Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

“In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign.” So said President Donald Trump in his inaugural speech to the United Nations in September 2017. “In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty. Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens… As President of the United States, I will always put America first.” Trump used the terms “sovereign” and “sovereignty” some twenty-one times in his U.N. address. As this brief quote suggests, the meaning of these terms shifted throughout his remarks: first Trump said that the people govern, then he said that those who govern must protect the people, and finally he said that the nation would act in its self-interest.  Sovereignty is a concept as much used as little understood in contemporary political discourse. In purely secular terms, sovereignty is the right to rule and to make the rules. Even if we can offer secular accounts of the concept of sovereignty today, the concept’s origins, at least in Western thought, are hardly secular. The sovereign of all sovereigns, of course, is a monotheistic God, at least within the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And the paradigmatic assertion of (and submission to) sovereignty is God’s inexplicable command to Abraham to slay his son Isaac. Kierkegaard called this the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” under which justice and reason must give way to the duty to obey the absolute sovereignty of God. Earthly sovereignty is either a pale copy of Divine sovereignty or takes its authority from Divine delegation or approbation. It is no accident that Romans 13:1 was a favorite prooftext for magistrates and would-be sovereigns: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist