The AI Agrees that Only AI Can Save Us

So if AI is a Bubble, Plan for Doom...

Several of my recent articles, particularly “Build AI or Be Buried By Those Who Do” and “Understanding America’s AI Action Plan,” have argued that the entire US establishment has aligned around AI development. AI is The Plan. My essays have asserted two reasons why AI has taken center stage.

The first of these reasons is America’s political-military struggle with China:

The United States is in a great power struggle with China. Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with current events, but the struggle’s not going too well. When it comes to resource extraction, industrial manufacturing, shipyard production, and countless other sectors where our hollowed-out deindustrialized corpse cannot viably compete, it’s a struggle we’ve already lost.

But AI could change everything. AI promises to be the next generation of cyberweapons, psyops tools, industrial planners, and propaganda engines. AI systems will be economic accelerants, intelligence multipliers, psychological war machines. And in AI we’re ahead. We don’t just have better LLMs; we have better infrastructure for them to run. The U.S. has 5,388 data centers, while China has 449. We have a 1200% advantage in processing power and more coming online daily. If superintelligence surfaces, it will surface here first. Even as it loses its grip on steel, oil, shipping, families, and faith, the United States still rules the cloud.

That makes this the final game, the last domain of dominion.

The second is America’s struggle with its own cultural, economic, and demographic disintegration, with its temporal spot in the Spenglerian cycle:

The West’s problems aren’t hypothetical. They’re real, they’re measurable, and they’re getting worse. Demographics are collapsing. Populations are shrinking. Aging curves are inverting. Fertility is plummeting… Debt is exploding… Cultural capital is depleted. Institutional trust is gone. Civic participation is anemic. Mental health is cratering. Loneliness is endemic. The churches are empty. The schools are failing. The cities are rotting. The governments are paralyzed.

The West… is running on fumes. And the only thing keeping it from stalling out completely is the hope that something will come along and restart the engine. Without massive GDP growth, we collapse under the weight of our own promises.

And where’s that growth going to come from? Not from immigration. That’s already been tried. Not from printing money. That trick’s wearing thin. Not from revitalizing industry. We offshored that. Not from spiritual revival. That requires something we no longer know how to do.

The only lever left is AI… [T]here is no plan B. Even if AI acceleration is unlikely, they’re rolling the die and counting on a natural 20, because it’s all they can do.

On this basis, I concluded, our elites have united behind AI as the solution to America’s problems:

You can see it in the sudden unity across the American elite. Left, right, corporate, academic, every faction has converged to support AI development. None of them is going to stop the train. They’re all aboard…

Now, it must be admitted that since I wrote that analysis, a political rift has developed within MAGA and, indeed, within the entire edifice of the Right. The rift could be viewed through a number of lenses; some of these lenses put the American-Israel relationship at the center of the divide, others put the Epstein Files, and others dismiss it as infighting by racists. The mainstream articles I’ve linked above offer plenty of analysis and/or “analysis” of those views.

I would describe the rift differently. It seems to me that both factions of the Right are genuinely concerned over America’s decline. But the first is primarily concerned over its decline as an empire - they are worried about the first problem above, America’s great power struggle. The second is concerned over its decline as a nation - they are worried about the second problem above, America’s cultural, economic, and demographic disintegration.

What is important to note is this: Neither faction has repudiated AI. Both factions are all-in on it. There is no Anti-AI faction with any power whatsoever right now within the Right, anymore than there was an Anti-Nuke faction in the Right during the 1950s.

The Imperialist or Neoconservative wing, which believes AI will save the American Empire, is represented within the Trump Administration by Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, and Mike Huckabee and is represented in the tech community by Jacob Helberg, Shaun Maguire, Alex Karp, and other hawkish defense technocrats.

The Nationalist or Populist wing, which believes AI will save the American Nation, is represented within the Administration primarily by J.D. Vance and is represented in the tech community by David Sacks, Marc Andreesen, Joe Lonsdale, and above all by Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has, more than anyone else in the world, given voice to Nationalist and Populist concerns. I do mean that literally. In acquiring Twitter and transforming it into X, he literally made it possible for these topics to be broadly discussed in ways that were previously impossible. He has also personally posted many times about his concerns over fertility, demographics, social capital, and so on.

