Enjoying the view from Limbo
Artificial intelligence will never be human. It will never have the best characteristics of humans. Neither will it ever have the worst characteristics of humans. What it will be, and all it will be capable of becoming, is an emulation, an imitation, a digital simulation, of the best and worst characteristics of humans. However, as it can only be simulating those elements of...
Donald Trump, as part of his crusade to keep the stock market’s tech bubble alive, obviously for the sake of his and his family’s material profit, is not only rejecting all pleas for regulation of the development of artificial intelligence, but is even proposing to boost its idiot-friendliness by changing its name to something even more false than the current one. Specifically, he...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism? / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 29, 2026
Inevitably, the news comes that the Trump administration is deeply engaged in negotations aimed at establishing “a long-term stake in a vast share of Venezuela’s oil fields.” That is, a long-term U.S. Government ownership stake in Venezuela’s natural resources. So Trump invades a socialist country and deposes its leader, only to come to terms with the rest of the socialist regime at the...
The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending,...
The Ring of Gyges.– The modern world is running a live test version of Glaucon’s brilliant challenge to Socrates in Book II of The Republic. The amoral thrill of being able to violate, invade, and steal everyone’s life, privacy, and property with impunity is now within reach of all of us, and above all, within the legislative reach of every government, and of...
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 28, 2024 · Last modified December 24, 2025
The past century of human civilization has increasingly defined itself as the age of the labor-saving device; that is, of endlessly-developing technological advances aimed at reducing human effort and freeing up our time and energy for “more important things.” But what happens when the labor being saved by our technology is specifically the kind of labor that was previously dedicated to those very...
Artificial intelligence is to the realm of learning and knowledge what the welfare state is to the realm of practical motivation and productivity. Reducing the sense of lack, need, and concern in practical life makes people not only less likely to want to work hard, less willing to devote their lives to some kind of meaningful productive activity, but also, at the highest...
In the eternal battle between cats and birds, I am always on the side of the birds. Make no mistake, though: I know the battle is eternal, which is to say that it is both essential and without hope of ultimate resolution or victory. I have chosen my side nevertheless, or rather perhaps I ought to say that I have been chosen by...
The world may already have ended: I just noticed that Noam Chomsky of all people has publicly stated something aligned with what I myself was thinking during my morning walk today. Specifically, he commented about a year ago that AI systems such as ChatGPT are “basically high-tech plagiarism. It’s a system that…accesses an astronomical amount of data and finds regularities and strings them...
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