Artificial Intelligence and Satan are the two greatest enemies of the human race
Artificial Intelligence and Satan are the two greatest enemies of the human race
Paul Craig Roberts
Many years ago in the 1950s, or perhaps it was the 1960s, Mad Magazine painted a dystopian picture of the future in which AI had taken over life and produced everything everyone needed. Consequently, humans had nothing to do and no longer knew how anything worked or how to fix it. And then one day AI had a problem and no one could fix it. The world came to an end.
I have never understood why geeks and scientists think it is important or an accomplishment to take function away from humans and make them irrelevant. Karl Marx had a much more optimistic view of the future than today’s AI geeks permit. Marx looked forward to a world in which the economy would be organized like a self-sufficient family farm or manor in which the output of the community was allocated and consumed without the need of markets and profit, thus bringing to an end the unemployment, inflation and disruption of life that unplanned market production caused.
The result would free human energy from coping with needless hardships and unleash the potential of every human. A person would be a worker in the morning, a philosopher after lunch, and a literary critic in the evening.
Under AI humans have less and less to do. I have pointed out for years that AI and robotics produce goods and services without human labor, but robots are not in the market purchasing goods and services. As humans have no income from employment, how are the non-human produced goods and services distributed?
I said that humans would have to be given a basic income and that this would be the way equality is achieved. As humans would not be producers, there is no reason for different incomes based on merit or luck.
AI and robotics are the path to socialist equality. But, of course, there is no equality as humans are subordinate to the machines. Moreover, what is the point of the humans? Why should AI produce for superfluous humans?
A day or two ago Elon Musk agreed with me when he said that a universal basic income would be necessary as AI and automation are replacing jobs, thus depriving humans of earning money from working.
Does humanity really want to be born into a world in which they are useless and unneeded, with no prospect of any higher development, with nothing to do but to spend their universal basic income for their needs or wants and watch disinformation on a video screen? In effect, AI means humans will be ruled by machines.
AI disconnects humans from one another. You can already see it. We experience it every day. Consider for example “customer service.” You are forced to confront robotic voices programmed to deal with a range of issues, seldom the one you are calling about. Sometimes it is 48 hours before you can make contact with a human voice.
The young are being taught to deal with AI, NOT WITH PEOPLE. Those born into AI will know nothing different, never having experienced contact with other humans as it is only a matter of time before schooling is accomplished online. We see it already, young people on dates sitting there scrolling their cell phones. If they are connecting across the table it is with texts. People are forgetting how to talk to one another.
Human reproduction can become a problem. Hologram induced masterbation can become more pleasing than actual sex as the beautiful partners are unreal and thus not problematic and weighted down with commitment. This has already begun with dating sites that offer free sex. Just call and arrange an anonymous sexual partner.
Today Americans are endeavoring with President Trump to beat back the Democrats’ attack on American principles. The task of beating back AI’s attack on humanity awaits us. If we wait too long, we are lost.
President Trump’s idea of replacing the income tax with tariffs is sound and a great advancement in the restoration of freedom
President Trump’s idea of replacing the income tax with tariffs is sound and a great advancement in the restoration of freedom
Paul Craig Roberts
Prior to 1913 the US government was financed by tariffs. It was under tariffs, not free trade, that the United States industrialized and became a manufacturing nation. Indeed, the Union invaded and destroyed the Confederacy in order to impose the Morrill Tariff on the South that enabled the North to industrialize. The North could not compete with British industry and required the protection of a tariff.
It is extraordinary to me that it has gone unremarked for 112 years that the income tax, which required a constitutional amendment, resurrected slavery. In actuality, white people voted to impose slavery on themselves.
Americans did not realize what was happening. The income threshold for being subject to the tax was so high that few qualified to be taxed. Moreover, the first tax rate was 1% and the progression halted at 7%. To be taxed at 7% you had to have a phenomenal amount of income for those days of more than $500,000, the equivalent of multi-millions today. In the US in the 1900s a person who made $70,000 a year was considered extremely wealthy. When Henry Ford’s innovation of the moving assembly line was introduced in 1913, he raised his workers’ pay from $2.34 per day to $5, producing an annual income of $1,300.
Only 3% of the US population was subject to the income tax. Many years ago I wrote an account of how the income tax amendment passed. In Georgia the state legislative leader said Georgia had no objection to the amendment as no one in the state of Georgia had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.
Everyone overlooked that once an income tax was in place, the thresholds could be lowered and the rates raised. By 1918, that is, within 5 years, the top tax rate had jumped to 77%, dropping to 25% in 1925.
When the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, slavery was resurrected. Historically, the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves did not own their own labor. Serfs were not owned by feudal lords, the the lords had use rights to as much as 30% of a serf’s labor. The labor of an enslaved person belonged to the slave’s owner.
An income tax establishes government ownership over part of your labor. How much depends on your income and the tax rate at the time. If you fail to deliver the government’s share of your income, you are severely punished and can spend many years in prison. Every American income taxpayer is partly enslaved and partly free.
A tariff is a tax on consumption, the preferable means of taxation according to the classical economists. It establishes no government ownership rights in your income. An income tax not only gives government a part ownership of your working time, it is also a tax on factors of production — labor and capital. Taxing factors of production reduces economic growth and Gross Domestic Product. It is a counter-productive tax that suppresses output.
The substitution of a tariff for an income tax is a pro-growth policy that will produce higher incomes and raise living standards. Free labor is always more productive because you are working for yourself and your family.
Out-of-date neoliberal economists argue wrongly that tariffs violate free trade and reduce economic growth. In the Lionel Robbins Lecture in 2000, published by the MIT Press, Ralph E. Gomory and William J. Baumol proved that the case for free trade was false and that at best the notion that free trade was mutually beneficial was an occasional special case. Paul Samuelson found their proof convincing, but overall the economists have preferred their free trade indoctrination to the effort it takes to master a new understanding.
The information from DOGE of the enormous fraud, abuse, and self-dealing that the US budget contains as a slush fund for insiders and for bribing foreign politicians and overthrowing foreign governments indicates that sufficient reductions are possible to establish a tariff at a reasonable rate.
To rescue Americans from the slavery of an income tax would be one the greatest achievements in history. Let’s achieve it.
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