Where do conservatives stand on the issue of AI? The American electorate needs to know.
They’re clear about the Second Amendment, national security, abortion, the border – the voters know where conservatives stand on these issues – November 4, 2024 attests to that. But they are less clear on the issue of AI, itself, or conservative America’s position relative to it. Yet, AI is not new on the scene — the term “artificial intelligence” was first coined in 1955 by John McCarthy during a workshop at Dartmouth College.
While it may be true that politics is derived from culture, with technological innovation it is the reverse – computer-generated algorithms influence culture in myriad and burgeoning ways. It already affects our decisions about what we “choose” to say, do, buy, like, dislike – in other words “what we accept as truth, good, right.”
There is a “narrative war” underway in America regarding AI, and those amongst us of a more conservative orientation cannot afford complacency in either its development or control over it.
AI is not just a “tool” – it is potentially a weapon — an information system that will substantially affect (over a not very distant horizon) national security, education, commerce, economics, employment. It is easier numerically to list what it will not touch than what it will.
Development and control of the narrative is critical because of the principal concern with Artificial Intelligence: agentic AI – this new phase of AI adoption can reason, learn and make decisions on its own with minimal, if any, human intervention.
Americans typically default on issues about automation with the same refrain: “we’ve heard this before;” the “robots will rule” — but “it never happens.” Technology creates jobs and eliminates them. The free market always sorts it out. Today, however, the situation is more complex because the systems are more complex – they are not designed to augment human cognition, but to replace it.
AI thinks for us.
Some argue that LLMs [Large Language Models] are just stochastic systems – parroting patterns found in data. Nothing new? These deep-learning systems like Sam Altman’s OpenAI ChatGPT are loaded with vast amounts of text data, allowing them to perform multiple tasks with seeming immediacy — answering questions, summarizing text, translating languages – and are becoming increasingly integrated into the internet, commercial venues and the government.
Those who study, develop and are (as we speak) building AI have a different refrain. And this is pivotal to my point concerning agentic AI. Are the comments we’re hearing from the likes of, as recently as two months ago, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei valid — that you’re going to see the elimination of half of white-collar entry-level positions?
“There’s certainly a possibility that, at least in the beginning, AI will replace a lot of jobs, rather than just augmenting people’s labor,” Powell told the Senate Banking Committee in late June. “In the long run,” Powell said, “AI may raise productivity and lead to greater employment. But it is a transformational technology, with effects that are unknowable.”
There is more regarding agentic AI and the narrative war than one might realize. The left already has their position staked out. It can be expressed through OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s social experiment when, as president of Y Combinator in 2016, he gave low-income individuals $1,000 per month for 3 years — with no strings attached.
As technology eliminates jobs and massive new wealth gets created, Altman added, “…we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.”
To be sure, Altman’s 2016 social experiment is clearly an espousal for some form of universal basic income (UBI), essentially, at the heart of the left’s AI narrative – supplanting rather than supplementing human endeavor – “dependency” at the expense of “freedom.”
It seems clear that a substantial threat from agentic AI exists for virtually all forms of bureaucratic interface in America — invisible algorithms which predispose to one decision as opposed to another, especially regarding bias, AI-powered social credit scoring, digital de-banking already occurring and scan-and-ban technology. Moreover, workers who are not at the end of their careers will experience a virtually insurmountable “speed efficiency deficit” because of the speed with which the ground beneath their feet is shifting.
Job displacement may be the result of agentic AI, but we need not acquiesce to the left’s position in response to this: UBI and progressively greater dependency on AI and the government, media and commercial venues which control its algorithms and potentially us.
Conservative America’s narrative must articulate a view clearly distinct from the left. Yes, AI is here to stay, but we should heed the warnings of the Godfather of AI, George Hinton: “AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.” The AI pioneer estimates a 10-20 percent risk that artificial intelligence will eventually take control from humans. Dozens of AI scientists admonish us to regulate the technology before it’s too late. And finally, while we may ultimately develop agentic AI to a point approaching “cognitive self-awareness,” we should also accept the wisdom of the premise:
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
America’s “Main Street” must become vocal and uncompromising in pressing Congress, the White House and “Wall Street” – to think through the ethical issues and profound consequences of their actions. Certainly, the race to gain a geopolitical advantage with AI technology remains fierce and is of paramount importance to our economic and defense capabilities, but we must not sacrifice who we are as a people or what we stand for as a nation in securing those aims.
Responsible decision-making begins with principles not capabilities – so as to consider the broader implications of one’s choices before bringing those abilities to bear – on the rest of America.
If the left prevails, agentic AI becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy promoting dependency, surveillance culture and indoctrination. America ceases to be what it has always stood for and Americans fought and died to defend – “freedom of choice” rather than “dependency driven equity.”
AI is a transformative technology which we are told will introduce a “fourth industrial revolution,” adding trillions in value to the global economy; yet, no one really knows what that will actually look like for most Americans. The American electorate needs to know that conservative America understands this and is intent on employing AI to protect America while safeguarding the rights and freedoms of its people for generations to come.
