The hottest topic nowadays revolves around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential to rapidly and imminently transform the world we live in — economically, socially, politically and even defensively. Regardless of whether you believe that the technology will be able to develop superintelligence and lead a metamorphosis of everything, the possibility that may come to fruition is a catalyst for more far-leftist control.
The likeliest starting point will be more calls for Universal Basic Income (UBI), a program by which the government guarantees every American some form of ongoing payment (such as a monthly stipend). Despite direct and indirect pilots of UBI being a failure, a potential ‘crisis’ will render that fact moot.
Using the prospect of AI software and hardware (aka robots) taking large swaths of American jobs, politicians won’t focus on retraining, they will go for the easy popular fix of promising something for ‘free.’ And something politicians can offer at someone else’s expense while creating more dependence on the government is a far-leftist dream.
Unfortunately, that dream is an economic nightmare for the rest of us. The government doesn’t produce anything productive, and any money that it has is either taken from us via taxes or ‘printed’ which devalues our purchasing power.
With an existing massive debt and deficit problem that has created a weak fiscal foundation, the government is in no position to create new entitlement programs. Further, taking money from workers, laundering it through the government and redistributing it to those who are not working is not a productive use of capital. It’s also not good for morale or giving people a sense of purpose in their lives.
With that, there will likely be a communist-leaning conversation about any AI that takes jobs and who should have ownership over that AI. If AI drives — or is even perceived to possibly create in the future — a deeper rift between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots,’ there’s no doubt that government ownership or societal sharing of the AI will be seized upon by those who look for any reason to push socialistic or communistic ideals.
Then, there is the potential for tyranny. If you thought the COVID-19 lockdowns were bad, wait until attack drones and robots create societal chaos. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where people are told to lock down or give up their freedoms until protocols are sorted out.
This is why we should be imagining and planning for those scenarios today, and not let reactive crises lead to an erosion of our freedoms.
Likewise, protecting our individual rights in the digital sphere, particularly as AI companies lobby to help shape regulation, is critical.
And a final piece of the puzzle is embedded in the AI itself. A Substack, called ‘Contemplations on the Tree of Woe,’ raised a related concern, noting that just as the left captured the culture via the mainstream media and Hollywood, a similar thing is happening with AI. The piece notes, ‘The code is not neutral … every major LLM is aligned with leftist priors. OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, every single one leans Left. Even the much-ballyhooed Grok is at best Centrist. (And, unfortunately, the ‘center’ of the political compass these days isn’t exactly Philadelphia 1776.)’
The piece goes on to say that if a left-leaning worldview is embedded in the coding and the output, and if something isn’t done to counter that, leftist ideals will be at the foundational core of everything, from education to culture to science (or repression of science).
If you thought the COVID-19 lockdowns were bad, wait until attack drones and robots create societal chaos. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where people are told to lock down or give up their freedoms until protocols are sorted out.
We need balance. A foundational infrastructure that is too far left or too far right can each cause myriad problems that compound and become too entrenched to resolve.
Americans tend to be very reactive instead of proactive in addressing issues. But with AI, we cannot wait. If we let AI become a catalyst to move us permanently to the far left, or if the underpinnings of the AI do that inherently and foundationally, we will give up our checks, balances and freedoms for the future.