AI is a new tool for government elites' coercion. The rest of us will struggle, but we will prevail and grow freer.
December 9, 2025
To remain competitive, humans must show up.
Humans add the most value in high-income nations. In these nations, humans' total fertility rate has been below the replacement level of 2.1 since 1974.
On top of that, today's artificial narrow intelligence is a mixed bag.
AI does provide convenient tools for searching, developing designs, and optimizing processes.
But even when humans show up, our cognition isn't as strong. In exchange for gaining quick, broad access to information, we learn less about where to find content. We retain fewer memories. We get less practice at processing information. We lose some of our neural connection strength and width. We feel less that we're the owners of our work.
Also, our motivation isn't as strong. AI already is an addictive: at prices that are affordable in the near term, it offers continuous near-term satisfactions.
Humans are getting dependent on AI, but we're not strongly dependent on AI yet. In a study of two AI-powered social media platforms, TikTok and Instagram, large shares of users would have preferred that these platforms wouldn't exist. Users of other AI apps may similarly prefer that these apps wouldn't exist.
AI care and feeding
Humans' use of AI is starting to compete with humans' other uses of scarce resources.
A current AI server's information-processing rate may be on the order of a hundred-millionth of a human brain's rate.
And yet, the AI server's energy use is 500 times the human brain's.
With the AI server population only 0.6% of the high-income human population, AI data center electricity use is already 1% of all electricity use.
So then, humans are currently doing almost all of the calculating. Also, appropriately given current capabilities and efficiency, humans are doing all of the creative risk-taking, building, operating, and maintaining.
AI is being developed and integrated, because creating and producing is what humans do. But AI's ability to outthink humans, and to then put this thinking into practice-whether augmenting humans, or harming humans-is limited by scarce material resources and scarce creativity.
Investing in helping humans develop is a far-better bet for most humans.
Elite coercion
So who are the humans for whom AI is a seductive, better bet ? Elites, especially government elites. For multiple reasons.
Elites are less limited by scarcity. Government elites don't even have to add value, they just take property from the rest of us by force. Elites can afford to tinker around.
Elites like building up things they can control. Elites have less control over humans and more control over AI.
Elites value force-multipliers. As an offense, elites who develop their own AI may increase their control over the rest of us. As a defense, elites who limit our AI may maintain what control they currently have over the rest of us.
Individual freedom
Humans have faced such force-multiplied challenges before. Often these have involved dual-use technologies. Very-broad examples that have some traits in common with AI have included writing, manufacturing processes, toolmaking, cities, and corporations.
Writing increased information but also enticements. Manufacturing processes brought increased material well-being but also idols. Various tools were developed to take lives or were applied to take lives. Cities in part became anonymizing dens of corruption. Corporations in part became multipliers of governments.
Humans responded creatively, often even using the new technologies themselves to create new defenses.
Writing strengthened Judaism and then Christianity, limiting sexual immorality. Wars advanced societies' scale and complexity. Cities increased innovation, and many corporations added value, and this innovation and added value built up economic power that offset governments' and cronies' political power.
Dynamic control for good
AI is a new variant of an ancient enemy: technological power that can be used to control minds, or to directly control bodies. As always, power must limit power.
True to form, USA government elites are clearing the way for Warp Speed construction of data centers. But USA citizens are now starting to block construction locally.
Humans still build muscle power by exercising. Likewise, humans will maintain cognition by practicing using traditional, human-created media.
Humans in families and in religious groups still practice sexual morality. Likewise, humans in families and in religious groups will limit addiction, maintaining motivation.
Humans will choose to build families, and those who do will influence their children and their children's children.
And humans will use constitutions to limit at least some parties, and these parties will limit governments, which will also limit cronies.
AI will surely get evolved into magnificent uses. We've seen such tailoring of all sufficiently advanced technologies-the more general the technology, the more sublime the portfolio of uses.
Also AI, like other technologies, will pay its way. The more prosocial value that AI adds, the more that AI will be developed and integrated by producers and ultimately chosen by customers.
We have long been good neighbors with dogs and cats and horses, even the nonworking breeds. They have long been good neighbors with us.
The AI that gets developed not for the elites but for the rest of us will be our force-multiplier for freedom.