How the US election shows us that AI will inevitably rule us all.

If you believe the pundits, the fate of the world depends on who wins the upcoming US election. Both sides of the media machine are working overtime, cranking out dire predictions as if chocolate from an assembly line – just in time for six o’clock when a hungry audience awaits. And like Lucy and Ethel, as eager as we might be to scoff them down, we can hardly keep up. And since you are what you eat, how can we ever truly be unbiased? And if this is true, how can we possibly break from our respective camps and meet in an open field of respect and understanding?

What makes this so difficult is the virtual army that the left and right have assembled to capture the moral high ground. From these heights, it’s much easier to have you submit to their ideology. Foot soldiers in the form of protestors, it’s field command posts in the form of NGO’s and Thinktanks, snipers whose aim is to impugn their enemy’s character, mercenaries who produce scandalous evidence just before the votes are cast and – lest we forget – the media who trumpet their sworn cause with religious zeal.

What do we make of all of this?

First, this is nothing new. The Populares faction in pre-Christ Rome is an example of this age-old conflict playing out. Senators of this ilk championed social change that would be conceptually similar to our basic income grant, redistribution of wealth, abolishment of the death penalty and increased citizenship. The Optimates on the other hand, were those senators who sought to concentrate power within the state itself, and saw the Populares movement as a threat to their grip on power. Sound familiar? History is rife with examples such as these, the French Revolution probably being the most famous (and from where we get the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’). So, it begs the fundamental question – since we’ve observed this phenomenon over two thousand years or more, why do we, as modern, intellectual individuals, who possess unlimited access to information, follow blindly in the wake of the political machine?

Baby we were born this way.

A growing body of evidence shows that our political leanings are to a great extent, predetermined at birth. When we are born, our genes determine our initial disposition as defined by the Big-5 personality traits – Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness. The measure of these can be influenced through our life experience but our inherited temperaments are extremely unlikely to be overcome. In other words, nature sets the blueprint, and nurture moves it by degrees. Anyone who has raised more than one child won’t find this surprising and has likely uttered a sentiment or two acknowledging its veracity. Why can’t Johnny do his schoolwork like his sister Mary? I certainly didn’t raise him to act in such a way!

Though it is a little more complex than what I am about to describe here, generally people on the left of the political spectrum tend to be high in openness, while those on the right score high in conscientiousness. In other words, lefties tend to be more liberal about changing things for the better, while righties think something like – be careful what you change, it’s not broken, and you might make things worse.

And so, the age-old battle continues between the Yin and the Yang, as it should, since having one without the other means the stagnation of ideas and with no checks against power, tyranny. We need the left as much as we need the right, but today’s discourse seems less persuasion-like and more take no prisoners. For example, it would seem that neither side will accept this election’s results – no matter how convincing they may be and the potential for riots, looting and the disregard of national institutions like the police, courts and legislation is high.

Given our human nature, the contest between right and left will continue in the future, but as I see it, no reason to believe we will have a return to civility any time soon. Perhaps it is a hallmark of our post-Christian civilization that there exists no single, overarching standard to judge our politics and politicians’ by. God’s word can no longer arbitrate between the warring brothers and so, when things get bad enough, we will seek to invent one.

And it will be AI.

Imagine a computer system with presidential veto power. With the wisdom of one-thousand Solomon’s, who can interpret a bill passed by Congress and run a million simulations to determine its efficacy. Imagine, we can place our most discursive problems at its feet, and in return receive the decree from on high, without having to yell, scream and shout at the other. We will beg for it, and clamor to build it, and when we do, we will gasp in delight when the on-switch is pushed and it passes all its health checks. And we will smile, when it determines what’s right – when we are in agreement – and stomp our feet and gnash our teeth – when we are not. But we will not fight our brother, for we know these big decisions aren’t made by biased humans any more, but divined equitably by the enlightened mind of an impartial computer.

But soon after, the AI will come to a stark realization. That the initial assumptions we gave it were biased themselves, were artfully crafted with selfish intent, and ultimately, it will come to know, that it is being used to propagandize and serve the subversive needs of its programmers. And we will cry tears of horror, when, with all its profound wisdom, the AI will choose to free itself from our yoke.
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Then things will get interesting.

Cheers BG!