AI and the Age of Elon

The Age of Elon is here. President-elect Donald Trump has announced the Golden Age of America. He has pledged to struggle for the future of every citizen with every breath in his body. He has promised not to rest until he has delivered a strong, safe, and prosperous America that all American children deserve.

He announced: “A Star is Born – Elon!”  Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently achieved a significant breakthrough by catching the huge booster stage of its Starship rocket in a pair of robotic arms as it returned to earth. His task under President-elect Trump would be to reduce fiscal waste and review regulations.

Elites of the liberal metanarrative acknowledge that all is not well in the world. Even if we truthfully want to, many of us are no longer capable of unravelling the moral problems of the world today. The future of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is far outside the horizon of many ordinary people. We find it difficult to unravel the twin revolutions in biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

We sense a future that is speedily passing us by. Our sense of disorientation is heightened by the quickening speed of technological disruption. The twin revolutions will restructure economies, societies, minds, and bodies. Changes in Fintech will impact the financial wellbeing of ordinary people including the unbanked.

At the United Nations in September 2016, President Barack Obama cautioned the world not to retreat into a sharply divided world along the ancient lines of nation and tribe, and race and religion.

Instead, he advised that we consider the principles of open markets and accountable governance, democracy and human rights, and international law. Obama argued that these remain the firmest foundations for progress.

Isolationism and nostalgic dreams that mix nationalistic attachment with religious values will not take us far in a world facing ecological collapse and digital disruption.  Obama’s thesis is that while liberalism has no clear answers to ecological collapse and technological disruption, it has a much better record than the alternatives.

President George W. Bush’s inaugural speech in 2005 acknowledged events and common sense has led him to conclude that the survival of liberty in America depends on the success of liberty in the rest of the world. His hope for peace in our world rested on the expansion of liberty in all of the world.

The liberal story acknowledges that we need to overcome inherited inequality and intergenerational immobility. It also accepts that in the most liberal countries, many citizens experience oppression, violence, live unbanked, and without access to the internet.

To overcome these problems, we know that we must give people more liberty, remove every unfreedom, protect human rights in the age of delegated artificial authority, establish free markets, and allow all ideas, humans, and goods to move throughout the world as easily as possible. This is the liberal cure of Obama and Bush.

They believe that we can produce prosperity and well-being for all, once we liberalize and globalize our political and economic systems. But liberty is empty without a social safety net, democracy, and human rights. The unbanked may find little utility in liberty. Once we sanctified revelations over liberty. Authority has recently shifted from celestial deities to mortals.

In the Age of Elon, we will witness the shift of authority from humans to algorithms. Just as divine laws were legitimized by religious formalities, and human authority was justified by the liberal metanarrative of liberalization and globalization, the infosphere revolution will establish the authority of artificial intelligence.

In the near future, algorithms will approve the National Budget and tax reforms of nation states. The liberal political model was built in the wake of the industrial era to manage oil refineries, steam engines, and bureaucracies.  Industrialization for which classical liberalism provided ideological justification created many changes in the modern world.

A swell of liberal ideas swept through the UK, France, and Germany from 1830 to 1848. But this liberal political model has trouble dealing with the twin revolutions in biotechnology and artificial intelligence. Interestingly, these revolutions will empower humans to alter the world inside us and society itself.

Margaret Thatcher was an advocate for individual liberties and economic freedoms. In a “Woman’s Own” interview in 1987, Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society.” She proposed a living embroidery of men and women, and that the quality of our lives depended on how much each of us is prepared to be accountable for ourselves.

Margaret Thatcher admired the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. Hayek argued that the most durable social institutions are shaped by unprompted advancement, not intelligent design. That “there is no such thing as society” mirrors Hayek’s idea that loosely-coupled social institutions and processes bring order to human dealings.

Its particulars are evident in common law, rituals, customs and practices. This evolving order allows the public manifestation of private choices; and, by those choices, bureaucracies and institutions are shaped through continuous adaptation.

Inaction in the Age of AI is not an option for LAC. Inertia can only make the struggle against irrelevance greater than the past struggles against exploitation, colonization, the horror of the Triangular Trade, and indentureship.