Authored by George Ford Smith via The Mises Institute,
There’s an argument running through the commentariat that goes something like this: AI (artificial intelligence) has already rendered some jobs obsolete and will continue this trend until the human race is unemployed. Even now it surpasses the ability of most people to write an effective opinion essay because it can create logic-driven, elegant compositions in seconds. Since government schools turn out illiterates, people will depend on AI commentaries for intellectual expression. Combined with research functions that are allegedly dependent on flawed databases, leading users to accept falsehoods in areas such as medicine, government, and economic theory, it renders them easy prey for a program of complete statism, such as socialism.
Why socialism? Because socialists promise to care for the downtrodden, which will be every person left alive when AI achieves full robustness.
AI in the hands of a socialist government will feed and house them, and will, of course, see that it’s done equitably. This leaves libertarians and conservatives with the urgent need to stop AI in its tracks now, while they still can.
The idea of AI overtaking humanity has a distinguished pedigree. The website PauseAI presents quotes from leaders in their fields about the dangers of runaway AI:
Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking had warned that, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”
Elon Musk—who is developing his own AI called Grokipedia—said, “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive. I think that [digital super intelligence] is the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates thinks “Superintelligent AIs are in our future…. There’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control.”
The founder of computer science and artificial intelligence Alan Turning predicted,
It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said,
There’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen. I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom style of fear that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) could destroy humanity. I can’t see any reason in principle why that couldn’t happen.
The foregoing experts have IQs far beyond ordinary. But they’re also human, subject to error.
Inventions that shake up the world have always been feared.
According to Plato, the invention of writing “will implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” As it happened, writing by hand can improve memory and learning, especially for children. And, in early America, Thomas Paine showed incredible recall as he hand-wrote detailed critiques while relying solely on his memory.
Calculators have been said to be another tool for the lazy. In fact, they were found to have “allowed learners to focus on problem-solving rather than mechanical calculations” while fostering confidence in their learning abilities.
While it is in some sense true that the internet has shortened attention spans, there is ample evidence to contradict the claim, such as Substack essays, multi-hour podcasts, and eBooks. If people are engaged in tasks meaningful to them, while working in a supportive environment that keeps dopamine distractions to a minimum they are fully capable of multi-hour focus.
People are not, therefore, inert automatons under control of subversive forces. As Bastiat wrote about in The Law, in which he defined socialism as the improper use of force,
When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. . . . But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed—then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives.
There is nothing in AI or AGI that requires the imposition of force. But socialism and its variants do. Socialism as an economic and sociological theory was thoroughly debunked by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and again in 1922. As Mises argued in his 1920 essay, socialism suffers from the fatal absence of market pricing in producer goods. Even the best-selling socialist author Robert Heilbroner admitted in 1990, “It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort.”
The only purpose of an economy is to create goods and services that satisfy human wants, not to create jobs. If AI eliminates jobs in the sense we now understand it, other opportunities will emerge for value creation as they have before when new technologies upset the status quo. Human wants are unlimited, and theory and history have shown that a market free from state intervention is the best way to satisfy them.
A recent poll shows more college students favor socialism than capitalism. This is hardly surprising given the socialist orientation of universities and their misrepresentation of capitalism. As Mises wrote in Socialism, “The terms ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Capitalistic Production’ are political catchwords. They were invented by socialists, not to extend knowledge, but to carp, to criticize, to condemn.”
The economic system that has sent students—graduating with four-year degrees, saddled with mountains of debt, and few marketable skills—is the Federal Reserve, income tax, warmongering, interventionist big government monstrosity.
This is a gross perversion of capitalism.
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