As we race headlong into our glorious AI-powered future, are we on the road to Idiocracy?

The Guardian

a day ago

As we race headlong into our glorious AI-powered future, a long-forgotten flick from the naughties is gaining cult status by posing a simple question: are we on the road to Idiocracy?
In the tradition of Bill and Ted, Idiocracy, a 2006 American sci-fi comedy, depicts an average guy transported 500 years into the future to find he is the smartest man on earth. A wrestler is president, people worship 'the profit' and the world's biggest corporation is a sports drink company whose market strategy has taken humanity to the brink of collapse.
Idiocracy is not a flawless film; it's jarring class eugenics and casual sexism seem more dated than its 20 years would suggest. But what it does brilliantly is challenge the assumption that the human race is on an uncontested journey to higher consciousness.
This is a timely counterpoint to the zeitgeist about the self-evident benefits of machine learning built by large tech companies under the conceit of 'artificial intelligence'.
Already we are seeing academic studies suggesting that Large Language Models are linked to cognitive decline, with a recent MIT study finding lower brain engagement among students using GPTs in writing essays.
We've also seen AI chatbots accused of inducing vulnerable people to suicide and cheery predictions about the hollowing out of entry level knowledge economy jobs which loom as our next inter-generational betrayal.
The question is whether these dumb outcomes are features or bugs of our emerging information ecosystem. Evidence is mounting it is the former.
Exhibit A is OpenAI's Economic Blueprint for Australia, an embarrassing document seeking rapid government adaptation, investment and minimalist regulation for 'the most significant economic and strategic opportunity of our time'
You could drive a truck through the holes in OpenAI's analysis: $115bn in predicted productivity improvements based on crude calculations of hours saved at work, with no trade-off for the costs of the jobs already being destroyed.
To realise this promised dividend OpenAI says the government would need to lean into resource-sucking datacentres, socialising the costs of energy and water, steamrolling communities and putting new pressures on the grid and fast-tracking development at the cost of the energy transition.
As our creativity is being stolen and repurposed, trading off our collective empathy for automated culture, OpenAI wants us to 'streamline and update copyright law', with industry groups already pushing hard for a general right to mine our data.
But these self-serving policy asks are not the worst of the OpenAI blueprint; it is the very fact that this massive corporation purports to set our future agenda at all, defining rather than responding to our collective needs. This design principle could represent the inflection point between a smart future and an impending Idiocracy.
It is true this technology carries amazing power to synthesise information and challenge higher order thinking in new and profound ways. OpenAI is right to describe the technology as 'like electricity' something that can illuminate the night sky. But would you get a power company to set the rules for electrical safety?
The truth is OpenAI is nether open or intelligent: it's a play to dominate a new technology on commercial terms for its material benefit, using their copious venture capital as a shield against competitors and a sword against government to create a policy environment to suit them. We are witnessing the next phase of their corporate history.
ChatGPT is a compelling shop front, but what if it is intellectual heroin? It tricks us to feel smarter, more seen and even loved, while actually providing the opposite by convincing us to commoditise our collective intelligence.
Short of returning to a genuine not-for-profit mission, OpenAI can never be a good faith partner. Theirs is an operating model to be resisted but that relies on us having the time, the understanding and, yes, the leadership to do this intelligently.
In the latest episode of my podcast Burning Platforms one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, Prof Toby Walsh, differentiates between the richness of distributed intelligence and the homogeneity of the concentrated intelligence that chatbots serve up.
High quality data is earned not stolen property; it is used mindfully to address problems humans identify, not commoditised to fill some market niche.
While the tech broligarchs battle for world domination, maybe the smart money should be on the design and value of small data models, designed for purpose not for producing mainstream slop and brain rot, that chew up less energy and eradicate fewer jobs.
Because of the power of the tech sector, all of whom have well-paid and well-positioned Canberra lobbyists, we also need to resist. Since shouting out the Luddites in my last column I've been delighted to discover there are people already doing this.
Ben Zhao, a University of Chicago computer scientist has developed programs like Glaze which protects private photos being harvested to train facial recognition technology and Nightshade, a filter for artists that tricks AI into seeing a cat as a dog, like putting ink in a bag of stolen bank cheques.
And Cloudfare, one of the dominant cybersecurity companies, has announced it will ban AI web crawlers from scraping content from their sites without paying compensation to the owner of those sites.
As Cloudfare CEO, Matthew Prince, says: 'I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites. And you're telling me, I can't stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?'
In the battle for our future intelligence, we need to deploy all the grey matter at our disposal: workers' intelligence, cultural intelligence, collective intelligence and the power of technologists in the face of the artifice.
Spoiler: in the movie the sports drink company, 'Brawndo' extends its market dominance in electrolytes by expanding into agriculture, poisoning the land in pursuit of 'The Profit'. Open AI's Blueprint for Australia would be a similar triumph of Idiocracy.
Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that undertook research for Labor in the 2025 election and conducts qualitative research for Guardian Australia. He is also the host of Per Capita's Burning Platforms podcast