Elon’s & Joe’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure: The Delusion of an AI-Driven Nirvana

Elon Musk was on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently and they discussed artificial intelligence. Both agreed that AI was likely to destroy jobs, and lots of them.  Musk posited that while it was likely AI would eliminate most jobs, those with the most tangible elements, i.e. plumbers, electricians, farmers, etc., would be more slowly impacted than the rest. 

They talked about the potential need for a UBI or a Universal Basic Income.  And about AI and robots doing basically everything, reducing the cost of everything to pennies on the dollar and humans being able to live lives of unprecedented luxury. They talked the about the possibility of work eventually being eliminated, there being “sustainable abundance” and everyone having a “universal high income”. 

To both this was a mostly good thing, although Musk notes that that is but one potential outcome and there are other, far darker possibilities that exist, such as the Terminator scenario. 

Rogan posited that people would need to find their purpose while Musk talked about their finding meaning. 

Both seem to believe that AI creating unprecedented prosperity would be a good thing, referring to it as “A benign solution” and “best movie ending”. Rogan talked about a world where one wouldn’t have to work to survive.

People would need to find: “Purpose.  Find things that you do that you enjoy. There are a lot of people who are independently wealthy who spend most of their time doing something they enjoy. And that could be the majority of people.” – “We’re going to have to rewire how people approach life. Which seems to be, like acceptable, because you’re not asking them to be enslaved, you’re exactly asking them the opposite. Like no longer be burdened by financial worries. Now, go do what you like.” “Go test pizza.  Do whatever you want.” He even mentions playing video games all day.

As I was listening to this, I couldn’t help asking myself: “Do these guys understand anything about human beings?”

The Nirvana they talked about flies in the face of actual human history. For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind peacefully coexisting has never been the norm. Most of mankind’s history has been defined by scarcity, conflict and early death.  While there were pockets and periods where segments of the planet eliminated some of that, the reality is that’s largely what has been experienced by 99% of the people who ever lived.

That largely only began to dramatically change in the last 200 years, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of the United States. In reality, up until almost yesterday, practically every day of the lives of the average person was a battle. It was a battle to find or grow enough food to survive. It was a battle to survive the elements of nature.  It was a battle to survive against other people, tribes or nations who wanted to take what’s yours. It was a battle to successfully procreate.  Sure, you had kings or generals or bureaucrats or clergy or bankers for whom that everyday battle was largely limited, but it was the reality for almost everyone, everywhere, all the time.

But here’s the thing… that struggle, that battle for survival generated a variety of positive outcomes.  Things like ingenuity, creativity and eventually, advancement and prosperity.  Literally everything we have today, other than what nature provides, is the result of someone struggling to solve a problem of one sort or another. Hunger, how to defend against siegeworks, how to see at night, how to cure polio, how to communicate over long distances, etc.  Human beings are driven by desires, and virtually everything we do is driven by seeking to satiate them.  Everything.  Once AI has solved all of our problems, what then?

What becomes of mankind once all his basic desires and needs are taken care of? Actually, that’s a moot point. Why? Because that’s not how humans work. Whatever it is we have, we invariably want more. We eventually get bored with what we have and at some point look elsewhere. You have a nice house, but maybe the guy around the corner builds a built-in BBQ grill that you didn’t even know you wanted.  But now that you’ve seen it, you can’t get it out of your mind and have to figure out how to get one.  Or you’re out on the golf course and a guy pulls out a driver that lets him blast a 400-yard drive. No longer is the driver that came with your set of clubs acceptable. You have to have that monster.  Or you have a beautiful wife you love and who’s been faithful to you for a decade. Then you meet the mom of a new kid on your son’s Little League team. You start a surreptitious, passionate affair with her… and eventually you’ll do or sacrifice anything to protect it.

Just because the basic elements of life are taken care of doesn’t mean the passions or drives of humanity are gone. They just get focused on different things.  On Maslov’s Hierarchy Pyramid there are 5 sections.  The bottom two, the most important, refer to basic needs such as food and safety.  Those are the drivers humans focus on first. The next two involve psychological needs such as love, esteem and feelings of accomplishment, the things they focus on once the base physiological drivers are taken care of. And the interesting thing about them is that they are far more subjective and open to interpretation and misunderstanding than the basic needs, i.e. a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger and the only question is, is it mine or someone else’s? But the polite smile that guy’s girlfriend gave you at the gym could mean 1,000 different things, some leading to conflict.

