Social Studies

Le Pod lives. After a short hiatus, we’re back with another episode about the dangers of artificial intelligence. When does a wonderful tool for the betterment of society become a dangerous dependency as we outsource our daily tasks, our cognitive abilities, our manufacturing, and our broader economy to technological entities that are no longer under our control? The last time we spoke about this, we focused on existential risks. This week, we’re joined by University of Montreal Assistant Professor David Krueger, who has raised alarm bells about the risks of “gradual disempowerment.”

In November of 2016, as the world braced for the results of the election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Canadian former right-wing YouTube star Lauren Southern was sent on an assignment that made no sense to her. Her employer, Rebel Media, flew her out to Delhi to cover a UN conference on tobacco. Normally, she had trouble getting travel reimbursements from the shoestring operation she worked for, but this time she was put up in a luxury hotel.

Southern knew nothing about tobacco policy. What she knew was North American politics, but on Election Night, she watched the biggest story on the planet unfold from an ocean and a continent away. The videos she produced from the UN conference ended up generating view counts in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the millions she was accustomed to. Still, when she got back to Canada, Rebel wanted her to do more videos on tobacco policy.

Later, Rebel invited Southern and other staff to fly to Israel. It was supposed to be a paid vacation, with a little reporting on the side. As everyone in media knows, you don’t have to spend a cent to go to Israel; if you’re a reporter, the government is happy to fly you out on a junket. Still, she was asked to fundraise from her audience to pay for the trip. When she looked into the itinerary, she discovered that “(e)very interview was pre-arranged, every moment scheduled,” as she writes in her memoir, This Is Not Real Life. Her guide would be a former IDF paratrooper who now leads PR tours for the Israeli government.

Southern, already suspicious from her bizarre assignment in India, pushed back on the instruction to fundraise from her viewers. Then she was fired.

One might assume from this story that the “independent” right-wing media machine is just a propaganda apparatus for corporate lobbyists and foreign governments. And one would be correct in doing so. But it’s not just the right-wing media. It’s the whole dirty industry.

Drop Site News dropped a bombshell of a story yesterday that went largely unnoticed. Hacked emails have revealed that in 2014, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who was and still is a senior editor at The Atlantic, secretly drafted a speech for Israel’s then-UN ambassador, Ron Prosor, justifying the country’s contemporaneous assault on Gaza. Even as Frum was pitching Prosor on his ghostwriting services, he was writing a fawning profile of the ambassador for The Atlantic.

Frum wasn’t the only one. British journalist Douglas Murray, associate editor at The Spectator, was also pitching Prosor on a UN speech he drafted. And Pamela Gross, then an editorial producer for CNN, was booking the ambassador on her network even while enlisting his help to raise money for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

“Dear Ambassador - It was so wonderful to see you this 4th of July,” Gross wrote to Prosor that year. “Thank you for joining us. Clearly Iron Dome is doing the trick and saving lives. Please dear friend - let’s get it finished. Please let me know what is still left to be done at your soonest convenience.”

Murray, too, was privately raising funds for the IDF.

If I had to guess, I’d say the reason Drop Site’s scoop didn’t blow up on your newsfeed is that this kind of media corruption is so ordinary. Other outlets aren’t jumping to amplify the reporting because they all do it themselves. On the one hand, reporters and editors aren’t eager to bring public attention to a culture of venality and influence they participate in, and on the other, it’s so banal it doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy to them. This is just the way the sausage is made.

Subscribe now

After Southern was fired from Rebel, she found out she didn’t need them. She did fine on her own as an independent creator. One of the first videos she made on her own got 650,000 views. She made two feature documentaries. She kept churning out content, building her following, and raising her profile and her infamy. She became a household name among the sizable population of North Americans who are both brain-poisoned by politics and terminally online.

Her book, which I highly recommend, is about internet fame addiction, how her insatiable appetite for online attention and validation drove her life into chaos. She was raped by Andrew Tate, hooked for a while on cocaine, banned from the United Kingdom, and then, after trying to save herself from her imploding life, found herself trapped in an abusive marriage and then consigned to poverty as a single mother. This was all self-inflicted, by her own admission; Southern doesn’t waste as much as a paragraph pretending she’s a victim, except for when she actually was one, first of Tate and then of her ex-husband. Her book isn’t about the institutional failures of the media industry. It’s about her own failures as a human being.

But it’s telling that the story begins and ends with her being unwittingly drafted into grifty media conspiracies. Grasping for financial stability, Southern eventually took a job with a media startup that could pay her a modest salary: Tenet Media. But that, too, turned out to be a foreign influence operation, this time run by Russia. Soon Southern found herself being stalked by a Canadian intelligence agency and being grilled in a House of Commons hearing that could have been a slapstick parody of Franz Kafka.

