it many conflicts of value and many character-types—the tendency of AI will be toward the hegemony of a single ideology. Beyond the potential for ideological lock-in, there will be a narrowing of intellectual range and field of vision. AI is already affecting prose style, shrinking the amazing variegation of human expressiveness to a machinelike uniformity. The gap between AI and human beings will grow, not only because AI keeps getting better with every new iteration, but also because we become ever smaller creatures.
None of this probable future of simultaneously greater atomization and greater conformity should appeal to liberals, let alone conservatives. Liberalism, after all, seeks a balance between the claims of community and those of individuality. A perfect liberal society would be one where we all swim in the same cultural sea, though the waters replenish and the tide is not so strong that each of us cannot swim out in our own direction. What AI portends, on the contrary, is a future in which we are each stuck in parallel but nonconnecting bodies of water, but the current in each only goes the same way. We will be more alike than ever, but also more alone.
The greatest figures in the liberal tradition—thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill—were terrified of the sorts of scenarios that might face us in the near future. While they of course did not envision superintelligent machines, they were worried that certain characteristics of democratic modernity—love of ease and need for comfort; dislike of uncertainty and doubt; impatience with projects that take time and effort to mature; indifference to second-order consequences as a result of demands for instant gratification—would lead democratic citizens unknowingly to give away their freedom and lose their social bonds.
Tocqueville, for instance, was terrified that consumerism and shortsighted self-interest, combined with the democratic presumption that everyone’s opinion must be roughly as good as everyone else’s, would lead to a situation in which there was conformity but no solidarity, a world of identical strangers. Into the void left by the absence of organic communal ties, a powerful bureaucracy would grow up that would take care of everything for us. It would look out for our interests, but in so doing would also deprive us of our freedom. What was to be feared from such a situation of soft, bureaucratic despotism was not cruelty or depravity, but that social life will become “regimented, programmed, and meticulous as in an army barracks”—that eccentricity and initiative would vanish, and that we would lose the inclination to think for ourselves.
Mill had an even more apt way of describing the pitfalls of benevolent despotism:
[Imagine] one man of superhuman mental activity managing the entire affairs of a mentally passive people….What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen? What development can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?
Wherever the sphere of action of human beings is artificially circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed and dwarfed in the same proportion. The food of feeling is action … Let a person have nothing to do for his country, and he will not care for it … One of the benefits of freedom is that under it the ruler cannot pass by the people’s minds, and amend their affairs for them without amending them … Any education which aims at making human beings other than machines, in the long run makes them claim to have the control of their own actions.
We now in fact do have the prospect of turning over our affairs to entities of “superhuman mental activity.” It is clear what our great philosophers of liberal democracy would have thought of the prospect. Mill ended the sacred text of liberalism, On Liberty, with a haunting warning:
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill … in the details of business: a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished: and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
These are not the words of an anything-goes libertarian. If you substitute “technology” for “state,” the peril we’re now facing is evident.
I agree with many conventional liberals that the state has limited ability to create meaning for people. However, it does have the negative ability to combat the onset of situations in which our capacity to live meaningfully is severely reduced. That is what it can do by restricting anthropomorphic AI use in civil society. A wealthier world but a more thoughtless and less self-reliant humanity is not what the liberal tradition dictates we support.
It isn’t just Marx who might be belatedly vindicated by generative AI. It may also prove the prescience of another dyspeptic social theorist in the Western canon. Recent discussions around AI have shown how eerily trenchant was the Enlightenment’s enfant terrible, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who shocked his fellow philosophes with his strident denial that moral progress and material progress proceeded in tandem. Rousseau leveled two fundamental charges against the latter. It limited our freedom, and it undermined our morality.
