Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

1 The United States and its democratic allies face serious, and possibly existential, challenges that appear in three manifestations: external, internal, and technological. First, the democracies collectively face a rising group of authoritarian nations loosely centered around China, which seek economic and technological supremacy in the coming century. Internally, the United States and others face lasting economic dissatisfaction and inequality, which has grown since the 2000s, creating a dangerous and widespread sense of polarization, resentment, and distrust. Everywhere there is anger rooted in resentment, the rocket fuel of contemporary politics. And lastly, and the hardest challenge to understand, is the rise of major technology platforms rivaling the power of nation-states, which seems to aid and abet the other challenges. The platforms, coupled with artificial intelligence abilities, seem unstoppable in their acquisition of information, attention, and other intangible assets. They have stoked new fears of humanity losing control over its future. These three challenges have combined to create a serious ideological retort to democracy itself, centered in a variety of authoritarian populists who claim a truer and more direct connection with the people than the democracies enjoy. Not since communism has democracy been so disparaged and denied. And what are the responses? There is the apologist’s response. It merely reasserts the intellectual and moral superiority of democracy and laissez-faire capitalism. If there are doubts, it says, the proof is in the pudding: democracy is highly democratic and look how easy we have made it to buy stuff for cheap. This response reflects the lingering influence of Francis Fukuyama’s absurd proposition that the contest of ideologies ended in the 1990s. We won, history is over, and all that remains is some tinkering. But what the apologist lacks is any answer to those living in rich countries who have lived through a painful decline in their standard of living, who have fallen through the cracks, and are suffering the humiliation of feeling poorer than their parents. It also lacks any answer for those living in poor countries, embittered by failed promises. No one wants to feel like a loser, and we have spent a generation creating economic winners and losers on a scale unsurpassed since colonialism. Another response returns to the twentieth-century contest between capitalism and socialism, suggesting that the former’s declaration of victory was premature. The more orthodox suggest that Marx’s prophecies were merely delayed, and blame Stalin for tarnishing the brand. Others, less interested in defending the record of the Soviet Union, suggest that the time has come for democratic socialism: a more gradual transition to a fully public economy. Since it is not capitalism, socialism has a way of serving as a placeholder, a stand-in for the rejection of toxic capitalism. Another response comes under the banner of rising to the challenge: it would question democracy itself and turn to a “man strong enough to get things done,” as they once said of Mussolini. It calls for an autocrat who will tame the foreigners, the universities, the media, and the disloyal government officials in our midst. Orbánism, Trumpism, and the fringe “dark enlightenment” represent the embrace of these ideas. A higher-brow version subsumes domestic economics to international power politics. It implicitly accepts the Chinese view that there are a fixed number of known contests for the future. To win these contests is to win it all. We therefore need our own command economy and centralized economic response. Those are some of the louder voices. Most people, I believe, are stuck. They may angrily believe that we are not on a sustainable course but they are uninspired by communism’s track record or by the strongmen who came to power promising to fix everything. But there is still another possible response, lost to time, to what obviously ails us. It is a vision of a decentralized and productive economy that believes in private ownership but is much different from the form of capitalism that has taken too much from too many over the last forty years. It borrows from what has actually been best over the last two centuries in real as opposed to imagined nations that have built sustainable wealth and equality. Unlike communism, it accepts and believes in private ownership,