27-04-2025
The AI–Robotics Combo: Will All Employees Be Replaced?
Commentary
On April 14, a local government administrator in the United States sent my relative a letter that she suspected of including artificial intelligence (AI) content. Sure enough, an AI detector found 83 percent generated by AI GPT.
She said it was the best letter she had ever received from a politician—and she writes to her representatives frequently. She praised the letter for responding to every single point she raised in her own letter, something no unaided politician had ever done.
We toyed with the idea of confronting the administrator publicly. If AI wrote a better letter than the administrator himself, perhaps he could be replaced with the technology, and his salary redeployed for more substantive taxpayer benefits. It was a tongue-in-cheek idea. But the logic is nevertheless disturbing.
If artificial intelligence is now better than one politician for one task, according to one constituent, is it plausible that in 10 or 20 years, AI could be better than all politicians for all their tasks, according to most constituents?
At that point, voters might just vote for an AI politician rather than a human one. Human politicians are, after all, time-constrained by their need to sleep, eat, and hobnob with their elite donors and other benefactors.
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My relative decided not to confront the politician at his next public meeting. She wants to influence his decisions in the future, and public shaming is probably not the best way to do this. So he gets a pass to continue using AI on unsuspecting constituents. Even his tiny hold on power at the local level protected him from the truth.
If he can get away with it, perhaps many other politicians are doing the same. This
The United Arab Emirates (
The UAE considers using AI to write legislation to be 70 percent more efficient than relying on human legislators to write laws. How that remarkably round number was arrived at is unclear. But as UAE citizens cannot vote, they could essentially become forced laborers working not only for the president of the UAE but also for AI, given that nobody understands exactly how AI comes up with its recommendations.
Now, consider expanding this to everything. A new startup in Silicon Valley, called
But the company also envisions pairing AI with robots to mechanize other jobs, for example, in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. Companies like
That the military could also be automated, despite the promises of AI companies to do no such thing, is obvious given the rise of armed drones on the battlefields of Ukraine, and the interest of the U.S. and
The Israel Defense Forces reportedly used AI to target as many as 37,000
Communists have long promoted the idea of full mechanization to 'free' humans of the need to labor. In their 'utopian' schemes, full mechanization would allow humans the free time to pursue whatever they want, including leisure, art, and family. With the rise of mechanization, automation, robots, and AI, a new utopianism is coming that will appeal to the '
With AI, this coming 'tech vanguard' can seek an AI communism, in which humans frolic in nature while being watched over by the machine. It sounds dystopian and easily manipulable by Leninists if not Stalinists. But its rosy-glassed adherents will see it the other way around. They have likely read Richard Brautigan's 1967
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Brautigan was not specifically communist, though he was counter-culture.
In the mid-2000s, a British movement developed a concept similar to being 'watched over by machines of loving grace' that would become known as '
AI is being touted, by even those who know its
In any conflict that occurs, Beijing will certainly deploy all technologies at its disposal. This puts those who would prefer to go slowly and carefully, or avoid any future of AI, in a bind. Use AI fire to fight fire, or not? And what if the fire blows back on the freedom of the individual in a market democracy, after burning the authoritarian adversary?
Handing over so much power, up to and including 'AI communism,' whether in the form of political power to legislate or industrial power that replaces trillions of dollars worth of human labor, is an immense concentration of power in the hands of whoever controls AI. That could be a dictator, an oligarchy, an elected official who accrues too much power, or a hacker. It could even be AI itself, if it goes rogue or is irretrievably granted that power at some point in the future.
The advent of AI is likely a
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
