“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth said, and we can’t help but laugh scornfully. That was in 1802, before the telephone—never mind smartphones, cable news, Twitter, Pfeizer, the NSA, the TSA, the CCP… And here I am, innocently checking my email, when I read that Elon Musk—the GOP’s unlikely new sex symbol—has announced he’ll be rolling out a line of A.I.-powered robots by the end of next year.
Now, don’t you feel like the rest of us deserve some say in all of this? Don’t you feel like the rest of the human race should be consulted before some technocrat unleashes a new race of androids on the planet?
The whole thing gives me this surreal feeling. It’s the same feeling I got when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Some friends of mine were convinced that nuclear holocaust was just around the corner. I didn’t agree with them, but it makes you think. And I thought, “How insane is it that the fate of all 8 billion humans on the planet—and untold squillions yet to be born—is in the hands of a few elderly politicians? Is anyone happy with this system (except the elderly politicians)?”
Actually, these androids are a lot like the A-Bomb. They’re one of those inventions that no one actually wants and everyone will regret. If we were smart, we’d all get together and shoot the things as they stroll off the conveyor belt. But unless you’re willing to go to jail, there’s nothing we can do.
What makes the whole thing even more surreal is that, until recently, Mr. Musk was one of the most ardent critics of artificial intelligence. As my friend Matthew Giambrone noted in Hearth & Field,
Four years ago, Mr. Musk warned that A.I. is more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and four years prior, he compared it to summoning a demon—you think you can control it but you can’t. Now, Musk is doing the summoning, conjuring up A.I. creations from the digital realm to invade physical space.
We’re suddenly supposed to be not concerned because he suddenly is not. And because his robot is designed to only walk at five miles an hour so humans “can outrun it.” Mr. Musk will forgive me if I am not immediately comforted by that image.
So, Mr. Musk decided to try his hand at demon-summoning after all. I’m sure his change of heart came after a long period of careful deliberation, in which we can all have perfect confidence.
Really, though, we shouldn’t even be talking about this. We’re committing the one great sin of the modern world: questioning the Progress of Science. We’re like those heretics who said that Covid-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab connected to Dr. Anthony Fauci. That was an obvious lie born of a deadly mixture of partisanship and racism—that is, until it turned out to be true.
Why did progressives react so violently to the lab leak theory? Was it just more partisan shilling? No doubt that played a part. But I think there was another, more honest motive: fear.
As the Covid death-toll climbed into the millions, many of us found it (literally) too horrible to believe that humanity had unleashed this plague on itself. Many of us started to wonder if maybe we shouldn’t be engineering deadly new diseases in labs, if one careless lab tech is all that stands between us and a worldwide pandemic.
Maybe we also started think, “I don’t remember voting on whether the government could perform these experiments in the first place. Isn’t that something they should have run by us? And now that they’ve started, is it possible to stop them?”
The government takes our money to fund these labs without telling us; then, when one of their scientists accidentally lets the disease out, they shut down the global economy and make us shelter in place until they finished paying some other scientists to ram through a faulty vaccine.
Ah, but now we’re touching another sore spot. MAGA Republicans triggered the same exact fear-response by suggesting that the vaccines might not be ready after just a couple of months and might cause serious side-effects.
Objectively speaking, these are perfectly normal questions to raise about a new drug. Imagine if I said to you, “I’m on this new thing called Oopsiequin, which is supposed to help with my migraines. It doesn’t help at all, though, and it gives me terrible gas. I don’t think it works.” Would you recoil in horror? Would you say, “How dare you spread this fake news? Don’t you know you’re attacking the roots of our democratic process? You’re basically trying to kill me!”
It’s different with the vaccines. Because it was never really the vaccine that was being questioned, was it? It was man’s total mastery over nature, his perfect command of technology, his ability to chart every star, to heal every disease—in other words, Science itself.
Now you watch. Everyone who questions Mr. Musk’s adventures in A.I. will be subjected to the same rigamarole. We’ll be dismissed as reactionaries and Luddites. We’re just the sort of people who burned Galileo at the stake! They’ll go on shouting us down, right up to the moment when the Robo-Gestapo kicks down the door. Oh, but that’s right: they can only go five miles per hour. Nothing to worry about, then, if we just keep running.
This is why conspiracy theories are so popular, on both the Left and the Right, from Russiagate to QAnon. A conspiracy theory is the comforting delusion that someone, somewhere is in control of All This.
Actually, I happen to think there is someone in control. His name is God. He mostly lets things play out for themselves, though. And I don’t believe in a Cigarette Smoking Man sitting in a dark room somewhere in Washington with his Syndicate carefully orchestrating international affairs. No: I believe in a pot-smoking billionaire sitting around with his buddies in Silicon Valley saying, “Once we get our space ships we should make robots. Then we could, like, colonize the moon. Also, I might buy Twitter.”
Yet just because we can unleash these forces, that doesn’t mean we can control them. This is one of the first lessons found in every religion and philosophy. It’s why you always hear people refer to the nuclear weapons as a Pandora’s Box. But at no point in human history have so many of these forces been unleashed. Never have those forces been so dangerous. Never have the boxes been opened so quickly, and by such a small group of people. It’s like Pandora’s Christmas for the One Percent.
Conspiracy theorists are driven by a feeling of powerlessness, and that’s why there are so many of them: because powerlessness is the defining mood of modern life.
By the way, I think this feeling of powerlessness explains why the GOP fell so hard for Mr. Musk. His takeover of Twitter gives us the illusion that one of the World Controllers is on our side. It’s exactly like when Kanye released Jesus Is King in 2019 and suddenly conservatives were convinced that Christian hip-hop was our secret weapon in winning the Culture War. This is just another conspiracy theory—only it’s a thousand times more dangerous than Q, because it says the conspiracy is on our side. That’s how we become complacent.
In the meantime, we’ll go on arguing that human beings shouldn’t be building bombs and diseases and robots that could potentially destroy the human race. And when we do, people will look at us like we’ve got three heads. Which you will, if you take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Fair warning.
Friends, in case it’s of interest, here are my latest writings elsewhere
1. “Give Me That Old Time Religion” at The American Conservative
2. “Why are Putin’s propagandists so bad at their jobs?” at The Spectator
By the way, I’ve been reading Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary by Dr. Brant Pitre. I’m sure you’ve heard of it already before but, man, what an amazing book. It is by far the best thing I’ve ever read about the Blessed Virgin. By far.
Peace and the Good!