We’re hurtling toward a future where political representatives, as well as average citizens, will be subjected to ridicule and pressure when they espouse policies or opinions that run counter to an “AI consensus.”

Artificial Intelligence is already being embedded as an oracle and assistant into core business and creativity processes across a spectrum of businesses and institutions.

And this past week, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order requiring Federal agencies to formally assess ways to integrate and utilize AI in all government operations.

It’s only a matter of time before anyone who doubts the “science-based,” dispassionate insights and recommendations of AI on a given issue or course of action automatically will be seen as “anti-science” and otherwise illegitimate.

How long before those who resist the advisements of AI are termed “AI deniers?”

In that future, who controls what and how AI learns, will have great power indeed. Right now, the most sophisticated publicly known AI rests with a handful of the world’s most powerful tech corporations.

Even at this point, in a drive to push AI to a point where it achieves an unprecedented new level of superior synthetic intelligence, AI is also being built with the ability to self-learn and advance, in ways that can’t be completely controlled by humans.

It seems that a certain amount of autonomy or “self-will” is inseparable with the kind of advanced intelligence being sought in the current AI arms race.

And that means that at some point, the AI consensus may amount to rule of average humans not by (relatively) free representatives accountable to the people, but by some alliance of technocratic human elites, with an increasingly sophisticated, autonomous AI that can outthink any human.  

Biden Dictates Will Speed the Embedding of AI into Government Decision-Making

Many might see President Biden’s latest directive as just a prudent way to leverage technological innovation.

The trouble is, AI represents synthetic intelligence. And what AI proscribes or recommends, may be viewed as more knowledgeable and objective than human intelligence. And as AI is given greater credence and deference, effective rule or policymaking by an AI consensus, may become the de facto norm.

Another problem is the kind of power that AI is already allowing human government operatives to wield.

A Post Millennial story on the Biden AI initiative detailed how intel agencies are using AI to upgrade their powers to surveil Americans. (“Biden admin moves to implement use of AI across federal agencies,” 26 Oct 2023.)

The Department of Homeland Security is utilizing AI in “autonomous surveillance towers,” which can identify and surveil “items of interest” without a dedicated human operator.

Meanwhile, the CIA said it was developing AI to “sift through an avalanche of public information.” Division director Randy Nixon, recently told Bloomberg in an interview: 

“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going. We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

One Small Step From Fauci’s “I am Science” to the AI Consensus 

At one point during the COVID War, top U.S. technocrat Dr. Anthony Fauci declared that his pronouncements were beyond criticism, since he perfectly reflected and embodied the scientific viewpoint with regard to COVID policies.

“I represent the science,” Fauci infamously remarked at one point in 2021, when questioned about troubling and even bizarrely illogical COVID policies.

The idea that any framework purporting to help make sense of human experience is untouchable and not to be questioned, is exactly the shibboleth that the scientific method was long touted as providing a check and antidote for.

But especially over the 20th century, with rapid advancement and endless products and innovations made available by science and engineering, science has morphed from a method to a belief system in itself.

I have called this phenomenon “scientism,” and detailed some of its core tenets.

The scientific method confines itself to particulars, and to ascertaining what is, and how what is is, is.

As science has grown increasingly speculative, it has gone into the business of predicting what will be. This is fraught with opportunities for ideologies, subjective notions and desires, and manipulations to enter the picture, in the name of science.

Since the 1950’s, and accelerating with advances in computing technology ever since, so-called scientific modeling has sought to drive political and social policies on a more and more grandly comprehensive scale.

Scientism is now used to drive radical policies related to the environment, education, and biology and genetics.

Transgenderism, wholesale genetic modification of plants and animals, and even the dawn of humans—and AI—genetically engineering ourselves—are all proceeding at an alarming pace.

The institituting of AI in public policy decision-making is part and parcel of this ceding of “progress” to something other than natural human provenance.

Generative AI systems have already shown themselves capable of swallowing practically the whole of human knowledge.

This represents information acquisition and leveraging that no human can match.

While AI has yet to demonstrate a “general intelligence” or self-cognizance (ie. self-awareness) that is comparable to humans, many AI experts believe it’s only a matter of time before such a moment—which some have termed the Singularity—is achieved.

In the year since OpenAI first offered its sophisticated ChatGPT to the public in a free preview, humans have already become dependent on AI, much as they have become dependent on other technology like smartphones and computers.

AI is being used to power financial software for stock and crypto trading. It’s creating award winning art and blog posts, in response to simple natural language prompting. It’s being used to analyze business data and processes, in order to advise and streamline operations.

A recent Politco article observed that AI was being utilized to solicit advice at medical facilities, with little or no regulation concerning the quality of the advice. (“AI has arrived in your doctor’s office. Washington doesn’t know what to do about it,” 28 Oct 2023.)

Perhaps Washington doesn’t want to do anything about it.

As the Biden AI directive shows, government is rushing headlong into its own slavish reliance on AI consensus.

The Trends Journal has long predicted that AI would be used sooner or later to guide and even dictate political and social policies, in an assault on human agency and democratic political rights and freedoms.

For more on that, see:

• “THE AI LEGISLATOR YOU DIDN’T VOTE FOR” (23 Aug 2022)
• “FUTURE AI WON’T SERVE HUMANKIND, BUT MIGHT SAVE IT OR DESTROY IT, SAYS SINGULARITYNET AI FOUNDER” (14 Feb 2023)
• “THE SINGULARITY AND THE SIMULATION” (18 Apr 2023)