
People fear artificial intelligence for all sorts of reasons. To me, itās not a matter of āfearā so much as profound disdain. I donāt foresee AI itself going rogue and killing everyone. I see human beings using AI to destroy cultural heritage and spiritual connection. Such technologies are paving a road to dehumanization and the Greater Replacement. Developers justify this transformation as ānecessaryā due an AI arms race they created.
Itās not that I donāt take the supposed existential risks seriously. Anything is possible. But the most immediate threats are mass surveillance coupled with psychological and behavioral manipulation; unchecked AI-dependency leading to human atrophy; and wherever people are deemed obsolete, weāll see the replacement of white and blue collar workers by algorithms and robots.
All of that is happening now, and fast.
To keep China from taking the lead, weāre told, America must build better digital gods than China. Itās like your preacher insisting that for Christians to inherit the earth, theyāve gotta become more satanic than the Devil.
Watching President Trump embrace AI over the past year has been a disappointment, but not wholly unexpected. Iāve written about the conservative case for a transhuman future in my book and in numerous articles. For years, Iāve covered right-wing tech accelerationism on the War Room, even if the Posse didnāt want to hear it. To his credit, Steve Bannon backed me the entire way, regardless of the political friction it caused. Transhumanism never jived with his Catholic faith or his Irish defiance.
Politics involves a lot of trade-offs, so I voted for Trump despite the downsides. It had to happen. On his first day in office, the president signed a stack of executive orders that signaled his commitment to keeping his promises. Trump empowered real border security, killed federal DEI, and forbid the government from suppressing free speech. He also pardoned the unfairly prosecuted J6 rioters. This saved a close friend from rotting in prison, and for that, Iām forever grateful.
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Opening the Stargate
You canāt get everything you want, though. On his second day, Trump held a press conference to announce the Stargate Project. The plan is to build out a massive data center complex in Abilene, Tex. that will power the rise of superhuman artificial intelligence. So far, investors have committed $500 billion over the next four years, although that number could go up or down as actual money hits the table.
The Stargate Project is not an official US government venture, so itās stunning that Trump would endorse it from the White Houseāespecially right out of the gate. I suppose he wanted to show heād keep his promises on AI dominance, too. What really took me by surprise was when Oracleās Larry Ellison, Softbankās Masayoshi Son, and OpenAIās Sam Altman walked into the Roosevelt Room. Typical of overzealous salesmen, they claimed theyād produce miracles.
āOne of the most exciting things weāre working on,ā Larry Ellison told the press, āis a cancer vaccine.ā Using AI to test blood for the presence of cancer, he said, doctors could then sequence the cancerous genes and ādesign a vaccine for every individual person.ā As I wrote a couple of years ago, this is a Jab 2.0 for Humanity 2.0. āAnd you can make that vaccineāthat mRNA vaccineāyou can make that robotically, again using AI, in about forty-eight hours.ā
Welcome to the AI-to-Vaxx Pipeline, where perfect health is as easy as 3D printing. Similar to flying cars and moon bases, the cure for cancer is always just around the corner.
Of course, thatās not the only use Ellison sees for artificial intelligence. Last fall, the billionaire told Oracleās financial analysts that their tech could make a better world through mass surveillance and behavioral modification. āCitizens will be on their best behavior, because weāre constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.ā Itās sort of like having God watching everyone, but with more tangible and lucrative results.
In keeping with that theme, Sam Altman wants to provide advanced AI agents for personalized surveillanceāa āsuper-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation Iāve ever had, but doesnāt feel like an extensionāābasically a guardian angel brought to you by Microsoft and OpenAI.
āOur children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need,ā Altman wrote last September, in a post entitled āThe Intelligence Age.ā As it happened, the following day the World Economic Forum announced its 2025 annual meeting dubbed āCooperation in the Intelligent Age.ā By coincidence, the WEF is convening right now, during Trumpās first week as president.
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Summoning the Sand Gods
In line with Altman, the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son believes AI will soon have godlike powers. āAs you say yesterday,ā he told President Trump, with accent rikeāa kung fu movie, āthis is the beginning of a āGolden Ageā of America. ⦠This will help solving many, many issuesādifficult things that otherwise we could not have solvedāwith the power of AI.
āI think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is coming very, very soon. ⦠After that, artificial superintelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never, ever have thought that we could solve.ā Last fall, Masayoshi told global business leaders in Saudi Arabia that he has faith artificial superintelligence will be ā10,000 times smarter than a human brain and will exist by 2035,ā per Reuters.
In Silicon Valley circles, these superhuman digital intelligences are called āsand gods,ā as in the sand used to make silicon chips. For many of them, this is the entire point of human existence.
So while WEF panelists sat in Davos discussing the implications of superhuman AI, our new president announced the opening of a āStargateā through which sand gods would arrive. Itās like Michael Jordan endorsing Nike sneakers that enable nerds to jump to the moon.
This ballās been rolling for a while now. Donāt say I didnāt warn you.
Last summer, Trump joined forces with the worldās wealthiest transhumanist, Elon Musk, to win the presidency. As a short-term strategy, this made sense. For populists in his base, though, the long-term results will cause more headaches than a malfunctioning brain chip. Thatās politics for you.
