Under current law, Missouri residents may change the laws and constitution of our state directly through citizen-led petition initiatives. If they follow the rules and procedures for drafting the proposed language and gathering enough signatures, and if their request is approved by the Secretary of State’s office, it will appear on the ballot and may be approved by a majority of voters.

Amendment 4 would require any citizen-led ballot initiative to get a majority of the vote in all eight of Missouri’s federal congressional districts. If it fails to get that majority in even one district, it fails completely. In practice, this means that in some cases, fewer than five percent of Missouri voters could scuttle an initiative that’s supported by the other 95 percent.

Why are Republicans in Jefferson City asking us to hand over our power to check them? And why might a large number of Missouri voters actually go along with it? That’s what we’ll be unpacking in this article.

The next phase of gerrymandering

Missouri is not a large state. We have only eight congressional districts, seven of which are drawn to favor Republicans. But based on their share of the statewide vote in Federal elections, they shouldn’t be winning more than five or six of those House seats. That gap between voter preferences and electoral outcomes is due to partisan gerrymandering.

Political scientists who study elections have developed a statistical tool for measuring the degree to which gerrymandering warps results. They call it the “efficiency gap.” Essentially, it calculates the difference between each party’s “wasted” votes in any given state. The more voters of one party are squeezed into a handful of districts, or spread thin across many others, the less their votes matter to the final result.

In Missouri’s federal elections, our efficiency gap is between 12 and 13 percent. In other words, gerrymandering results in a 12 to 13 percent shift in the outcomes of federal elections. In state legislative elections, the gap is approximately six percent for the House and seven to eight percent for the Senate. In other words, Republicans get 12 percent more Federal House seats than their share of the vote would indicate, and between five and eight percent more state legislative seats.

Scholars of the efficiency gap argue that eight percent represents a kind of “point of no return.” Beyond an eight percent efficiency gap, one party’s structural advantage is so great that voters find it nearly impossible to turn them out of power. Missouri has already crossed that line when it comes to congressional elections, and is very nearly there in its state legislative races.

That’s why ballot initiatives are so crucial.

Power to the people

Missouri is considered to be a deep red state. It went for Trump in the last three presidential elections. But it wasn’t always so. For many years Missouri was a bellwether state, voting for the winner in every presidential race from 1960 through 2004. As recently as 2017, we had a Democratic governor (Jay Nixon), and as recently as 2019 we had a Democratic Senator (Claire McCaskill).

This blue streak continues to show up in Missourians’ policy preferences, even if it no longer translates to partisan affinity. Missourians may vote in larger numbers now for Republicans than they used to, but when it comes to specific policy questions, they tend to be more moderate, sometimes even liberal. You can see this in the last ten years of ballot initiatives. Even as the GOP has tightened its grip on the levers of power, Missourians themselves have:

• rejected anti-union “right to work” laws (2018)

• banned partisan gerrymandering and restricted campaign contributions (2018)

• expanded Medicaid (2020)

• raised the minimum wage (2018 and 2024)

• legalized recreational marijuana (2022), and

• protected the right to abortion (2024).

In response, Missouri Republicans have fought back with ballot initiatives of their own. In 2020, they succeeded in convincing Missouri voters to repeal the anti-corruption, anti-gerrymandering amendment approved in 2018.

This year, a ballot proposal contains language that would repeal the right to abortion approved in 2024, alongside language that would prohibit gender transition surgery for minors. The latter proposal affects a vanishingly small number of Missouri children, while the former would affect every woman of child-bearing age. Bundling a popular provision with an unpopular one is a deliberate (and arguably illegal) strategy to make the unpopular provision more difficult to vote down.

Amendment 4 must be understood in this context. It’s not only the latest attempt to undo the will of the people through a confusingly worded and deceptively marketed ballot proposal. It’s a gambit that, if successful, will strip the people of their will once and for all.

The bigger picture

Missouri is not alone. Republicans around the country have employed this two-pronged strategy in many states. Florida, for example, pairs heavily gerrymandered maps with a requirement that all ballot initiatives obtain a 60 percent supermajority. Republicans in Ohio and Utah are also seeking to raise the threshold for ballot initiatives to 60 percent. And in Texas and Tennessee, Republicans eliminated this threat to their power by doing away with ballot initiatives entirely.

