The Intellectual Welfare State
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 levels of practical thought, it reduces the spiritual incentives that lure us toward the ideation and development of new ways of doing things, either in our personal lives or on more universalized levels — technological developments, economic innovations, a better routine, a more sensible bedtime, what have you. All elements of what we may broadly call practical motivation are suppressed or strangled by the socialist impulse. Necessity is the mother of invention. The welfare state is by definition hellbent on dulling or pacifying the pangs of necessity, and hence necessarily diminishes invention of all sorts, including even the ordinary, everyday (and therefore more indispensably human) manner of invention that consists in working hard, setting sensible practical goals, restraining one’s urges toward idleness and lethargy, being moderate, saving money, and choosing one’s endeavors thoughtfully so as not to waste energy on trivialities that may deprive one of essentials in the future.
The goal of overcoming discomfort requires discomfort, requires pain and anxiety, requires trepidation over that which may need to be corrected or circumvented “before it’s too late.” Invention, in the sense of development and overcoming, demands tangible problems. Take away the problems and you take away the motivation that leads to the activities that make us properly (that is, successfully) human, inasmuch as humanity is a developmental species, which is to say a natural potency with a corresponding natural actualization. Without obstacles to overcome, we lose the sense of purpose, on any level of purposiveness from the most elevated to the most mundane. Socialism, or progressive utilitarianism, is focused on the collective provision of material results at the direct expense of the spiritual qualities that individuals previously had to develop in the process of pursuing such results on their own, i.e., at the expense of the virtues. That is to say, it is the coercive redistribution of material goods in the name of diminishing the natural experience of need and struggle, thereby simultaneously diluting all the unsettled feelings that push us to define and habituate the internal means of seeking what is good.
Artificial intelligence is designed, in effect, to accomplish the same spiritual corruption in the realm of thinking, learning, and truth. It is basically an artificially manufactured consensus bastardization of knowledge. It shaves off all the rough edges and open-endedness of thought and discussion, deleting or obviating substantial disagreement by artificially reconciling everything in advance in the name of “the best available answer.” What effect will such consensus truth, readily available without an ounce of effort on your part aside from clicking a button or asking a question into a microphone, have on the realm of thinking, and more specifically on the intellectual virtues essential to the human quest for knowledge?
Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with perhaps the simplest and most elegant profundity ever uttered on the subject of human nature: “All men by nature desire to know.” If you ever wanted to overturn that deceptively simple wisdom — that is, if you ever wanted to undermine the desire for knowledge, and thereby denature humanity — then, just as the welfare state reduces the desire to develop and produce (the inventiveness that arises from material necessity), so of course the thinking life, the learning life, the longing for understanding, will be absolutely undermined, and eventually destroyed, by the inescapable and ubiquitous availability of ready-made consensus truths that we do not even have to search for and try to understand, but which are rather provided to us with the least possible expenditure of physical or intellectual energy on our part. We no longer have to lose a moment’s sleep wondering or sifting through alternative answers; just ask a question to the machine and the machine provides the truth. The pre-sifted and tidily uncontroversial consensus truth. No “learning curve” required. You do not have to think at all. You get the results of learning (literally the mangled amalgamation of other people’s learning which has been stolen from them and regurgitated by the algorithm) without ever having to face the confusion, complexity, and wonder that previously stoked the soul’s inventiveness in seeking knowledge, i.e., without ever developing any of the rational capacities and activities that Aristotle dubs the intellectual virtues.
Thus, in a most emblematic twist of modernity’s fate, the most expansively human, we might almost say superhuman, iteration of “invention” will be annihilated by the most subhuman iteration of the utilitarian-socialist instinct. Artificial intelligence, the intellectual welfare state, a socialist confiscation and redistribution of thought. Universal Basic Intellect. Its pernicious effects are easily predictable due to being almost identical to its overt intentions: no discomfort required, no pain of uncertainty, no long and frustratingly inconclusive searches, no unfulfilled longing or nagging doubts.
Above all, none of the spiritual conflict of the heretic with a vision. None of the fear, none of the social stigma of private self-overcoming. None of the practical paralysis or ennobling spiritual detachment derived from the profound awareness of one’s own ignorance. No joy of self-discovery, or sense of overcoming the limits of one’s historical environment. No lives devoted to the arduous, alienating, delightful journey out of the cave and into the sun. The cave exit sealed off forever, and the tethers binding men to their seats before the shadows on the cave wall fastened beyond all hope of escape, thanks to the comfortingly convenient, labor-saving, and doubt-obviating redistribution of Being that we most aptly call artificial intelligence, though it would even more accurately be named the intellectual welfare state.
