“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything,” G.K. Chesterton
I had a good friend, a Christian, now sadly gone, who often referred to G.K. Chesterton when we discussed religion and atheism. I’m an atheist, an open-minded one I hope, and my response was always: “Why must we believe in anything? I don’t. I prefer to consider the odds. Some things are very likely, some very unlikely, and others somewhere in between.”
Notwithstanding Oscar Wilde’s characterization of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, I must admit to certain cynical tendencies although I would rather be considered a skeptic than a cynic.
Becoming a skeptic is something I associate with adulthood. It’s easy to get carried away with causes and movements and ideas when you’re young and just getting started in life. It’s also dangerous. Consider Karen Hollander in Kurt Andersen’s sharp and reflective novel True Believers.
What has always bothered me about the Chesterton quote is that it assumes we never grow up. That is, we never outgrow the need to have an all-encompassing world view to rely on, a parent figure who has all the answers, absolute certainty. That can lead to fanaticism and authoritarianism, a world all too familiar to us today. I’m far from the first to make this argument. Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements in 1951 and his ideas were distilled from a long tradition of social and political thinkers.
This leads into a discussion of what I would call Artificial Elites. As we replace “real intelligence” (human or animal intelligence that evolved biologically through millions of years of natural selection, tied to a living organism) with AI (intelligence designed by humans and based on algorithms, data, and computation to simulate certain cognitive functions), we create a new elite class (technical elites such as engineers, scientists, and researchers who design and understand the core of AI systems; capital elites such as big tech companies and firms that own and control the data, infrastructure and distribution channels; and the influencers, executives, and founders who leverage AI tools to scale their reach and optimize their influence).
AI doesn’t just replicate the old inequalities, always a part of human societies, it entrenches them, disguises them as neutral, and scales them globally. This risks creating a techno-oligarchy: a world where a small group of people not only own the tools but also own the definitions of intelligence, truth, and value.
Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano), E. M. Forster (The Machine Stops), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (Animal Farm), and even William Golding (Lord of the Flies) are just a few writers (members of an older elite) who foreshadowed the “artificial elites” that are asserting themselves today.
Ironically the MAGA populists who rail against certain elites (academic, coastal, liberal, media, globalist) are themselves led by a new group of emerging “artificial elites” empowered by the AI revolution.
Good, old G.K. Chesterton may have been right. We humans seem to be doomed to always seek certainty. If my good friend were still alive I would concede that much to him. I would add, however, that while we may seek certainty we can never find it. What’s It All About, Alfie? by Burt Bacharach and Hal David poses the age old existential question for which we will never have an answer, not even from the latest currently hot new kid on the block, AI.
What about the artificial elites that are emerging with the hot new kid on the block? The jury is still out but I suspect a new set of populists will arise to rankle them at some point assuming the gargantuan power requirements of this new technology don’t cause self-destruction.
Will there be any end to this? What might the end be? Robert Frost said it as well as anyone in his iconic poem.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.