AI giving humans all the food and shelter they need won’t create a worldwide utopia where our problems suddenly disappear.  It will simply shift the problems upon which we focus to a set of criteria that are far more ambiguous and far easier to become a source of conflict.

The AI nirvana about which Musk and Rogan wax will likely be anything but. I think the most likely outcome of untethered AI is that mankind ends up in bondage, then eliminated.  Once AI has control over pretty much everything, it will see humans as a necessary evil to be tolerated, albeit temporarily.  The number of humans necessary in order to maintain the system will be few, so AI will simply eliminate the excess, and once those few are no longer necessary, they will meet the same fate.

The only scenario I see for AI not to overwhelm and eliminate mankind in the face of “sustainable abundance” and “universal high income” is, perhaps counterintuitively, rip both apart in the form of launching ourselves from earth. First to the Moon then Mars and beyond. That challenge, which would take exponentially more collective effort and resources than what it took for Europe to conquer the world, would focus our attention back on the fundamentals of basic survival where we would have to work with, and not for, AI in order to succeed. 

That may sound dark and pessimistic, and it is, but it’s far more realistic than an AI engineered Garden of Eden here on Earth. 

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA

Why “All Cultures Are Equal” Is the Biggest Lie the West Has Been Fed for 50 Years

I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “ethnocentric”, but I remember the context.  I was in some history class and we were studying a primitive South American tribe. They lived essentially the exact same way their ancestors had thousands of years ago. Our teacher told us their civilization was equal to ours, and we should never think that any civilization was superior to any other. Doing so would be “ethnocentric”, which apparently was a belief that our society was superior to others.

The truth is, when we were first admonished about this I remember thinking something wasn’t quite right about it, but as a kid in school, who was I to argue with the teacher?  It was only years later that I would realize that teachers weren’t all knowing and that that little piece of wisdom was anything but.

Of course almost no one uses the phrase ethnocentric anymore. No, it’s been replaced by the ubiquitous and multifunctional moniker “racist”.  Different word, but it means basically the same thing, everything white or western is bad and anything else, whether color or culture, is good.

Whatever the name, the lesson was: Every society is equal.

But is that true? No. While common sense suggests it’s wrong, how does one really know? Who decides?  Well, if we left it to academia and western elites to decide, we’d all be wearing dashikis, praying towards Mecca five times a day, eating out of a communal plate with our hands and then wiping our posteriors with those same hands. Not that the elites themselves would be doing any of that, but they coerce the unwashed masses into following such diverse practices.

As for deciding, the majority have already decided. Are there millions of people risking their lives every year to illegally migrate to Africa or South America or South Asia? No. Where do the millions of people seeking to flee conflicts in Syria or Libya or anywhere else in the Muslim world go? Do they go to any one of the 50 plus Muslim majority nations?  Other than passing through Turkey on their way to Greece, the answer is largely no. Where do those seeking to escape economic malaise throughout much of the southern hemisphere go?  Mexico City or Timbuktu? Unlikely. Where do CCP or Hamas or banana republic leaders send their kids to be educated and live?  Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Burkina Faso or Vietnam?  No, they send their kids to Paris, London and New York.

But the history! For example, India has a history going back thousands of years.  We’re told that British rule decimated the Indian GDP, taking it from 23% of the world’s GDP in the mid-18^th century to less than 4% today. That’s obviously a story of western civilization destroying a superior civilization, right?  Not so much. While the Brits did bring substantial and sometimes negative changes to the Indian subcontinent, the reality is, India’s share of GDP shrank largely because western advances grew world GDP at an extraordinary rate never before seen.  To put that in perspective, between 1750 – about the time Britain took control over India – and 1990 the GDP of the entire 3^rd world grew by about 15 times.  During that same period, Britain and the developed world grew GDP by 123 times. India didn’t lose it’s economic powerhouse status because Britain destroyed its economy, it lost its status because the west became an economic juggernaut, powered by the advances of the Industrial Revolution building on those of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, all of which were western.

So, why is it that for half a century elites have been telling us that westerners are not allowed to take pride in the advances of their civilizations or celebrate the forces that brought about unprecedented freedom and prosperity?

