Perhaps I sounded unhinged to more than a few people when I cautioned that “true social justice requires a woke supercomputer” a few years ago. Today? Don’t say I didn’t warn you:
Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is issuing OMB’s first government-wide policy to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits – delivering on a core component of the [sic] President Biden’s landmark AI Executive Order. The Order directed sweeping action to strengthen AI safety and security, protect Americans’ privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers and workers, promote innovation and competition, advance American leadership around the world, and more.
Hold up. Advance equity? Yes, using a new Council of Chief AI Officers, which every federal agency must now appoint.
Technology and justice are powerful idols, and the elite-level clash of their cults spells untold and untrammeled pain for Americans and the American experiment.
According to the OMB, the new CAOs will “develop a plan to comply with minimum safety standards and to work with chief financial and human resource officers to develop the necessary budgets and workforces to use AI to further each agency’s mission and ensure equitable outcomes.” As Ars Technica reports, the OMB has laid out in detail exactly what it has in mind:
Agencies are encouraged to prioritize AI development and adoption for the public good and where the technology can be helpful in understanding and tackling large societal challenges, such as using AI to improve the accessibility of government services, reduce food insecurity, address the climate crisis, improve public health, advance equitable outcomes, protect democracy and human rights, and grow economic competitiveness in a way that benefits people across the United States.
Behind the laundry list of social-justice jargon, the idea is simple. Having tried all other known forms of government to create a utopian heaven on earth, we have found all wanting. Justice is simply too complex for human beings to achieve. Whatever good we can manage is hopelessly incomplete due to our knowledge and capability limits.
Only the most intelligent machines can understand in infinitesimal detail precisely what is due to exactly whom at exactly what moment in precisely what measure. In a world shot through with endless microaggressions and microinequities, only a national supercomputer can rightly weigh our worth in the balance and place us correctly in our proper rank on the great ladder of social credit – updating our status not by the election year, by the day, or even by the hour, but instant by instant, a new Last Judgment every femtosecond. Artificial intelligence must unite every federal agency into a new regime, a supercomputational one catechized into the woke religion, overseen by a priestly caste of superofficials.
So much for democracy! So much for human rights!
And so much for public health while we’re at it. These hallowed terms of our civil religion have been so thoroughly debased by our digitizing, diversifying overlords that they’ll now knock on your door if you say online that they and their slogans are like emperors without clothes. A few more steps down this road, and they’ll do it if you say it offline, too.
Of course, there are common-sense, practical justifications for getting the government up to speed with our onrushing technologies. Officials asleep at the wheel will wake up to digitally powered regime change of a different type, where ambitious nerds seeking revenge on federal incompetence and DEI discrimination will cut out what they see as the middleman of justice worship and erect a new form of rule on the foundation of straight-ahead tech worship. This one-feed-to-rule-them-all model spells the end of America just as definitively as the single-feed social justice/social credit system of the woke supercomputer’s unelected theocrats.
The era of the computer overlords
Technology and justice are powerful idols, and the elite-level clash of their cults spells untold and untrammeled pain for Americans and the American experiment. Understandably, hedonists and trads alike hope only to nope out from under the creepy sensation of this impending battle royale overshadowing ever more of our lives.
But fleeing en masse for the Shire or Burning Man, like calling in the airstrikes on the Big Tech data centers, abandons the moderate path that alone will give Americans the grace to gradually process our unfolding reality and adjust to it with wisdom instead of collectively collapsing into a hostile and alien timeline. We do need competent technologists and public officials, and we do need them cooperative, with each other, with American citizens, and with the dearly won constitutional form of government we rightly cherish, no matter how battered and diminished it has become.
However, we won’t get them unless leading figures in tech and governance rise to recognize that a sweeping revolution is not the cure for what ails us. Americans know how fragile our young country is. Our imaginations and artworks are filled with recurring dreams and nightmares of fracture, faction, chaos, and collapse. Libertarianism, conservatism, and even liberalism are so hard to maintain because of the anarchism that still pulses just below the surface of so much of American life and the accompanying fear that only some form of iron rule can save us from a headlong descent into barbarism the minute things go south.
Ultimately, the change of heart we need at the leading edge of tech and the foundations of our government must come from a place more profound and trustworthy than imagination or calculation. It must come from a discernment born of painful spiritual experience. A council of tech-savvy elders thus tested and tempered would be a boon not only to tech or to government but to the people, to the citizenry, whom ostensibly all this fuss is about. But we’re not going to get it from today’s OMB, and we’re not going to get it from the “Biden” administration. If you’re a top technologist or a presumptive second-term Trump official, the golden road is wide open, and there is no number you have to take to get in line to lead.
To take advantage, and save your country, you’ll need both more and less than ambition, competence, and intelligence. Bring humility, patience, and an ear for what’s heard only in silence, and you just might be remembered forever.
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