To the first point: One of the things that Rousseau, like later critics of technology, intuited is that many kinds of technology do not simply add a new choice-set atop an otherwise steady civic architecture. The automobile opened whole new vistas of possibility by allowing us to go farther faster, but as a result of its arrival, whole types of towns and cities are no longer built much private property had to be commandeered to create a new transport infrastructure, and a massive new host of regulations had to be introduced. Important technologies don’t simply give us one more option. Instead, they alter the fabric of society and disrupt the old equilibria around which moral expectations had developed. Are we freer after the internet? It is hard to know how to approach such a question. Certainly, greater possibilities have opened up for conducting commerce and transmitting information and connecting with those far away. But there are many things one never does or says now from the fear of being recorded; there is a palpable feeling of constant inhibition in social life as a result of the way in which the internet has shrunk the world (“the global village,” a terrifying idea that many somehow found liberating) and enabled the collapse of crucial context around events; our privacy is constantly intruded on; the expectations for our being available to employers or clients have radically altered such that the boundary between work and life has dissolved in many professions; the dopamine hit of social media has created a powerful new addiction and diminished our control over our own attention.
Technology expands our productive powers, but it often also diminishes the ways available to us to live. One can opt out of using a dryer (most of Europe does) if you have an atavistic longing for hanging clothes on a line; but you cannot be a solvent, self-sustaining person and opt out of the digital panopticon.
“New technologies of great power have a profoundly forcing effect.”
More generally, a reason that technology often constricts our freedom is that its adoption is not really voluntary. New technologies of great power have a profoundly forcing effect. Even if the vast majority of people would prefer for a new technology never to have come into existence—as I suspect is the case with the smartphone—there are crippling collective action problems to getting rid of it. In some cases, it takes only a few people to begin using a technology for everyone else to be effectively compelled to take it up in order to participate fully in civil society, whether they hate it or not. As late as fifteen years ago, only a third of American mobile phone owners had a smartphone. Within a decade, it would be effectively impossible to hold many jobs or go to many schools without one, not only due to new social norms but also to formal barriers like two-factor authentication to access university or corporate equipment. Working-age Americans today are effectively not free not to own a smartphone, no matter that Congress has never mandated anyone have them. The man for whom the great value in life inhered in a certain sort of solitude or unreachability now has to choose between making a living and preserving this kind of life for himself. He still has a choice, of a sort; but it is not a choice he ever wished to have to make. He would have felt freer unconfronted with it.
Likewise, new technologies change expectations and judgments about what are acceptable risks and behaviors in ways that often foreclose what are, to many, important pieces of their lives. A seminal image of American freedom is the driver hitting the open road in his convertible and speeding out to something new. For many of us, this is as close to the subjective conviction of being a free agent as there is. And yet, with the arrival of self-driving cars that are already far safer than human drivers comes the prospect that driving oneself will soon be seen as deeply reckless. Even if it is not outlawed as an unsafe practice, as some moral entrepreneurs are already demanding, it could become practically out of reach if, say, mass social opprobrium is brought to bear on the driver, or insurance companies raise rates each year on human drivers as they represent a progressively smaller, and riskier, share of the pool.
The same process is already underway with AI. Social media already abundantly features people who act as if advocacy of any restrictions on deployment of a technology that originated less than a half-decade ago is tantamount to trying to ban fire. Such figures are more than ready to “force you to be free” (to steal a phrase from Rousseau) by making you accept the progress you are too recalcitrant to recognize. There are already studies of attitudes to AI being conducted in which it is treated as a pathology (“moralization”) to continue to object to AI even after being informed that “it’s safe and beneficial.” Don’t you know that it’s your solemn duty, as a person alive at this juncture in history, to find the resources in yourself to embrace machines with the power to replace you? We can all see where this is headed, as even some thoughtful commentators are already stigmatizing the non-use of AI as irresponsible. The language of voluntariness is utterly misleading. It is more likely that we will either all be subject to a new world of effectively mandatory AI usage or none of us will.
Legal scholar David Grewal coined the term “network power” to describe the way in which a new modality or set of standards can “progressively eliminate” all other alternatives, even if a majority of people would prefer some other way of doing things, simply by making life so uncomfortable for those who decline to use it. Authors are already facing such forced choices. If you publish a book, your publisher will ask you whether you consent “for your work to be included in new licensing routes” for the press to supply generative AI. (Not that it would matter anyway; AI companies do not care about the legal provenance of their materials.) The fact that I have this choice doesn’t change the fact that this is a choice I wish I did not have to face, one that feels to me like a lose-lose. For I do not wish to be a part of the AI corpus; I would rather not contribute to what I see as a debasement of research and reading. But on the other hand, with AI being pumped down our throats, I know that most students present and future are likely to encounter the subjects I care about largely through AI queries. Since I believe that what I wrote is true (otherwise why would I have bothered?), if I exclude my work from the corpus I am making the information that future users will get about the topic more distorted, less accurate, than it would otherwise have been. I wish I had never been confronted with this dilemma.
