AI's Relentless Advance And The Battle For The Future

Last month, during an interview streamed on the social media platform X (formally Twitter) Elon Musk predicted that Artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence by the end of 2025. 

"My guess is we'll have AI smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year," further stating that AI “is the fastest advancing technology I've seen of any kind, and I've seen a lot of technology." 

While developing artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human intelligence (commonly referred to as "AGI" for artificial general intelligence) is frequently considered unavoidable by proponents of AI, there exists no widespread agreement on the precise timing of achieving this milestone—or even on the precise definition of AGI, for that matter.

Regardless of the timing of when this milestone occurs, there is no real disagreement that this moment will eventually arrive. And while AI is often positioned as a positive force for good, it could also be catastrophic for humans on multiple levels.

The development and deployment of AI is just the latest example of the many advancements made during the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” This period has been marked by the exponential growth of information and unprecedented connectivity between people, devices, and systems. It's important to understand that AI is not just about automating tasks but also about reshaping entire industries, the nature of work, and, perhaps most importantly, how information is generated, disseminated, and consumed.

On the economic front, many conservatives, such as Ben Shapiro, celebrate and encourage unrestrained and unregulated technological advancement under the economic concept of “Creative Destruction.” Popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction involves the continuous creation and destruction of industries, businesses, and economic structures through innovation and technological advancement.

Supporters of economic liberalism often champion creative destruction as an unequivocal force for good, vital for fostering economic growth and advancement. “So, what if millions of truck drivers are replaced by self-driving trucks? They’ll just have to learn to code,” says the libertarian. Of course, the optimistic narrative is that the jobs lost from AI will be offset by the number of new jobs created, but that will be of little consolation to those who are permanently out of work due to a lack of support for retraining. In this economic paradigm, the well-being of individuals, families, and communities devastated by these changes is not a primary concern; all that matters is that the nation’s GDP always goes up.

In previous industrial revolutions, such as the advent of globalization, we witnessed the erosion of American manufacturing and the subsequent alienation of the American working class. This decision to offshore manufacturing to satisfy America’s desire for cheap consumer goods delivered via two-day shipping has, predictably, made America vulnerable as a nation. 

One only needs to look at America’s dependence on foreign supply chains from geopolitical adversaries like China to see how detrimental this short-sightedness is. Today, the United States is increasingly dependent on China for critical goods, such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, and rare earth minerals. With tensions between the U.S. and China rising over Taiwan, this vulnerability will only be amplified. If war were to break out between the U.S. and China, would the destruction of American domestic manufacturing have been worth it if Americans struggled to obtain life-saving drugs once China cut off trade? 

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AI potentially poses an even greater risk when we move from the distribution of goods to the curation and distribution of information.

Wokeness now lies at the center of American political discourse and occupies the thoughts of those who hold power throughout the United States, including those who are developing AI within Silicon Valley. As such, it is no surprise that there is an ongoing battle to control how AI programming is applied to the internet itself. One of the front lines of this effort is confronting “Algorithmic discrimination.”

Algorithmic discrimination denotes the occurrence wherein algorithms or computer systems systematically exhibit discriminatory behavior toward specific demographic groups, such as those distinguished by race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other protected attributes—in short, this is the left’s fight against whiteness or anything pertaining to Western norms transferred into the digital realm.

Ten years ago, Googling “How do you define a woman?” would have given you a set of results to search through, but the idea that a woman is a female human would have been found at the very top of your results.

Today? AI-generated answers are automatically presented at the very top of your query and will tell you that “a woman can be defined as a female human, OR a person who identifies as a woman, regardless of their birth sex.” This deliberate reprogramming of reality using the standards of radical wokeness will be applied to every facet of the information we consume. We already saw where this could lead with Google’s rollout of its AI Image Generator, Gemini, which, in Google’s words, “overcompensated for diversity” by depicting a black woman as a U.S. founding father, among other ridiculous examples.

What does this AI assault on reality mean for democracy?

Theoretically, a healthy democracy requires the free exchange of ideas and opinions as well as the dissemination of knowledge to citizens so they can make informed voting decisions. Journalists were also supposed to play an important role in helping to separate facts from “opinions.” Today, it’s clear our debates are anything but healthy and journalists are simply narrative-generating machines and not objective sources of news.

As such, in our age of information, where there are seemingly unlimited sources of information and an overwhelming number of opinions to choose from, generative AI positions itself as a way to cut through the noise by providing curated and authoritative answers to questions. But this leads to an uncomfortable question: 

Whose authority?  The answer: whoever controls the programming.

“Seizing the means of production" was a phrase often invoked by Communists in the era of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It suggested that the working class should take control of the ownership of infrastructure, factories, land, and resources necessary to produce material goods. Today, the left in Academia and Silicon Valley is seizing the means of information production, and whoever controls the ownership of AI will, in many ways, determine who owns the future.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.