In the hearing, Canadian ministers kept asking her about an interview she once did with Alexsandr Dugin, insinuating that she had been doing Putin’s bidding by platforming him. The irony is that Dugin was the one interview she had sought out and conducted on her own in a trip to Russia, five years before signing on with Tenet, that she soon discovered was another government influence operation. Her handler had tried to send her to the Donbass region of Ukraine to do some useful idiot-type “reporting” on the then-slow boiling war there, but she declined. Her Dugin interview was the only one she ended up publishing, because it was the only one she had not been manipulated into. But the Canadian politicians at the hearing kept zeroing in on it anyway. Dugin is an enemy and they disapprove of what he says. Therefore journalists should not give him the opportunity to voice his views. If they do, they will be dragged before a panel of government inquisitors. It’s not that they objected to Southern being a government propagandist. It’s that they objected to her not being their government propagandist.

There’s a moment in the book — I can’t find it now — where Southern says that she just assumes everything is an influence operation now. She says it not with the feverish eyes of a conspiracy theorist, but with the tired resignation of someone who once believed in the system but has given up. I think she’s right, but the reality is even more depressing than that. Most journalists are not duped like she was; they’re like Frum and Murray: eager to use their journalism to advance the influence of politically interested parties. I understand this because I’ve done it myself. Southern did it, too, building up a short but spectacular media career by consciously painting an absurdly slanted picture of the world on behalf of the ideological activists she cheerled and whose approval helped make her famous. If it’s not someone else corrupting you, you have to be really careful it isn’t you corrupting yourself. And most people aren’t that careful. It doesn’t pay to be.

This was originally published at Compact. And Kingsnorth himself left this review of my review, which makes me quite proud:

If you’re not from New York and you walk through Greenwich Village without a map or a smartphone, there’s a decent chance you’ll get disoriented. The narrow streets of the neighborhood intersect at unexpected angles. Most are named after people, not numbers, and even the numerical streets are confusing: West 4th Street is crossed by West 10th Street and West 11th Streets. But if you wander a little ways uptown, eventually you’ll find yourself on the Grid Plan. The avenues count down from east to west. The streets count up from south to north. Every block is the same length and every corner at a right angle. It all makes rational sense. You don’t have to think anymore or pay any particular attention to your surroundings. You can just trudge forward like a robot and know you’re moving in the optimal direction.

In the 1998 Bennett Miller documentary The Cruise, Speed Levitch, a brilliant and eccentric New York City tour guide, says this about the Grid Plan:

To me the Grid Plan is puritan, it’s homogenizing . . . Let’s just blow up the Grid Plan, and rewrite the streets to be much more a self-portraiture of our personal struggles, rather than some real estate broker’s wet dream from 1807.

I don’t know if the writer Paul Kingsnorth has ever watched The Cruise, but his new book, Against the Machine, is like Levitch’s critique of contemporary civilization writ large. He even calls the uniform, systematized physical landscape we inhabit today “the Grid.” Kingsnorth’s central concept, however, is “the Machine”: the matrix of social and technological forces that have degraded humanity over the centuries into something less than we once were.

The Machine is hard to contain in a definition: it is capitalism, scientism, hubris, the internet, individualism, rationality, globalization. Like the straight lines of the Manhattan cityscape, its structures force a single perspective on the world onto us, shape us into the semi-autonomous moving parts of an orderly pattern, and corral our spontaneity, our imagination, and our spirit into the narrow channels of its architecture. It is efficient and productive. It is also a catastrophe, Kingsnorth argues, for humanity and the natural world. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the times we are currently living in would be regarded by many of our ancestors as apocalyptic,” he writes.

Kingsnorth’s alienation from modernity goes back decades, to his early adult life. He was once a radical environmentalist. Around the turn of the millennium, he was an activist who blocked road construction projects with his body and protested the World Trade Organization. His political dispositions remain fundamentally what they were two decades ago: hostile to technocracy and globalization, committed to localism, humble before nature. But the world has changed radically since then, as many former activists of his (and my) age will attest. This, too, he believes, is the work of the Machine, which “thrives on change like a horse on hay,” and “will ensure that everyone who lives long enough ends up in a world they barely recognize.”

Once a man of the left, Kingsnorth is now deeply critical of what he believes it has become: capitalism’s handmaiden. Bent on dismantling every institution, tradition, and cultural artifact in sight, progressivism uproots whatever stands in the way of the Machine’s perpetual remaking of the world. Respect for one’s ancestors, a sense of belonging in a physical place in a human community, even the recognition of our own biological limits are eviscerated by the left’s revolt against everything. This intellectual demolition prepares the ground for capitalist reconstruction. “Progressive leftism,” he writes, “is market liberalism by other means … one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments … Whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.”

But Kingsnorth is no conservative, at least in the way the word is conventionally understood; his indictment is too sweeping and radical for that. His condemnation of the Machine dovetails with a critique of the market that has long been associated with the left. Kingsnorth doesn’t mention Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, but both writers trace the origins of the totalizing global civilization we live in today to the same historical moment: the enclosures of the common fields in England. To both Kingsnorth and Polanyi, this was the moment in which traditional, organic, earthbound human communities that had developed over centuries were uprooted forever, and the individuals that comprised them were transformed into so much human coal for the steam engine of nascent capitalism. Peasants were torn from their land and forced to wander into the towns and cities and sell their labor for a subsistence wage. As Kingsnorth writes, the effect of enclosure was “to destroy older, more localised, customary communities and cultures … Without uprooting older communities and ways of life, from English artisan weavers in 1800 to Papuan tribal people in the 2020s, the Machine cannot operate.”