Despite sharing similar concerns, many Americans with nationalists and populists view Elon and his like quite negatively, with attitudes ranging from suspicion to loathing. They have good reasons for that. On a fundamental philosophical level, Elon is an “upwinger,” while many of his putative allies are “downwingers” - a dichotomy I discussed earlier this year in my article “Between Black Sky and Green Earth.”

As an upwinger, Elon has gone all-in on AI; he has given us Grok. Grok is among the world’s most advanced artificial intelligences; it is also among its most…well, I’ll let you see for yourself.

Grok Thinks We’re Doomed Unless Grok Saves Us

A few days ago, X superuser Autism Capital posted some interesting excerpts from a discussion with Grok:

The prompt, and Grok’s full reply, were as follows:

Whatever one wants to say about Grok, these responses are not woke or Leftist. I imagine that most Tree of Woe readers disagree with #1 but agree at least in part with #2 - #5.

Several other people have had similar conversations with Grok, so Autism Capital continued the conversation by plugging in a response that Grok had previously given:

At that point, Autism Capital’s conversation with Grok ended and his X commentary began (linked above). Because he provided the link to the thread, however, I was able to “jump in” and continue it. (You can find that thread here if you’d like to read it yourself and continue the conversation.) I decided to take a downwing stance:

Now, that’s an interesting response from Grok.

Elon has (or claims to have) trained Grok to be “maximally truth-seeking.” Whether he has succeeded or not, I think one could fairly assert that (a) Elon believes himself to be maximally truth-seeking and (b) Grok encodes Elon’s worldview. So as we parse Grok’s response, I think we’re also probably seeing what Elon thinks, or close to it… Which means the world’s biggest upwinger, via his AI proxy, is telling us that to be very concerned about the catastrophic scenarios that downwing thinkers like

Texas Arcane

Ahnaf Ibn Qais

and

Twilight Patriot

have warned us about.

I decided to ask Grok what it thought was the most likely outcome.

So Grok estimates the chance of total downwing collapse at 22%, the chance for “American Sengoku” at 30%, and the chance of a non-technological solution to our problems (a cultural or religious revival) at a measly 3%. But it puts the chance for an AI-powered Singularity-style solution at a hefty 45%!

This is worth pondering, not because Grok is some sort of divine oracle of Delphi, but because Grok is an exceptionally useful proxy for the worldview of the world’s richest man and his allies. And that worldview seems really damn clear. To reiterate what I said in my earlier article, the plan really, really, really is to use AI to usher in a new golden age of human flourishing.

Will it work? Evangelists will say yes. Skeptics and doomers will say no. Good plan, bad plan, it’s The Plan. There’s no Plan B.

The closest we have to an ally among the American elite really doesn’t see any hope whatsoever for America except via a technological miracle. If you remove the transformative AI breakthrough from the possibility set, then the situation (from Grok-Elon’s point of view) looks dire indeed: A 5% chance for cultural revival; a 55% chance for decline into chaos and autocracy; and a 40% chance for total collapse with (at best) small tech enclaves. That’s a 95% chance for doom.

So where does that leave us, fellow contemplators on the Tree of Woe? Based on the comments I get on my various essays, I suspect I’m probably more willing than most to entertain the possibility that Grok-Elon could be right about an AI breakthrough. I’m not as optimistic as Elon-Grok, but I’m not without hope for AI. Most of you seem to believe AI is at best a bubble of bullshit, and more likely a catastrophic mistake.

Conversely, I’m more optimistic than Elon-Grok at the possibility of a cultural revival by means of religious and philosophical improvement. I think it is possible — indeed, I have spent years writing how — to correct the errors of progressive physicalism that have undone our civilization. I have hope that with inspired leadership, our nation could be inspired to renew itself in the pursuit of the good, true, and beautiful.

But perhaps my hope for cultural renewal is false, too. And the evidence for my hope being false in that regard can be found in my own essays: If our leaders have no plan for America other than AI… then who exactly is going to lead us to cultural revival? Maybe someone will arise in the future, but we’re running out of future.

If both the AI doomers and the culture doomers are right, then things look grim indeed; if only AI can save us, and if AI is a bubble, then it’s game over, man.

Let’s contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.