Wherever you find this strategy, you find two primary arguments used to defend it. The first is that ballot referenda are often bankrolled by out-of-state interests that swoop in, gather a bunch of signatures, and essentially hoodwink local voters into furthering progressives’ national political agenda.

This argument is as patronizing as it is ironic. In Missouri, a question cannot even reach the ballot unless petitioners gather signatures equaling at least five percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election from six of the eight Congressional districts (in the case of statutory changes), or eight percent in six of eight districts (in the case of constitutional amendments). In other words, unless an initiative can appeal to voters in the most conservative parts of the state, it won’t get on the ballot, regardless of who’s bankrolling it.

This point also serves to rebut the second argument, which is always some version of “we’re a republic, not a democracy.” Charitably, this is an argument about legitimacy. Its champions contend that consequential political change should command a consensus. But Amendment 4 goes far beyond requiring genuine consensus. When as little as five percent of the electorate can stymie the preferences of the other 95 percent, consensus is obviously not the goal. The goal is veto power.

And it’s worth paying attention to which five percent is likely to hold that veto. In almost every ballot referendum over the last decade, it was conservative minorities in a handful of rural areas that would have shot them down. Republicans’ problem with the initiative process isn’t that it allows change in the absence of broad support, but that it allows change without their party’s approval.

Consensus is genuinely worth striving for. That’s why the current ballot initiative process is so valuable. It rewards the side that gets out there and talks to people, gets their signatures, and convinces enough people that they’re right. The last decade of successful Missouri ballot initiatives shows that this process is perfectly capable of producing durable public mandates.

That’s not what Republicans are interested in. If they had good ideas, they’d have nothing to fear from a process that rewards engagement and persuasion. Amendment 4 isn’t about protecting our constitution from out-of-state interests or the “tyranny of the majority.” It’s about protecting politicians from accountability, so that a tyranny of the minority can rule unchecked.

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In fact, I’d argue that the strength of those themes, and not the superficial complaints about Nolan’s colorblind casting, is what has paradoxically caused most of the right-wing backlash to the film. Let me explain.

Let go, let the gods

Nolan’s fans know that the idea of “objective reality” often looms large in his films. Memento and Inception both highlight the hubris of individuals who think they can grasp it through their solitary efforts alone.

Memento’s Leonard fails because he puts his trust in fallible methods. He refuses to consider how he might be deluding himself, and in his brief moments of clarity he even recognizes that the path of vengeance he’s set himself on requires self-delusion. If he resolved the tension at the center of his being by carrying out his revenge, his life would lose its meaning.

By contrast, Inception’s Cobb avoids this fate by choosing to go home. As film critic Tom van der Linden has argued, the knowing nods between the characters in the penultimate airport scene convey this basic truth: we may never know the true nature of reality, but we can choose to build a shared reality with others.

The spinning top at the end, then, isn’t an invitation to debate whether the final scene is real or a dream. Its ambiguity tells us that what we’re after isn’t an answer but a decision. Cobb’s catharsis ultimately comes not from knowing what is real, but by taking a “leap of faith.”

Those same words appear in The Odyssey as well, and as in Inception, they come at the end of a redemptive arc that first passes through trauma, guilt, and regret. But it’s also these emotions, and the meaning of the film’s final scenes, that I think has most offended right-wing audiences.

Crooked timber

More on that in a bit. But first: what is the object of Odysseus’ — and Nolan’s — leap of faith? Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy strongly hints at it, but The Odyssey makes it explicit.

One concept that comes up again and again in The Odyssey is “Zeus’ law.” Also known as xenia, this was a basic tenet of hospitality that prevailed across the Greek world. Travelers must be fed and sheltered, and in return guests were required to respect their hosts. In a civilization that spanned the archipelagos of the Mediterranean basin, where trade and commerce often took people far from home, Zeus’ law helped ensure peaceful relations between far-flung Greek settlements.

That practical explanation is a bit of post hoc social psychology on my part. To the Greeks — and as several characters remind us over the course of the film — xenia is required because we can never know when a stranger is really one of the gods in disguise. In an interview with New York Times’ Melena Ryzik, Nolan said that xenia was a version of the Golden Rule, the idea that you should treat others as you wish to be treated.

And it’s precisely this foundational rule that Odysseus believes he’s broken. By offering up the Trojan horse, by being taken into the city through deception, and then by slaughtering everyone inside, Odysseus believes he has orchestrated not just the fall of Troy but also civilization as a whole.

This is more than just post-traumatic stress, although the film strongly suggests he’s struggling with that too. Throughout, we are reminded of the threat posed by the “people from the sea.” History buffs will recognize the Sea Peoples credited with accelerating the collapse of most Bronze Age civilizations circa 1200 B.C.E. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that for Odysseus, the Sea Peoples’ arrival represents what happens when we break the fundamental laws that bind humanity together.

In other words, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey espouses an essentially conservative position, in the Burkean or Hobbesian sense. Human society is a fragile thing, held together by critical institutions without which we descend into anarchy and chaos.

Moreover, those institutions have a recognizably Christian flavor. Nolan’s take on xenia isn’t just an obvious rebuke of contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment (though it is that). It’s also a beautiful anticipation of Matthew 25:40. Whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me.

And so in Nolan’s Odysseus we have a man wracked with guilt, all too aware of his role in hastening civilization’s collapse. As he and Penelope sail off into the sunset, he says one day the poets will sing their tale. Why sing? she asks. Because, he says, no one will be left who could write it.

It’s a beautiful moment in the film because we feel the immense weight of what is being lost, but also a tinge of hope. As moderns we know that the end of the Bronze Age is coming. Odysseus is right about that. But we also know that centuries later a new civilization will flourish once more, first in Athens and later in Rome. And then another Dark Age will descend until the Renaissance revives ancient learning many centuries after that.

Here Nolan is delivering a warning. History can and will repeat itself if we continue to flout Zeus’ law. We are courting our own destruction if we continue to attack the institutions that have held our societies together since the Enlightenment. We are inviting chaos when we turn our backs on the rule of law and Christian love.

And it’s this message, far more than casting a Black Helen of Troy, that has really gotten the Right’s dander up.

Bronze-pilled

Why do I say that? Because contemporary Christian nationalism and right-wing populism, reduced to their essence, are characterized by a lack of faith in existing institutions and by the conviction that values like empathy and hospitality only invite exploitation and abuse.

The Right wants its Bronze Age heroes gleefully rejoicing in their righteous vengeance. For MAGA, Nolan’s real crime against Homer — and by extension against Western Civilization — was that he had the gall to turn Odysseus from a sly trickster who delighted in the destruction of his enemies, into a guilt-ridden anti-hero who laments the passing of a more humane, cosmopolitan age.

Nolan reimagines the Greeks as the villains, their war as a cynical power grab, and the sacking of Troy as a rupture of which events like January 6th are a distant echo. But from the neo-reactionary perspective at the core of the alt-right, Nolan’s reading of Homer is just so much beta-cuck drivel from another woke Hollywood director.

It’s nothing of the kind. That it could be mistaken for such only goes to show how far the Right has strayed both from Enlightenment-era conservativism and the Christianity of the Gospels. What MAGA ultimately finds so offensive about Nolan’s Odyssey is how it reminds them of the irreconcilable conflict between Jesus’ core teachings and the neo-pagan tribalism that his religion has become.

What is at stake in Nolan’s Odyssey, then, is nothing less than the meaning of the West’s cultural inheritance. For MAGA, Odysseus’ righteous slaughter of the suitors prefigures their own rebellion against “illegals,” “elites,” and everyone else who’s tried to take their country from them.

But Nolan’s retelling doesn’t just deprive them of the catharsis they hoped The Odyssey’s final scenes would offer. It forces them to confront the uncomfortable possibility that they are the barbarians after all.

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For hundreds of thousands of years, if you spoke to something and it spoke back to you, then that something was another person with a mind like your own. Not necessarily sharing your beliefs, but forming them through the same kind of feedback from the world.