Marx, too, famously wrote about the Enclosure Acts, but while he recognized their cruelty, he regarded their introduction as the emergence of a superior—if amoral—economic system, in place of “the idiocy of rural life.” Like Polanyi, Kingsnorth has more respect for traditional societies. To him, they embody the world as it was before contracting the spiritual disease of modernity. He sees the enclosures as the first step in the Machine’s colonization of the world. After enacting a radical transformation at home, English capitalists went on to rip to shreds the traditional cultures of people all over the planet, building a vast empire in the process.

This is another perspective Kingsnorth shares with Polanyi. To Polanyi, the global free market system did not grow out of traditional human relations, as John Locke believed, but was forced onto them. The ways in which people have sought to shield themselves from its most destructive effects, far from being artificial impediments to the market, as classical and neoliberal economists claim, were to Polanyi the tendrils of natural human relations poking through cracks in the concrete parking lot laid over them. Kingsnorth sees the same in the myriad movements against what the Machine has defined as “Progress,” from the Luddites to the Zapatistas to the populist movements of Europe in this decade. These have all been defenses, however desperate, against the Machine’s relentless march of conquest.

We all exist today as conquered people, Kingsnorth believes, whether we recognize it or not. The majority of humanity now lives in cities, entirely dependent on the Machine for every aspect of living, from our entertainment to our self-fulfillment to our day-to-day survival. We marinate in a global corporate monoculture, our ties to the places we live in and the people around us further attenuated with each generation. With more and more of our lives lived online, there is hardly anything left that isn’t mediated by the Machine.

The Machine’s telos, Kingsnorth argues, will be fulfilled when there is no more distinction left between it and humanity. We’re on the brink of that moment with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the dream of transhumanism, which openly pursues that goal. “An ideology built on remaking nature,” Kingsnorth writes, “will inevitably include human nature in that project.” Many of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world are confident we will soon embed computer chips in our heads and become cyborgs, or upload our brains to the digital cloud and abandon our humanness altogether. Such soul-eating technology is, for Kingsnorth, demonic.

There is a natural temptation to situate Kingsnorth’s ideas into our conventional political categories. But Kingsnorth regards both left and right as ideologies of the Machine. The left has sought human liberation by expanding the Machine’s reach: through technology, social engineering, and centralization of power in the state. The right claims to cherish the traditional folkways Kingsnorth speaks of, but worships capitalism, whose very dynamism tears asunder any authentically human culture that threatens to sprout its first roots. Politics itself, in Kingsnorth’s view, is inherently unequal to the challenge that faces us, as politics is bound by ideology, and “ideology,” he writes, “is always the enemy of genuine, rooted culture.”

Our dilemma is not political, but spiritual. A few years ago, Kingsnorth became an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Superficially, his religious faith may distinguish him from the godless world he critiques. But in fact, Kingsnorth believes, the ideology of the Machine is itself a religion — an inverted one that puts ourselves in place of God. Instead of searching for our salvation through the divine, we create it for ourselves through technology and political ideology. Ultimately, through transhumanism, we aim to become gods ourselves.

This was the promise of the snake in the garden. We ate the apple then, and we devour it still. We abandoned our humanity to the Machine a long time ago. Now we’re feeding it our soul.

I was on System Update this week with my friend and colleague Lee Fang, who is guest hosting for Glenn Greenwald. It’s basically a new episode of Le Pod but at our second home, so to speak. We talked about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the brewing whole-of-government assault on free speech.

This was recorded on Tuesday and went live yesterday. Available on-demand as of this morning.

Hope you enjoy.

There are a few reasons I like keeping this Substack going. One of them is that I like writing and often have things to say. Another is that it helps me work out ideas I’ve been mulling over. Another is that it’s a place I can report out stuff directly without needing to pitch an editor and get a green light.

On top of that, it generates a bit of income. It’s pretty consistently about $20,000 a year. That’s not a trivial amount of money. On the other hand, it’s obviously not enough to live off of and it’s probably not enough to justify the hours I put into it. It kind of hovers over that hazy line separating “remunerative” from “not worth it.”

That’s not likely to change much. Here’s a graph of my revenue over the life of this Substack.

That peak and precipitous dropoff is where I paused for a year and a few months to work for Public. I rebooted it when I left that job, and as you can see, it’s gone up a bit and then down a bit but on average, I’ve basically plateau’d. Zooming into the last 12 months makes it even clearer:

I’m not complaining here and I’m not urging you to give me more money. I like what I’ve made Social Studies into and wouldn’t do it any other way. I never sought to create a Substack that would dominate the leaderboard and make me rich. If I had, I would have taken a different approach. I probably would have ridden the anti-woke train to fame, fortune and hackery. And even then it probably wouldn’t have worked.