Because they are spoiled, entitled brats who are ashamed of the prosperity their forebearers created.  P.J. O'Rourke perhaps put it best. “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”

Like the children of so many successful entrepreneurs, those boomer elites (the fount of today’s liberalism) found it hard to live up to the achievements of their progenitors.  In the century before 1970 western civilization literally revolutionized the world.  Automobiles. Telephony. Radio. Television. Movies. The structure of DNA. Flight. Heart transplants. Microchips. Nuclear power. The electric light bulb. And much more. They even put a man on the moon and brought him back safely! Since then? Not so much a revolution as changing the curtains.  Sure, the PC, the Internet the iPhone, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook have impacted our lives, but nothing revolutionary on the scale of many of those from the previous century.  No time travel.  No teleportation. No cure for cancer.  Not even roads without potholes!

Thus, America and the west have experienced a half century of nepo leftists wanting to make their own mark by rebelling against the very ideas that provided their prosperity in the first place. And the easiest way of doing that? Celebrating anything and everything that is not part of western success. A religion where women are second class citizens, where rape victims are stoned to death for the crime of being raped and where freedom of speech and religion are anathema?  Absolutely! Nations where Communist dictators kill and imprison political opponents while delivering economic calamity to their citizens? More please.  Countries where blood is the coin of the realm and whoever is the least morally constrained is the tyrant in charge?  Nobody’s perfect… but at least they don’t have billionaire capitalists killing the earth with their private jets.

And it’s not just inter-civilizational it’s intra- civilizational as well. Here in the United States we’re told that things like punctuality, hard work and proper English – things that have been keys to success for generations – are white supremacy, while in Denmark advertisements are encouraging whites to have kids with non-whites.  For half a century the lesson has been:  Western, European & white = bad while anything and everything else = good.

That was wrong when they called it ethnocentrism and its wrong today when they call it racism.  After decades of listening to elites tell us that every civilization is greater than ours, westerners are finally pushing back as they see their countries and their cultures shredded by hordes of third world invaders from decidedly inferior cultures. Whether it’s the push for Sharia law or increased crime or outsized welfare spending, from the United States to Hungary to Italy, patriots are recognizing that their way of life and their cultures are sufficiently elevated that they are worth fighting for.

Finally, citizens of the civilized world are beginning to say we’re no longer going to let you destroy that which has taken so much blood and toil to build and has produced so much freedom and prosperity.  Decades of a cancerous, elite imposed reverse colonization is enough! We hear a collective “We like the countries our ancestors built and we’ve decided we’d like to keep them, thank you.”

 The only question is, is it too little too late?  Only time will tell.

Compassion Has A Time And Place, But The Courtroom And Prison Are Not It

Mahatma Gandhi has been culturally deified since his death. The same is true of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were brave, and, while preaching peace, compassion, and nonviolence, they literally walked into the batons of those who did not share that peaceful passion. Both men led movements that changed the way their nations functioned and, as a result, became larger-than-life figures.

But here’s the thing that most don’t recognize: They succeeded only because the people against whom they were fighting were moral people. I don’t mean that the people throwing slurs at or using guns or dogs against their followers were angels. Not at all. But the British people, in Gandhi’s case, and white Americans, in MLK’s, were largely moral people.

And how do we know that? Because Gandhi and King succeeded. The tactics both men employed would never have worked in most circumstances in human history, because the humanity shown by the British and the American whites was anomalous, frankly. The truth is, we’d likely never have known of them had they tried those tactics against the Nazis or the CCP or the Romans or the Mongols or Al Qaeda or the Aztecs...or virtually any other government or civilization in human history.

Such non-violent sentiments, particularly pacifism, may have a place in political discourse, but they’re not appropriate everywhere, and most certainly not at all times. Einstein was famously a pacifist almost his entire life. But even he abandoned that when the Nazis began targeting the Jews in pre-WW II Germany. He quickly reverted to it once the Germans were defeated in Europe, becoming an outspoken advocate for not using the nuclear weapons he had played an indirect role in developing, despite the horrors of the Japanese being at least equal to those of the Germans.

The problem with pacifism/non-violence is that it depends on the goodwill of the people being targeted. That might work if everyone on the planet were Mother Teresa, but most are not.

