The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Navigating the AI Threat and AI's Potential

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Of all the scare stories about Artificial Intelligence (AI), this one by Jasmine Sun in the April 30 New York Times (“Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass”), is the most judicious, though it suffers from other defects including neglecting to include Elon Musk’s mandate for engineering benevolent AI. Here is my synopsis of the author’s key points:

Jobs Apocalypse Sun writes, “Whether one talks with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians, the so-called San Francisco consensus on the impact of A.I. for workers is bleak: many ordinary people will lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away, displacing millions.” A concentration of wealth and power will accumulate monopolistically to the A.I. corporations and CEOs and the existing owners of capital. “The rich will be able to deploy super-intelligent machines to do their bidding, and everyone else will be rendered useless and unemployable, left to live off welfare scraps.”

Deus ex Machina AI and robotics will soon surpass human capabilities. “Unstoppable” AI systems will be able to do almost any job a human can and at a superior level.

Lobbyists The pro-artificial intelligence super PAC “Leading the Future,” which has received partial funding from OpenAI President Greg Brockman, has expended more than $2 million on advertisements opposing Alex Bores, a populist congressional candidate in New York who has put forth a plan to finance direct payments to American citizens via taxation on artificial intelligence.

Money Talks Artificial intelligence-related investments—such as those in software and data centers—accounted for 39 percent of U.S. economic growth during the first three quarters of 2025, according to an analysis conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. This substantial contribution endows the federal government with a vested interest in perpetuating the artificial intelligence boom. An economic concentration of this magnitude risks inclining policymakers to resist the regulation of artificial intelligence.

When the Automaters Become the Automated No one is immune to super-intelligence, not even those who work —or own—the leading corporations behind these innovations. “It may be feasible to pay human employees even long after they are no longer providing economic value in the traditional sense. Anthropic is currently considering a range of possible pathways for our own employees,” said Dario Amodei co-founder and CEO of Anthropic (maker of “Claude” AI), in contemplating the eventual obsolescence of his own employees as their roles are cannibalized by AI. Which leads us to ask, what firewall will Mr. Amodei and other Masters of the Tech Universe implement to keep AI from sending them to a retirement home, or worse?

Dumbing Us Down: Sun observes: “Recent studies demonstrate that young engineers who relied on AI coding agents not only didn’t complete tasks much faster; they also understood their work less when quizzed about it afterward. The labor market implications are grim. At the same time that early-career workers are competing with AI for jobs, they may be stunting their own skill development by overusing AI tools.”

Revolutionary Violence Absent a robust social safety net and a coherent transition strategy, overt protectionism represents a rational response by workers confronting automation. The prospect that artificial intelligence will entrench a permanent underclass can impel individuals to undertake extreme measures to forestall such an outcome. Populist discontent in turn harbors the potential to escalate into violence. In April, an assailant attempted to firebomb the residence of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In a separate incident, another individual has been accused of targeting an Indianapolis city council member who had approved a local data center project. The Luigi Mangione paradigm no longer lurks in the shadows.

As noted, the author omits all mention of Elon Musk’s unique AI (named Grok) from her New York Times study. Read more at NYTimes.com

Jasmine Sun writes about AI and Silicon Valley culture on Substack

Elon’s mission for Grok differs from all other AI makers. According to him:

AI “could make us more prosperous, but it could also kill us all. We want to be in a Gene Roddenberry movie, like Star Trek, not so much a James Cameron movie, like Terminator.”

He elaborated by comparing AI training to like raising a child: “It’s like if you had a very smart child — at the end of the day when the child grows up, you can’t really control that child, but you can try to instill the right values. Honesty, integrity, caring about humanity —being good, essentially.”

One might laugh at the gullibility of taking anything Elon says at face value. However, the proof is in the pudding. I have found that Grok is close to ten times more committed to censorship-free responses compared with other AI systems such as ChatGPT.

The reign of machines —“dead matter” in Elizabethan magus Dr. John Dee’s words —has been a sustained occult project whose antecedents extend back through millennia of Western esoteric tradition. Historian Frances Yates was among the first to point out that far from emerging as a Cartesian-materialist phenomenon, the mechanization of existence and the elevation of machines over organic life was a fulfillment of mystical Hermetic and Kabbalistic initiatives: the animation of inert substance. The design finds its prophetic anticipation in the visionary fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu Mythos depicts the invasion of demonic entities—so-called “Dark Gods.”