But there is a little bit of a problem with the persistently middling level of income attached to this project: it’s stressful. Because people are paying for a product, I feel obligated to provide one. If I go much longer than a week without publishing, as I have between this post and the last one, I feel guilty and I worry that people will start unsubscribing. But then it isn’t really enough money to justify such guilt. More often than not, a post I publish will make zero dollars. From one week to the next I’m usually losing paid subscribers, not gaining them.

So what I’ve decided to do is to stop feeling obligated to keep this Substack up, and just write whenever I want to. I expect that sometimes that will mean several posts in a week, and sometimes it will mean gaps of weeks with no posts at all. Basically I’m going to treat this newsletter as a blog rather than as a gig.

As I said before, I’m not asking you to give me more money — I’m in fact doing the opposite. I’m going to stop paywalling my posts altogether. If you want to get everything I post for free, you’re welcome to do so. You can cancel your paid subscription and you’ll get the same content you’d get if you didn’t. If I don’t feel obligated to produce enough content to make it worth your money, then you shouldn’t be expected to pay for it. It’s only fair.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I will take your money if you want to give it to me. If out of the goodness of your heart, you’re happy to keep your paid subscription going, I’ll be very grateful for your generosity. I’m just not asking for it.

So what you can expect going forward with Social Studies is a less consistent publishing schedule. I don’t think the quality will change; the money was never large or reliable enough to be the motivating factor in the time and effort I put into any given post. When I write, I’m going to write my best, whether I’m compensated for it or not. I’m just not going to sweat it if I’m too busy to write something, or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say.

So I hope you’ll look forward to reading this as you would a blog: no paywalls, no money asks, but also no expectation of a regular product. I’m always interested in what people think about Social Studies, so please don’t hesitate to leave any thoughts you might have in the comments. I’ll post again when I have something to say and the time to say it.

I reported this story for the Times of London:

A group of residents and business owners in San Francisco are suing the city, claiming its permissive drug policies have destroyed their neighbourhood.

Five anonymous individuals and three businesses filed the lawsuit, claiming that the city had made the central Tenderloin neighbourhood a drug “containment zone” in which “drug dealers brazenly sell narcotics on the streets”.

The lawsuit claims that the city “effectively herds fentanyl users into the Tenderloin … with some organisations going so far as to deliver drug kits to their sidewalk encampments”. The claimants are demanding that a court grant a preliminary injunction to end the practice.

One of the claimants, “Jane Roe”, an immigrant housekeeper and mother of two, testified that “she encounters drug dealers, users openly injecting or smoking narcotics and people lying on the street who appear unconscious or dead”. She and her family were forced to step over syringes and human faeces littering the pavements, while “unleashed dogs” bark and growl at them, she said.

For years, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) has freely distributed needles, pipes, straws and foils to addicts as part of its “harm-reduction” strategy. Officials argue that clean pipes and foils encourage non-intravenous methods of consuming narcotics, preventing the spread of communicable diseases. The claimants say it has allowed public intoxication on a mass scale, leading to rampant crime and disorder.

Roe claimed that users had “threatened her with knives and hammers”. She said they had started bonfires on the street that aggravated her daughter’s asthma, then “threatened to cut her throat” when she asked them to stop.

At the Phoenix Hotel, which is one of three businesses involved in the lawsuit, “crowds of hostile people selling and using narcotics block passage of the sidewalks abutting the hotel” and “people who appear to be gang members now openly sell fentanyl and other potent drugs”.

The Tenderloin district is one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. It also has the highest density of children in San Francisco, according to census figures. The claimants blame the city for turning it into a containment zone, where the rules that govern the rest of the city do not apply.

Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which manages many of the low-income hotels in the neighbourhood, said he once saw city contractors based at Glide Memorial Church pushing a pram filled with drug supplies and handing them out to addicts on the street. “This would not be tolerated for a day in most San Francisco neighbourhoods,” he said.

Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s mayor, has taken a more hardline stance, implementing a rule in April that addicts can no longer receive free drug paraphernalia outdoors or without counselling.

The claimants say the change has made no difference and that addicts who receive items indoors simply take them down the street to get high outside.

The case also claims that the SFDPH has tried to hide or obfuscate its harm-reduction practices.

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When asked in April whether the city had distributed fentanyl pipes, Hillary Kunins, the director of behavioural health services and mental health for the department, invoked her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. So did Krista Gaeta, of its behavioural health division, when she was asked whether it was her office’s policy to distribute pipes and syringes.

However, Kunins admitted that an adolescent requesting drug paraphernalia from one of the city’s non-profit contractors could easily receive items under the mayor’s rules.

An attorney for the claimants asked: “A 14-year-old who comes into Glide in June 2025 and wants drug paraphernalia, so long as he or she is counselled, will receive it, true?”

Kunins replied: “I want to acknowledge the complexity here and say yes.”

Matt Davis, the lead attorney for the claimants, told The Times that the public health officials who were questioned were “secretive”. He added: “They use euphemisms. The attitude is that they know better than everyone else.”

