Foreigners are baffled that Americans are allowing an authoritarian to rob them of their precious birthright. I’m baffled, too—but I also recognize that we have no experience resisting this kind of government. So we can study what ordinary people living under other modern authoritarian regimes have done. Witness, protest, speak out, and mock in creative ways that catch the popular imagination. Politicians can run for office, lawyers can sue, journalists can investigate, artists can dramatize, scholars can analyze. Americans are already doing these things, but so far none of it has made much difference because the public isn’t engaged, and without the public on their side opponents of authoritarianism are too weak to win.

The greatest temptation and danger is to withdraw into some private world of your own and wait it out.

 

Sam Altman, a co-founder and the CEO of OpenAI, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. When Rogan floated the idea of an AI president, Altman envisioned a system that would be able to talk to everyone, understand them deeply, and then “optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S. That’s awesome.”

 

I’m suspicious of anyone who suggests being governed by a machine that’s made him a multibillionaire. I remember Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian dream of a platform that would create a more open and connected world, uniting humanity across tribal lines, perhaps even ending wars in the Middle East. The unforeseen damage that social media has caused democracy seems likely to be dwarfed by that of artificial intelligence. It won’t just substitute an algorithm for our ability to make decisions. It’s coming to replace us—to be our therapist, our doctor, our teacher, our friend, our lover, our president. But if one day a chatbot writes a poem better than Frost or Bishop, it will still be worthless—because it’s only the human intention, the search for meaning and effort to reach others, that give a poem its value. There’s no art without us.

 

Chatbots feed on some longing we must have to be relieved of our humanity, as if being human is too hard, too much trouble to have to think and judge for ourselves, to define who we are and what we believe, to suffer the inevitable pain of consciousness and love for another human being. This longing seems especially acute today.

 

So artificial intelligence promises to do what an authoritarian regime does: take our place. They’re two sides of the same coin—one political, the other technological—both forfeitures of human possibility. We’re surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we’re building machines that take away our ability to think and feel.