With Donald Trump as president, living in a body has become a
dangerous thing.
We’re much more at risk of death by gun violence, even those
of us who travel with security, such as conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who died Wednesday after being shot in the neck at a rally at Utah
Valley University. Despite making political hay out of so-called “American
Carnage” in order to blame it on Democrats—always baselessly (for example, in
Kirk’s murder, both perpetrator and motive are still unknown)—Trump has gutted
laws that are supposed to protect us against such carnage, making it
easier for criminals to buy guns by weakening the definition of a “fugitive
from justice,” purging half a million names from the federal background-check
database, and lifting prohibitions on gun purchases by the mentally ill.
Then there are the toxins that imperil nearly all life forms.
Republicans are notoriously soft on pollution, but even compared to past
conservative administrations, Trump has been alarmingly permissive on air and
water polluters. For example, Trump is delaying the implementation of Biden’s
2024 methane standards for oil and gas facilities, a move that the
Environmental Defense Fund says will add millions
of tons of methane to the atmosphere. Methane contributes to respiratory
illness, neurological damage, and cancer.
And how about infectious diseases? Whether you’re a chicken,
a wild animal, a human preschooler, or a grandmother, you’re far more at risk
of disease under Trump. High-ranking officials have been leaving the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention over RFK Jr.’s changes to vaccine policy, which have
recently included making it harder to get a Covid-19 vaccine and failing
to act in the face of a Texas measles outbreak that killed two children and
hospitalized one hundred people.
And infectious disease is only one possible way that bodies
of all kinds have become more vulnerable to sickness, as Trump and his team
have also canceled millions of dollars of investment in research into disease
prevention of all kinds, and crippled
programs that protect Americans from cancer, lead poisoning, heart attacks,
and many other fatal and debilitating conditions.
The perils to the body are now even worse if you’re poor or
disabled, since Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have cut Medicaid by
some $900 billion over a decade, a move that will leave 7.5 million Americans
with no health care by 2034. About half the recipients are children; not only
will those kids lose coverage, but hospitals
serving children will be gutted, since they rely on Medicaid for about half
their revenue.
It’s natural to care more about humans, but it’s worth
noting that Trump’s anti-biology bias is consistent, extending to all living
things. Not only are plants and animals endangered by Trump’s loosening of pollution controls and weakening of public
health, he’s also been setting up some species for extinction by undoing
protections for endangered plants and animals, and, on Wednesday, removing
“conservation” as an official purpose for public lands, which essentially means
that their main purpose is to serve the extractive industries. This will
make it harder for all life forms to survive on the nation’s 245 million acres
of federal public lands.
It’s not a good time to be alive. Under Trump, the machines
have it easier.
Trump’s AI Action Plan, released this summer, outlines
90 federal actions to that effect, including some that will make it easier
to build more data centers more quickly, as well as roll back regulations on
AI.
Whenever this administration has the opportunity to choose
between machines and life, it chooses the machines, as is evident in the executive
order making
it easier to bypass environmental regulation in order to build data centers.
And for all Trump’s talk of American jobs, this massive AI welcoming party is going
to kill the jobs and livelihoods of millions of Americans attempting to sustain
their own lives and those of their families.
Almost all normal people would agree that a society that is
kinder and more nourishing to machines than to life is a failed society. But many
of the Silicon Valley billionaires influencing our president and donating to
his party don’t agree. They believe that they’re creating machines that are
better than people, and that it’s OK—and for some, even desirable—if we go
extinct and the bots take over.
Philosopher Emile Torres, who has studied the “post biology”
and “pro-extinction” thought in this milieu, argues that such ideas underpin
the entire race to build artificial general intelligence and can be heard “everywhere
in Silicon Valley.” Jaron Lanier, virtual reality expert, recently told Vox
that it’s common in the industry to believe that “it would be good to wipe out
people and that the AI future would be a better one.” There’s an underlying
assumption in the industry that, as Elon Musk has tweeted, humanity is a
“biological boatloader for digital superintelligence.”
Obviously, freaks with such anti-human, anti-life attitudes
belong nowhere near government, but Trump’s policies show how intimately close
they are. Our leaders need to take sides and—I’m going out on a limb here—throw
down with the animate over the inanimate.
Sure, some technology can make our lives more productive and
efficient. But while this should go without saying, in our current world it
obviously does not: Anyone plotting our extinction is an enemy. As living
humans, we owe ourselves, our children—and all animals and plants to boot—a
world in which biological life comes first. And when the machines get in our
way, they must be stopped and destroyed.
The post Under Trump, It’s Much Better to Be a Bot Than a Human appeared first on New Republic.