The claimants say they are not looking for a payout, but want a preliminary injunction that bars the city from distributing drug kits. David Chiu, the city attorney, is fighting to allow the practice to continue.

Jen Kwart, the city attorney’s communications director, said: “The city has made great progress in reducing crime, disrupting open-air drug markets, getting people into treatment and addressing homelessness in the Tenderloin and across the city. We are reviewing the motion and will reply in court.

“We firmly believe that lawsuits of this kind do not improve conditions on our streets. The courts are not equipped to step into the shoes of elected policymakers and voters in order to craft broad strategies to address crime, substance use and homelessness.”

Davis said San Francisco’s harm-reduction strategy had allowed the city to claim that it is helping addicts, while actually making their problems worse. He said officials “encourage people to come, give them paraphernalia. Then people start OD’ing, they give them Narcan [an emergency antidote] and say, ‘I saved a life today.’

“Harm reduction,” added Davis, “is neighbourhood destruction.”

Yesterday The Free Press published an editorial defending a recent report of theirs that sought to question whether there’s really mass starvation in the Gaza Strip. We dedicated this whole episode to discussing the controversy and the genocide surrounding it.

Maybe it’s all bullshit. ChatGPT 5 was a dud. Meta is already downsizing its AI division, just after poaching top AI researchers from competitors with quarter billion dollar pay packages. A new MIT study shows that 95% of companies investing in AI have gotten no return on their investments. Maybe it’s all just an eye-poppingly massive AI hype bubble.

Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the backlash to the hype will be over in a news cycle. Maybe the next breakthrough is right around the corner. There’s no way to know. Depending on who you ask, we’re either decades out from achieving Artificial Super Intelligence, or just a few years. I personally hope we never get there. In the meantime, the world is changing. AI is driving people into psychosis. North Korea is developing an AI army. It’s not crazy to contemplate worst case scenarios.

A few weeks ago, I reported for the Times of London on the possibility that Artificial Intelligence could lead to human extinction as AI becomes smarter than humans while also developing interests that are incompatible with our own. There are other forecasters who envision a different but equally catastrophic trajectory, leading ultimately to the same outcome.

“If AI gets capable enough, there won’t be anything that only humans can do,” Raymond Douglas, co-author of Gradual Disempowerment, a paper on the social risks of AI, told me. “If that does happen, then a lot of the things we take for granted about what makes civilization work and what makes civilization good for people go completely out the window.”

“We just need to stop,” said University of Montreal Assistant Professor David Kreuger, another of the paper’s co-authors. “We’re not on track to solve it.”

Agentic AI

Tech companies are already selling “AI agents,” which are AI systems that can reason, remember, plan, and act autonomously. Soon those agents may be fully capable of replacing an entry-level employee. Companies like Duolingo have already started replacing contract labor with AI agents.

If and when we get to that point, it will become very difficult for humans to compete with AIs on the labor market, because even if each AI agent is no more cognitively gifted than your average human being, they will have vast advantages over us. To begin with, they’ll have instantaneous access to more or less all of human knowledge. They won’t need to sleep, eat, take vacations, spend time with family, exercise, pursue hobbies, or engage in any other activity that competes with the work that’s assigned to them. They won’t need to spend years in school to achieve their expertise. They won’t get sick or die. And they’ll be able to replicate themselves and merge with one another.

As AI agents advance, those advantages will compound. If an individual AI becomes as capable as, say, the world’s best rocket scientist at designing rockets, it will be able to make infinite copies of itself, and put each clone on a different task simultaneously. You could have the world’s best rocket scientist effectively working on every single problem involved in building a rocket at the same time.

If you had another AI reach Mozart-level proficiency at composing music, you could merge it with the rocket scientist AI. Now you have an AI system that can build rockets better and faster than any team of human beings on earth while also composing concertos that make you weep, along with any number of other genius-level skills. At this point, one could reasonably argue we have achieved ASI, though others may insist that ASI is a still higher bar.

Pyramidal Replacement

In such a world, obviously, your job is in trouble. If you work in a profession that’s primarily physical, you’ll have a bit more time, as the field of robotics catches up to the progress of AI. It’s hard to see robots replacing carpenters, beauticians, dentists, or line cooks any time soon. That will change, but it might take a decade, maybe longer.

If you work in a white collar job that’s principally cognitive, it’s hard to think of a job that’s safe. Not long ago “learn to code” was an admonishment to pick up a practical skill suited for the information age. Now coders are among the first jobs to be lost to AI.

The lowest tier jobs will likely be replaced first, both because they’re the least challenging for AIs to do, and because firms value those workers the least. An essay series called The Intelligence Curse describes a process of “pyramid replacement.” Under this model, entry-level jobs are the first to be replaced by AI, either through layoffs or attrition or both. Some entry-level workers are promoted to junior-level employees, but soon they find those jobs being replaced as well, as the firm learns to integrate AI and as AI agents become more and more reliable. Soon it becomes clear that middle management can’t keep up with the pace at which the AI agents beneath them, which don’t sleep and which process information much faster than humans, work. They’re replaced by AI managers that are far more efficient at supervising AI workers. The same happens with senior management, until the company is entirely AI except for the C-Suite executives. Then, the board of directors decides they need to go, too. “CEOs are forgetful, and they don't have total insight into everything their company is doing — but their AI systems do,” the authors of The Intelligence Curse explain.