The subjective feeling of freedom, for most people, resides not in facing a series of Sophie’s Choices, but in the belief that there are different avenues by which they might cultivate their talents; freedom is to a large degree just not finding your energies blocked. But AI is already taking off the table many time-honored routes for such achievement. Take my little corner of the world, the university. It is well known that cheating has exploded, to the point that assigning students papers is pointless. Now, of course, one could do a version of the gun rights’ defense: “AI doesn’t cheat, students who use AI cheat.” This is logically true, but beside the point. This talking point simply skirts the reality that we would have continued to assign papers if AI had not been invented; it is the rise of this technology, interacting with the realities of human nature, that has now taken this centuries-old manner of teaching off the table.
This might look like a trivial example, but it is not. For what it means that we cannot offer this assignment is that students no longer have the opportunity to have their considered thinking assessed by a specialist who has devoted his life to the subject. Essay-writing is one of the most efficacious methods for developing a whole range of mental aptitudes, and the idea that there are great men who never learned the discipline of sitting with their thoughts and wrestling with them until they came out right on the page is fantastical. (Men of action like Napoleon and de Gaulle or of science like Einstein and Oppenheimer were brilliant writers in proportion to their genius in their respective domains.) Since the first commercial model of ChatGPT was released in 2022, the experience of writing—the basic way in which thinking people have from time immemorial formed their minds—has been stolen from students. This is a real intellectual impoverishment. Generative AI has thus already deprived a rising generation of the greatest tool for real learning there is. This experience of having pedagogical and educational possibilities contract is a foretaste of what life will be like as AI continues to advance. Doors will close in every direction. Efforts to verify human authorship of one task or another or find a way around the scams and plagiarism will occupy an increasing portion of our time and energy, further incentivizing us to turn over the demanding but meaningful activities of thought and creation to the LLMs.
When we foreclose opportunities, moreover, we shift the kinds of personality that thrive. The written word was the decisive medium for the formation of a certain species of intelligence: slow-developing, iterative, precise but imaginative, meditative, unflashy but memorable. If the written word is no longer a reliable indicator of a human intelligence behind it, that means that we will rely even more on the qualities of personal presentation and charisma, quick-draw wit, and hollow rhetorical dexterity that have already been excessively prized since the television age began. If, as several academics are already predicting, lowering the costs of “writing” means that producing a thoughtful, long-researched book or article no longer can be relied on to help one advance even in the supposed citadel of reason that academia represents, then we have to worry that the shy and retiring but deliberate and measured person will be selected out of the corridors of prestige and power. This would be a disaster. The man who is better on the page (with the pen or the paintbrush) than in person has been responsible for many of the greatest achievements in our history. We should not celebrate any “advance” that promises to further marginalize these valuable personality-types. I suspect the human spirit will become cramped, developing in fewer directions, displaying fewer virtues, as the field of freedom diminishes under the influence of artificial intelligence.
What we should want out of our economy is the increase in the avenues through which human excellence in its manifold forms can be achieved and displayed. That is real wealth—not the mere augmentation of consumption and achievement of autonomous digital superiority. But it is the latter that our tech sector and our government seem determined to give us.
Rousseau offered a second warning about the pursuit of material progress: that modern technological-commercial society undercuts morality. The Genevan philosopher argued that the highly sophisticated civilization of eighteenth-century Europe was soulless and fake. Factitiousness trumped authenticity; appearing and pretending trumped being and achieving. Whether that was fair or not in his time, it is an accurate charge against our AI-ridden culture. The sheer proliferation of AI text in everything from academic articles to legal briefs to consulting reports to newspaper articles to novels to wedding vows reflects a fundamental cultural change. People are losing the sense that the words they choose help constitute who they are as a person. This concern is not the mere literary affectation of the “wordcel.” The most uncreative human being can be discovered through a letter to a spouse or a note to a child. If we lose the idea that we are responsible for our words, our ability to make sense of the words of others will atrophy; we will lose our connection to our very selves. Even the humblest of us can attain personality and integrity through his relationship to his words. To his child, the words of a father are as meaningful as anything in Shakespeare.
“Those who choose to use AI to write are leaving less of themselves in the world.”
Those who choose to use AI to write are leaving less of themselves in the world. Think about what it would mean to you if you discovered letters written by your deceased grandmother. That each and every one of those words were her own is what would allow you to know something about her, however imperfectly, despite the passage of time. Now think how crestfallen you would be if it turned out that she happened, through some crack in the space-time continuum, to have had access to Gemini. You now can never be sure that those words were hers, as opposed to a machine’s. The access into a real person who lived and died on this earth and who is a part of your history has been denied you.
This uncertainty about the human provenance of text is an incalculable loss. In both classical and Christian philosophy, the human being was distinguished by his unique relationship to the word. Machines that have command of language are therefore nothing like the mere next step after the microwave and the calculator. The idea that for the rest of my life I will never know for sure if a text was written by the human who claims it or by a machine saddens me greatly, and I suspect this reality will cast a pall over all our lives once it sets in more generally. As things stand, we will face, every day, a task presented to us that no previous human ever could have contemplated: the task of sussing out whether the text we are looking at had a human behind it. This is a huge “transaction cost” that our new technology has imposed on us all, an unwelcome introduction of doubt and wariness and suspicion into the fundamentals of our life together that will only reduce trust and increase atomization.
Among AI boosters one now frequently hears that it allows them to “read fifty papers in a month rather than fifty in a year”; or that it allows them to do a whole literature review in a few hours, or that “if you’ve always wanted to write a book but couldn’t find the time or struggled with the writing,” you can now write it with AI tools. It would be truer to say that in each of these cases what is happening is that you are being enabled to avoid doing the task in question—reading, reviewing, writing—and yet to emerge with a facsimile of what you might have eventually produced at the end of that process—minus, of course, the understanding that would have come with it. How close a facsimile you have wound up with, you will never know; since if you had actually done the work you would have become an ever-so-slightly different person in the process, and thus might have been of another mind on the matter; you would likely have come to different conclusions had you not “written” with Claude after “reading” your sources with ChatGPT.
The skills that we need to develop on the way to forming valuable thoughts are endangered by the ease of AI. For example, LLMs can efficiently automate translation, which will open up many new texts and new experiences for the seasoned thinker. But for the rising generations, not already disciplined by the prior rigors of having to learn languages, this gain will be more than counterbalanced by the loss of language acquisition. In the world of AI it will never be the efficient, justifiable choice to learn a language. We will become less multilingual. And this will undermine free, creative thought in ways that defy quantification. The idea that Thomas Hobbes could have founded modern political philosophy without also being the greatest linguist of his day appeals to a sort of straight-line, engineering mentality, but is not in fact how genius works, which is in crooked lines. Human beings have great ideas only by having lots of ideas knocking about their heads. But mass AI adoption means we will externalize the knocking-about of ideas. We will just have less stuff in our minds, being chewed on, working in mysterious ways we don’t comprehend. Which will make us smaller creatures all around—not just yielding fewer geniuses, but even removing the bases for the unconscious intellectual play that gives depth and texture to the inner life of the average person.
Humans are interpretive creatures—that is what, classically, was thought to distinguish us from animals moved by instinct; as we go through the world we give meaning to our experience through language. To write is to engage in one of the most fundamentally human tasks—selecting words, arranging thoughts, arriving at one’s sense of the world. To outsource even the smallest bit of composition to AI is to participate in one’s own dehumanization. There is no gain in efficiency that is worth this sacrifice. As Rousseau would have recognized, the nature of our species is at stake.
Going forward, we can expect politics increasingly to be divided between those to whom the moral decay brought on by generative and agentic AI is incapable of being compensated by any amount of economic growth, and those for whom all humanistic objections seem misguided and irrelevant next to the quest for machine superintelligence. Let us hope that the former prevail.