Who Will Control the Narrative on AI and Potentially Our Future?

By F. Andrew Wolf, Jr.

They’re clear about the Second Amendment, national security, abortion, the border. Voters know where conservatives stand on these issues, and if there were any doubts, November 4, 2024, cleared them up. But what about the issue of AI, itself, or conservative America’s position relative to it? Artificial intelligence is no novel phenomenon – indeed, the term was first coined in 1955 by John McCarthy during a workshop at Dartmouth College. This event is considered the birth of AI as a field of study; it’s just that its trajectory has recently accelerated dramatically.

While it may be true that politics is derived from culture, with technological innovation it is the reverse – computer-generated algorithms influence culture in myriad and burgeoning ways. It already affects our decisions about what we “choose” to say, do, buy, like, dislike, etc.

There is a “narrative war” underway in America regarding AI, and those amongst us of a more conservative orientation cannot afford complacency in either the development of or control over it.

AI is not merely a “tool.” It is potentially a weapon, as well – an information system that will substantially affect (over a not very distant horizon) national security, education, commerce, economics, employment, and much more. It is easier numerically to list what it will not touch than what it will.

Development and control of the narrative is critical because of the principal concern with the technology: agentic AI – this new phase of AI adoption can reason, learn, and make decisions on its own with minimal, if any, human intervention.

Americans typically default on issues about automation with the same refrain: “We’ve heard this before;” the “robots will rule” – but “it never happens.” Technology creates jobs and eliminates them. The free market always sorts it out. Today, however, the situation is more complex because the systems are more complex – they are not designed to augment human cognition, but to replace it.

AI Thinks for Us

Some argue that LLMs [Large Language Models] are just stochastic systems – parroting patterns found in data. Nothing new? These deep-learning systems like Sam Altman’s OpenAI ChatGPT are loaded with vast amounts of text data, allowing them to perform multiple tasks with seeming immediacy – answering questions, summarizing text, translating languages – and are becoming increasingly integrated into the internet, commercial venues and the government.

Those who study, develop and are (as we speak) building AI have a different refrain. And this is pivotal to my point concerning agentic AI.  Are the comments we’re hearing from the likes of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei valid – that you’re going to see the elimination of half of white-collar entry-level positions?

There is more regarding agentic AI and the narrative war than one might realize. Progressives already have their position staked out. It can be expressed through OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s social experiment when, as president of Y Combinator in 2016, he gave low-income individuals $1,000 per month for three years with no strings attached. As technology eliminates jobs and massive new wealth gets created, Altman added, “…we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.”

To be sure, Altman’s 2016 social experiment is clearly an espousal for some form of universal basic income (UBI), essentially, at the heart of the left’s AI narrative – supplanting rather than supplementing human endeavor – “dependency” at the expense of “freedom.”

What is operative, here, is the Moravec paradox – the idea that things that human beings find difficult cognitively are easy for machines (like computing systems) to accomplish. If this is so, and apparently it is, white-collar jobs tend to be just as much at risk, or more so, than those of a blue-collar nature.

And given this paradox, a substantial threat from agentic AI exists for virtually all forms of bureaucratic interface in America: invisible algorithms which predispose to one decision as opposed to another, AI-powered social credit scoring, digital de-banking, and scan-and-ban technology. Moreover, workers who are not at the end of their careers will experience a virtually insurmountable “speed efficiency deficit” because of how quickly the ground beneath their feet is shifting.

Job displacement may be the result of agentic AI, but we need not acquiesce to the left’s position in response to this: UBI and progressively greater dependency on AI and the government, media, and commercial venues which control its algorithms and potentially us.

Conservative America’s narrative must articulate a view clearly distinct from the left. Yes, AI is here to stay, but we should heed the warnings of the Godfather of AI, George Hinton: “AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.” The AI pioneer estimates a 10% to 20% risk that artificial intelligence will eventually take control from humans. Listen to the dozens of AI scientists who admonish us to regulate the technology before it’s too late. And finally, while we may ultimately develop agentic AI to a point approaching “cognitive self-awareness,” we should also accept the wisdom of this premise: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

America’s “Main Street” must become vocal and uncompromising in pressing Congress, the White House, and where the money is – “Wall Street” – to slow down and think through the ethical and profound consequences of their actions. Responsible decision-making begins with principles not capabilities.

If the left prevails, agentic AI becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy promoting dependency, surveillance culture, and indoctrination. America edges closer to eroding its democracy, becoming more autocratic, and a “welfare state.” It ceases to be what it has always stood for and what Americans fought and died to defend: “freedom of choice” rather than “dependency driven equity.” Not only must this not happen, but it can be prevented – if conservatives prevail in the narrative war for the heart and conscience of America.

Andrew Wolf, Jr., is director of The Fulcrum Institute, an organization of scholars dedicated to the classical liberal tradition. He has also been published stateside in American Spectator, The Thinking Conservative, and American Thinker, as well as abroad in International Policy Digest, Times of Israel, and The Daily Philosophy, among others.