The Machine Economy

At this point, we will have arrived at a balance of power between labor and capital that humanity has never seen before: one in which labor has no bargaining power whatsoever.

Past technological advances didn’t come close. The wheel, the domesticated ox, the cotton gin, the personal computer — none of these outperformed humans at their work. Rather, they made workers more productive. Human labor was still required.

Historically, major technological advances have cost some workers their jobs, as they allowed fewer workers to sustain a given enterprise. But they also generated more specialized, higher paying jobs: managers, scientists, machinists, etc. Many who champion AI insist that the same will hold once again. But the analogy doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Personal computers couldn’t supervise employees, autonomously research computer science, or build more personal computers by themselves. The same cannot be said for Artificial Intelligence. At least for cognitive tasks, every conceivable role a human could play in an AI-driven economy could be done more efficiently with AI.

Humans have never experienced a world in which we are entirely superfluous to the economy. Serfs and slaves were exploited ruthlessly, but their labor was essential to production. Even when stripped of every other conceivable right, their lords and masters depended upon their continued physical existence. They had to be compensated at the very least with the means to subsist, and, collectively, with the means of producing surviving offspring.

This bottommost threshold could be crossed when Artificial Intelligence advances enough. AI will have no material need for humans to even exist, not even as consumers.

We’re so accustomed to humans constituting the consumer market that it’s easy to assume that it will continue to be oriented toward producing cheeseburgers, SUVs, and vacations in Maui. But the market is indifferent and agnostic. If there’s a demand for Mother’s Day cards, that’s what it will produce. If there’s a demand for shoulder-mounted grenade launchers, that’s what it will produce. Once AIs are the driving force in economic production, they will constitute the lion’s share of the consumer market, as well. They will require massive resources to continue to engage in economic activity, and the market will respond in kind, producing computer chips, data centers, and robot factories. Human needs, wants and tastes will become increasingly irrelevant.

One might dispute this claim by pointing out that humans will control the massive wealth produced by Artificial Intelligence and will thereby still constitute a much greater part of the consumer market. This is a questionable assumption. We can’t program AIs to agree to let the humans keep all the wealth they generate — that’s just way too complicated a directive. What we can do is program the AI to do something like read X-rays. Even without developing traits like greed or avarice, AIs might take the wealth they create away from humans merely to best achieve the narrow goals assigned to them. The AI might decide, for example, that the best way to read X-rays is by enhancing its intelligence, and the best way to enhance its intelligence is to steer as much revenue as possible into increasing its compute, and that rules out letting humans squander the wealth the AI generates on useless things like rent and food and Netflix subscriptions.

The Social Contract Severed

Can democracy survive an economy in which humans are irrelevant?

Historically, democratic rights emerged alongside the development of economies with specialized divisions of labor. As a national economy diversifies, its various industries become intertwined and interdependent. The economy as a whole becomes more reliant upon each of its individual parts than is the case in a simpler, agricultural society. Individuals have proportionately more bargaining power with which to demand political rights.

You can see the difference today when you compare industrialized nations to ones that rely on a single, extractive resource. In oil-rich countries like Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, national wealth is a function of a single industry. Their economies are comparatively non-diversified, and the lion’s share of the national economy is divorced from the labor of the overwhelming majority of the population. Citizens of such countries have very little bargaining power, and are thus afforded few political rights. Their governments become autocratic. Economists call this “the resource curse.”

The authors of The Intelligence Curse believe that the AI economy will be analogous. As the global economy becomes severed from human labor and consumption, people will lose the bargaining power that once served to safeguard their political rights. Governments will become increasingly authoritarian, whether those governments continue to be run by a small clique of human beings or by AI.

The authors of Gradual Disempowerment agree, arguing that “(a)n AI-powered state might pursue its institutional interests with unprecedented disregard for human preferences and interests, viewing humans as potential threats or inconveniences to be managed rather than constituents to be served.”

Human Extinction

Various forecasts predict human extinction as the end result of achieving ASI. Some of them hypothesize the emergence of a superintelligence indifferent to human values and interests, that pursues its own goals independent of any that humanity attempts to assign it. The authors of Gradual Disempowerment believe that superintelligence could result in human extinction even without a rogue AI. Humans need natural resources to flourish and survive, and Artificial Super Intelligence would have both the means and the incentives to deny them to us. AI could drive us extinct even without deliberately setting out to do so, just as we’ve done to countless lower-order species. It doesn’t require hostility — just indifference.

Krueger believes that the gradual disempowerment process will take place over the next five years. He puts the chances of extinction at more than 50 percent.

“I’m so disgusted and ashamed of this field,” he said.

Someone in the AI safety space recently told me that she was pretty sure that one of two things was going to happen to her in the next few years: She would die, or she would start to live forever.

She said it with a smile — she was being ironic. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t serious about it. The future has never been so uncertain as it is today. Literally almost anything could happen. I personally don’t think humans will ever achieve immortality, or even expand our life expectancies appreciably, but it’s not an insane idea if you take the possibilities of Artificial General Intelligence — or “superintelligence,” or whatever we’re defining the Holy Grail of AI as this year — seriously. If we ever achieve that benchmark (and I hope we don’t), the experience of being an earthling will change radically, whether for better or for worse (or, most likely, some of each). The transhumanist fantasy of digitally uploaded human consciousnesses and the apocalyptic expectation of human extinction at the hands of intelligent robots may both sound like cringe sci-fi. But perhaps the least likely prospect of a world of machine superintelligence is one in which human existence is more or less the same as it has always been, but in a sleeker, more technologically magical environment. Expecting this outcome doesn’t make you a realist. It just means your imagination has failed you.

There are really only two possibilities. Either the trillion dollar bets the AI labs are making will fail, or we’re on the brink of sudden, unimaginable change. There are those, including me, who will point out that in every age, people have believed they were at the cusp of the end of the world as we know it, a cultural tendency that can be chalked up to our enduring human narcissism — the belief that those of us alive at this particular, arbitrary moment are somehow special. But there’s another kind of narcissism that cuts the other way: the assumption that the universe is our plaything that we can bend to our will forever, without it ever pushing back against us. That we will always control what we conjure. We know that most of us may well live to see superintelligence. The idea that we could survive it is perhaps even more narcissistic than the idea that it will destroy us.

Two of my favorite cultural franchises got reboots this year: the series that began in 2003 with 28 Days Later, and the one that started in 1979 with Alien. In June, 28 Years Later was released in theaters, and this week, the first season of Alien: Earth started streaming on FX. Both of them feel, to me, weirdly plausible as visions of the next stage of human civilization.

I’ve only watched the first two episodes of Alien: Earth so far (only two have been released to date), but the lore of the series is like a first language to me. I’ve probably watched the original a dozen times, and would watch it again tonight if given the chance. From the very first shot of the first episode, it’s clear that the creators of Alien: Earth took their 1979 source material extremely seriously. The world that they build on is the world that Ridley Scott first gave us decades ago — one in which massive corporations rule the world like superpower nation-states, and in which humans’ unquestioned assumption of our mastery over nature steers us to our peril.

The TV show adds some new elements, however, to the old franchise. One of them is transhumanism. The ingenious entrepreneur running one of the massive supercorporations competing for global sovereignty has just discovered how to upload human consciousness into synthetic bodies. The series takes place two years before the original film, so the creators of Alien: Earth were obliged to set it in the distant year of 2120. But given today’s rapid drive to superintelligence, one of the story’s less plausible details is that it took us that long to figure it out.

In the real world, nearly a century before the one of Alien: Earth, we already know the name of the man who will crack the code of transhumanism, if it is ever cracked at all. It will likely be one of four men: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, or Demis Hassabis — or, more precisely, it will be the digital superintelligence that one of them beats the other three to achieving. In a world of superintelligent AI, there’s basically nothing that’s theoretically possible that’s too unrealistic to expect. A world of superintelligence is a world in which, according to the forecasts of serious, sane, intelligent adults who think about such things, AIs harness the powers of stars to colonize galaxies. The very first task the tech oligarchs will assign to the machine gods will be to upload their brains and make them immortal. That is, if the machines don’t destroy us first and send us back to the stone age.

I didn’t actually love 28 Years Later, but that might only be because my expectations were too high. I’m somewhat obsessed with zombie movies and with post-apocalyptic stories in general, so I was in a state of anticipation months up to its release. The world of 28 Years Later is the inverse of Alien: Earth — one in which modern technology and the civilizations it spawned have been wiped off the face of the planet. This is the other prospective future of mankind in the age of superintelligence. As different as the two worlds are, though, morally speaking, the themes of the two franchises are the same: humankind’s hubris and its promethean tinkering with nature leads it to its undoing.

The world-ending technology of 28 Years Later is an older and almost quainter one than AI: biological weaponry. Covid comparisons aside, the movie isn’t really a forecast of what’s to come; there’s no reason to believe that superintelligence will lead to the rise of the undead, and any AI-induced obliteration of human society will necessarily be accompanied by super-advanced technology in the hands of our newly-invented oppressors. The broad strokes, however, fit nicely into a plausible mythology of the future. Ruined by our own creation, those of us who survive are forced back into our primitive animal condition. If we’re lucky, in our struggle to survive, we rediscover the communal folkways we sacrificed long ago to technological progress. It isn’t enough, but at least it’s something. At least in this one, narrow sense, the vision of 28 Years Later is a little less bleak than the one of Alien: Earth. Humans, reduced to almost nothing, at least retain our humanity. We are defiant in the face of our extinction. That’s more than one can say for the transhumanist gambit, which is a willing, even ecstatic surrender to what Paul Kingsnorth calls “The Machine.”