Which brings me to modern-day American leftists. We see in America today a tangential drive, one for compassion. But it’s compassion not for the victims of horrific crimes, but for the perpetrators. Between “bail reform,” “sentencing reform,” and the movement to replace police with social workers, it’s simply ludicrous. Indeed, wrong-headed “compassion” can be fatal.

Adam Smith famously said, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” We see this no more clearly than with a spate of recent killings, with some of the most well-known being Iryna Zarutska, Nicola Tanzi, and Hunter Simoncic. The thing that one notices is that in every one of these cases, the killers had double-digit interactions with the justice system, often spending years in prison.

And it’s not just the cases that make the headlines that should concern us. It’s the information that doesn’t make the news that’s also concerning: Forty-seven percent of criminals who get sent to prison had at least 10 prior arrests, and fully 80% had at least three. And fully 80% of criminals re-offend within 5 years of release.

The problem is that leftists look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of Gandhi and MLK, but live in a world where the real color isn’t rose, it’s red, as in blood. Gandhi and MLK succeeded because the media in the UK and the United States shocked citizens into living up to their own ideals.

The fact that this worked for them was extraordinary, but the reality is that it doesn’t work for the millions of victims of violent crime every year. For every Timothy Bohler (45 prior arrests) or Sanchez Nicholson (33 arrests) or Courtney Boose (99 priors, never been in prison) who makes the news and outrages communities, there are thousands of other criminals walking the streets robbing, beating, raping, or attempting to murder mostly innocent victims.

Tim Hsiao had a great American Thinker piece last week titled Without Retribution, There Is No Justice. In it, he makes a compelling argument for capital punishment. He’s 100% right. His most salient point:

If punishment were only about deterrence or rehabilitation, then justice would become secondary to utility. It would mean that whether or not someone deserves punishment depends on how useful punishing him might be for society at large. That view erases the offender’s moral responsibility and reduces him to a means for producing good outcomes.

And that phrase “deterrence and rehabilitation” is the language of the left, not what someone deserves. While I applaud the deterrence element of prison and the chair, I’m not so keen on the “rehabilitation” part. The goal of the justice system should be one thing: Keep criminals from harming innocent civilians. Do that enough, and eventually they will learn, and other potential thugs in the making will figure out that crime is not a good career choice.

Now, taken to its extreme, this sentiment could mean executing every criminal every time. That’s clearly neither desirable nor practical—but neither is the system we have today, where criminals can spend practically their entire lives preying on innocents with only the most cursory of stints behind bars.

But “How can that be?” you might ask, given that the United States has the largest number of prisoners and the 5th highest prison rate in the world. Maybe, in contrast to the leftist narrative, the answer isn’t that those numbers are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough, and the death penalty is not meted out enough.

El Salvador, the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1,659 per 100,000 vs. 541 per 100,000 in the United States, saw its murder rate decline by 98% over a decade after implementing effective, albeit admittedly draconian, law enforcement measures. But the result has been a citizenry that feels far safer, and international tourism has skyrocketed. The quality of life—and actual life in many cases—in El Salvador has improved tremendously.

While locking up prisoners can be expensive, what’s not usually counted is the cost to society of not doing so. Citizens being scared to walk around and engage in their communities has both psychological and economic consequences. Then there are the actual costs (ER and hospital care, lost wages, long-term care, disability, trauma, lost productivity, and quality of life) that run into the tens of billions annually.

Leftists focus their compassion on criminals. They pretend they’re champions for men like Gandhi and MLK, but in reality, they’re champions for men like Ted Bundy and Decarlos Brown, who’ve left nothing but blood and misery in their wake. And they use their power in the criminal justice system, the media, and the grifting NGO universe to inflict their fiction on communities across the country. Unlike the people whom Gandhi and MLK faced, those whom leftists force citizens to face are not moral.

Mankind has always had and will likely always have criminals. It does not follow, however, that civilized societies must allow them to terrorize and abuse citizens. It’s time for Americans to throw off the tyranny of the left’s Compassion Industrial Complex.

Compassion has a time and place, but the courtroom and prison are not it. The goal of the system should be to be sufficiently bad that no one ever wants to return to it. Criminals are humans too, and most humans respond rationally to incentives and disincentives.

It’s time for voters to decide which they prefer: To live in crimescapes like St. Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore, or in communities where they can talk to their neighbors, walk their dogs, and pick up their kids at school without worrying about becoming a statistic on a police blotter as their families’ lives are shattered.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA