Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency
Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.
Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.
www.newyorker.com
“… Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an “A.I.-first strategy,” which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts.
doge is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education.
Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals.
“Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official
told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.
He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency.
The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently
posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.)
Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump.
… In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio
labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”
… A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making.
… Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations.
As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them.
With
doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.
… the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself.
Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.
One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning.
Americans got a taste of the technology’s shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google’s Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption.
Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.’s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused “career Treasury officials” of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress.
His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X’s A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly
disputedthe claim.) …”
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