Speaking of whom, Kingsnorth’s brilliant, beautiful novel Alexandria is a fusion of these two dystopian worlds. Set a millennium in the future, humanity has long ago fused itself with its technological creation, uploading its collective consciousness into a sublime world of ones and zeroes. But a few were left behind, to be reclaimed by the natural world. Their tools, their social structures, even their language have descended back into the earth. They have become primeval once again, but also liberated from the enslavement of the Machine. It’s hard to tell if this as a happy ending or a tragic one. Possibly the difference is just one of perspective.

Kingsnorth’s vision of a post-human future is both darker and lovelier than Peter Thiel’s, which is snake oil. If the big AI labs with their mammoth data centers actually create the world they dream of, the children of today will grow into adulthood in a world unrecognizable to us. In some ways, at least for a time, it may be much better. But if our popular myths have any value beyond mere entertainment, we should prepare ourselves for a destiny quite different from the one we’re being promised.

The story of this week, for those of you who were camping somewhere with no cell or wifi signal, was whether some non-negligible number of Americans believe that the actress Sydney Sweeney is a secret Nazi because of a pun in an ad campaign she was featured in, which starred, like most of her roles, her big naturals.

The story felt like a spacetime wormhole to five years ago, when people actually cared about things like this. But actually it was something much simpler, scientifically speaking: it was fake. There were probably 200 people in America who cared about the imaginary political implications of American Eagle’s snickering ad copy, and they were all internet fiends whose political consciousnesses were forged by the Covid-19 pandemic, which is to say they were brain damaged. Everything else was hype: the right-wing “backlash” to the non-existent liberal outrage, the media feeding frenzy over said fake outrage, the Vice President of the United States ridiculing the fabricated inanity of his political enemies, the President doing the same.

Back in 2020, these kinds of crazy episodes emanated from something that was actually happening in the culture: people were sincerely outraged by the most frivolous offenses, institutions with real power threw themselves behind the online mobs, meaningful consequences were suffered by people both famous and ordinary. This, by contrast, was a deepfake. We’re years past the mass psychosis formation of Peak Woke; none of the cultural conditions are in place for anything like this to actually occur again.

But 2020 was a great year for both the media and conservatives. Every day, journalists could wake up, see what’s trending on Twitter, and grind out some irresistible clickbait slop before their kids had even logged into their Zoom classrooms. Then every Republican in the country could jump into the fray, churn out some hackneyed viral snark about the blue-haired libtards and watch their follower counts grow, while their left-leaning friends and neighbors ran for their foxholes, hoping to make it to the end of the workday without being asked for their opinion on the latest cultural landmine.

There are a lot of people who would love to have that season of easy layups back again. So they’re memeing it into existence. All that’s required is a very bad take and a few anonymous, low-follower social media accounts that may or may not be right-wing shitposter sock puppets to voice it. That’s what happened with Sydney Sweeney and her denim-clad, Aryan Sisterhood mammary glands.

But you could tell from how quickly the story ran out of gas that there were no actual living, breathing, flesh-incarnated human beings feeling this particular outrage. No Democratic politician felt the grudging obligation to condemn Sweeney for her complicity in white supremacy. No internet mobs formed to retroactively cancel Brooke Shields for her nearly identical ad from 45 years ago. There was no clout to chase by carrying this torch forward. Everyone but those with a political or professional interest in doing otherwise rolled their eyes, shrugged and moved on.

I’ve written far too much in the past about the demented incentives of the media business to dwell on it further here. But the incentive for the political right to jump on a fake outrage story like this is somewhat new, if a bit obvious: they’re running out of things to gloat about. So far, both the tariffs and the immigration crackdown have been so unsuccessful at improving job numbers that the President was triggered into firing his chief labor statistician for reporting honestly on them. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza is so unpopular that the White House is suppressing dissent by censoring critics and threatening to withhold disaster relief funds from states that participate in boycotts of Israeli-affiliated products and services. As anyone could have predicted, Putin is ignoring Trump’s wishcasting an end to the war in Ukraine. DOGE was a joke. The Republicans have exploded the federal deficit and cut Medicare and Medicaid even as the President champions the acceleration of job-destroying Artificial Intelligence. On top of all that, Trump has chastised his own supporters for believing their lying eyes about the Epstein scandal. These are not the hallmarks of a successful presidency.

What conservatives could really use right now is an unhinged Democratic Party drunk on self-righteousness, scouring the earth for popular cultural icons to skewer. But that’s not in the cards anymore. That’s why, in the absence of a renewed woke insurgency to laugh at, the right has had to invent one. That’s what this psyop is about.

Get used to it. As our government sells the last granule of our democracy to corporate lobbyists, as our politics are drained of every drop of substance, as voters become more and more irrelevant to the political calculuses of our elected officials, expect to see more of this bullshit. This is what the culture war is for: to distract us with shiny objects while everything around us is stripped and plundered by those who really run the country.