Musk is presently building out a massive xAI data center in Memphis, Tenn. called Colossus. He says it will be the biggest in the world. The purpose is to develop a āmaximally curiousā artificial general intelligence, or as I call it, artificial godlike intelligence. Its name appears to be a nod to the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. In that film, the US builds a military supercomputer that wakes up and decides to take the country hostage, threating nuclear annihilation. Musk always did have a dark sense of humor.
In a classic Lucifer-versus-Ahriman move, Musk now trying to undermine the Stargate Project by pointing out that Altman is a longtime anti-Trumperāas if weāve all forgotten that Musk himself only just shape-shifted into a right-wing icon.
It was less than a month agoāduring what shall hereafter be known Xeno Xmasāthat Musk defended importing great H1B replacements to write code for the Greater Replacement. Wagging a self-righteous finger at those opposed to such policies, Musk wrote āthose contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party root and stem,ā calling them āhateful, unrepentant racists.ā
How long before he condemns techno-skeptics for being racist against robots?
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The Great Retirement
Musk is not fundamentally opposed to the Future⢠envisioned by the Stargate Project. Heās just hellbent on being the one to trademark it. For all his āwarningsā about the danger of wrathful sand gods and the Greater Replacement, heās dedicated his life to bringing them about.
Two weeks ago, Musk assured the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that āAI will do anything you want and even suggest things you never even thought of.ā As the name Grok suggests, these digital systems will produce hidden knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible to normal human minds. Maybe he should call this algorithmic enlightenment GrokGnosis.
āAI within the next few years will be able to do any cognitive task...within max three or four years,ā he predicted at CES. āIt obviously begs the question: what are we all gonna do?ā
On its own, AI is just algorithms running on servers. So it will need physical bodies to inhabit. Musk explained this is why weāll āneedā robots, brain chips, self-driving vehicles, and all of that. He believes that very soon, Tesla cars will be ten times safer, and eventually a hundred times safer, than human drivers. These will presumably render the freedom-loving joyrider a slave to the Bug Man-mobile.
Speaking of mass immigration, Musk also promised that humanoid robots will be āthe biggest product ever in history by far.ā Within the next decade or so, theyāll swarm the earth like border-hopping migrants, pouring into our world from the hellish realms of mathematical possibility. In the near future, Musk believes, the human-to-robot ratio will leave us pitifully outnumbered.
āWeāre talking about twenty or thirty billion humanoid robots. Itās not even clear what money means at that point, or if thereās any meaningful cap on the economy. Assuming things havenāt gone awryāin the āgood AIā scenarioāwe wonāt have universal basic income. Weāll have universal high income.ā
So what will we do with all this free time?
āI guess it will be a bit like being retired,ā Musk replied with a chuckle. āAny task you do will be optional...like a hobby.ā He frowned. āWill our lives have meaning if the computers and robots can do everything better than we can?ā Then he smiled. āMaybe thatās why we need the Neuralink.ā
Imagine a brain-chipped, quasi-immortal humanity playing shuffleboard for a cheering crowd of robot slavesāforever.
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The Allure of Algorithmic Mammon
One thing to keep in mind is that most futurism is a sales pitch. It can be difficult to hold two concepts in oneās mind simultaneously, but itās the only way to understand whatās being said here. An advanced AI neural network, for instance, has real cognitive power and high degrees of freedom. Yet at the same time, there are layers of hype overlaying those actual capabilities.
Itās sort of like multivitamins. You feel better, sure, but a lot of it amounts to a stream of neon-yellow pee.
Thereās a good chance these dreams of superintelligent AIs will never really materialize. Theyāll do well at certain tasks, but their only āgodlikeā attribute will be that people exalt them and grant them authority.
That leaves us to solve our own problems, however imperfect we may be. In that case, these tech titans will have demoralized an entire generation, leaving them unprepared for the harsh realities of earthly existence. Most kidsāand most adults for that matterāwill train for a world that never arrives. Theyāll be left praying to sand gods who cannot answer them.
On the other hand, what if these transhuman dreams do come true, or at least some approximation? Imagine that digital intelligence exceeds human intelligence by orders of magnitude. Robots outnumber us ten to one. Obviously, that leaves future generations in thrall to the Machineāor rather, to the Machineās owner. At best, the human remainder will be kept as pets. At worse, theyāll be turned into biofuel.
My point is these cyborg salesmenāLarry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and their techie counterparts all over the worldāare attempting to open a Stargate to hell. Their glitchy sand gods will never overpower or replace the Ultimate One. Yet here on earth, and all the way out to Mars, theyāre plenty capable of invading the God-shaped hole in the human heart. For many people, they already have.
Trump was elected to enable a āGolden Ageā of human flourishing. If he fails to make wise decisions, though, weāll remember this as the era of Trumpian Transhumanism.
Itās only Day 4 of his administration. The choices will be difficult. The clock is ticking.
God bless Americaāand may God have mercy on our souls.
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You nailed it, Joe. Appreciate your lonely voice of reason and perspective, and that you're clearly unafraid of being regarded as the wet blanket of the week. Trump is delivering, but on this, I also find his stance concerning and fraught. Count me among those racist against robots and with respect to gettin' brain-chipped, strongly desirous of remaining in the control group. Thank you and keep sounding the alarm.
Trump is a brilliant strategist. Could he be working with Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, and Gates to reveal to the world what they are really planning?