Just before the Trump indictment hit, the news was all about how artificial intelligence, if not immediately paused in its development, was going to kill us. What is killing us is what human intelligence is not doing.     

The news blares out that the world is ending, that AI will take over the world and destroy humanity. It sounds eerily like the Covid panic all over again.

It's certainly true that a society which comes to rely on computers to “do its thinking for it,” is not long for this world. Computers are useful tools. However, for most people today, computers are not computational machines advancing scientific and industrial progress. They are instead simply, if remarkable, telecommunications devices, “black mirrors” that absorb every aspect of our life into datasets, which then provide our simulated avatars to all the corporations and agencies which might be interested. In payment for this Faustian pact, the computer becomes an all-knowing oracle providing all the politically-correct answers for life’s hard questions. In this same way, the Oracle of Delphi helped to destroy Greek civilization in its fratricidal Peloponnesian War. 

The Internet is actually not all-knowing, nor will it ever be, and no AI program will ever be conscious, feel pain, or give a damn. Far from it. In reality, any AI system built on today's Internet of Wikipedia, porn, and personal data collection, will be more like a sex-obsessed adolescent know-it-all, than a great genius. And this, unfortunately, is the typical kind of kid that has dominated Ivy League campuses for too many decades. 

However powerful an AI system becomes, it is not going to inevitably devour human civilization. But, if we choose to let it run our society, then the outcome will not be much different, if only more accelerated, than if we leave it in the hands of the robotic lickspittles that run society today. Either way, our society would be run with nearly zero understanding of actual human civilization. (See Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias.)

The real crisis we face is found in what we are not doing. We have a generation of young people today in which many of them have little to no sense of their own profound meaning. Not surprisingly, the adolescents and young adults who often feel this way, with a certain “lostness,” are often the ones with a potentially richer internal and intellectual life. They are the ones who crave meaning because they have a seemingly intrinsic sense that human life is based on profound meaning and purpose. But instead of nourishing this cultural life of the individual through what used to be known as education–a sharing from one generation to the next of the profound advancements in creative thought and discovery–we have instead encouraged the robotic imitation of experts and fads. 

Today, one who merely parrots the right answers, as ChatGPT might, will be statistically more likely to achieve the materialist's "good life." In other words, we have rewarded the robotic, not the creative. And for the rest of us, who find truth and meaning in ideas, principles, thoughts and emotions–we are encouraged to become cynics, to sit and scoff at such stupidity while civilization collapses because of it.

We need to see once again the hard, courageous, and creative work that got us here. Not “here” as in smartphones and the Internet, but here as in self-government and nation-states, here as in the massive distribution of electricity and running water for billions of people, with advanced health care and abundant food supply. Famines are now extinct, except when they are man-made. Many diseases that were once mass killers are now gone. How has this all happened? How have we come to benefit from all of this?

It is a question of nothing less than how civilization advances for the benefit of all future human existence. More personally, it provokes the question–how do we live self-conscious of our own meaning and purpose? Something a cold, dead computer can never experience. Its solution lies in the creative passion of human individuals. Great minds, some known and many unknown, who sought, often at great peril to themselves, to advance the broad human condition.

As statesman Lyndon LaRouche identified, it is the voluntary devotion of the individual which rallies the creative powers of a people and nation through poetic ideas and the power of truth, with the intention to act in concert for the common good. Our Constitution's Preamble says no less: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. 

This capability is not measured by ideological coherence, as a computer’s AI program might be, but is measured by our power to sustain future generations and to inspire their creative powers to continue this arc of creation.

Much more can be said on the scientific details for measuring the success of our policies in this regard—but this, and nothing less, is what a society must do to survive. If we don't, if we obsess over what is nothing more than an Internet simulation of  pseudo-intelligence, however useful in specific applications; if we watch generation after generation lulled into existential meaninglessness by the lack of purpose and mission of our culture; if we fail to challenge our citizens to grasp the greatness of human civilization, and how they personally can contribute to the greatest of God's creations–then we will certainly perish, or at best, face precipitous decline. But that is not the doom inevitable from AI. It is the doom intrinsic in natural law, when a human society denies the true creative and moral powers of their citizens. 

Given the indictment yesterday in Manhahttan, one must say, for the record, that President Trump understands this principle of creativity, and this is why the robots of our legal system and their programmers in Washington are hell-bent on taking him down. They did the same to Lyndon LaRouche. Proving only that people can become like robots.