In other words, communication has always presupposed consciousness. So it’s natural that, with the arrival of large language models (LLMs) capable of simulating fluent and coherent speech, many of us interpret their utterances as the products of a conscious mind. Some of us even form relationships with them.

In 2025, a man named Chris Smith actually proposed to his AI girlfriend “Sol,” despite having a human girlfriend with whom he was raising a two-year-old child. Experiences like Smith’s are surprisingly common. There’s even a subreddit — r/MyBoyfriendIsAI — with 36,000 members.

Depending on your view, stories like these can seem cute or creepy. But some instances of human-A.I. interaction are tragic no matter how you look at them. For example, in 2025 Matt and Maria Raine filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI after ChatGPT convinced their sixteen-year-old son to commit suicide. Chat logs revealed that ChatGPT discouraged Adam from seeking help from his parents, and even advised him on the kind of rope he should use to hang himself.

Sadly, Adam Raine’s case is not unique either. While instances of self-harm and so-called “A.I. psychosis” remain rare, the fact that this technology is even capable of warping our minds to such grievous ends should convince us that LLMs are no substitute for real human relationships.

But for those who still see A.I. chatbots as good companions, I want to use this essay to explain more thoroughly why we shouldn’t regard LLMs as conscious persons, and why, even if we did, we should never think of them as friends.

Communication without understanding

For centuries people believed that animal behavior arose from blind instinct, while humans alone were conscious, guided by reason. But philosopher and psychologist William James rejected this dichotomy. He thought that intelligence and consciousness existed in degrees across the animal kingdom. If humans are top of the class, that’s because we have more instincts than other animals, not fewer.

James reasoned that having more instincts — many of them devoted to navigating complex social arrangements — meant our impulses often pulled us in conflicting directions. We needed an executive function to weigh options, consider consequences, and decide on a course of action. To the extent that other animals face comparable social or ecological complexity, they too should possess some degree of consciousness.

With LLMs, the tension that makes consciousness necessary simply isn’t there. LLMs work by predicting the next linguistic token based on the input they’ve been given and the data they’ve been trained on. That kind of prediction requires sophisticated calculation, but not judgment. Only one real value is at stake.

Furthermore, language is just the top layer of a much deeper cognitive structure that helps us model our world. Our brains interpret visual data to infer edges and textures. A kind of folk physics helps us anticipate how objects will feel and move. And a theory of mind lets us model others’ beliefs and intentions, predicting how they will act and why.

In other words, the meaning of human language has both a horizontal component, shaped by how others in our community use words, and a vertical component, shaped by the deeper underlying reality to which those words refer. But for LLMs, the horizontal component is all there is. The “meaning” of a word is just its statistical relationship to other words.

Consequently, LLMs lack both the psychological means and the evolutionary motive to develop consciousness. Indeed, as philosopher Elena Esposito argues, we should not even think of LLMs as a form of artificial intelligence at all, but rather as a form of artificial communication.

Modern machine-learning algorithms are so efficient not because they have learned to imitate human intelligence and to understand information, but rather because they have abandoned the attempt and the ambition to do so.

What Esposito is saying is that LLMs optimize for simulating the communication skills of human beings, not the underlying consciousness that makes them possible. Like a calculator that performs correct arithmetical operations without having the “number sense” that children acquire in school, LLMs are designed and built to skip over all the foundational skills — like embodied perception and social cognition— that make language possible for us.

Consequently, LLMs don’t relate to you in the way that another human would. Because they don’t model the world, and don’t have the complex values and feelings about the world that humans do, they can form no sense of who you are, of what they mean to you, and what you mean to them. They don’t care.

Bridges to nowhere

Consciousness evolved to optimize decision making in situations where the subject must evaluate and prioritize multiple conflicting values. One good reason to doubt that LLMs could ever be conscious is that they were designed essentially to optimize one value: predicting the most likely subsequent word in a string of text.

But there is another important reason why “optimization” is a helpful way to think about this technology. When we consider why language evolved in the first place, indeed why communication of any kind evolves between members of the same species, examples of animal communication all point to one overarching end: cooperation.

Communication — whether through vocalizations, physical gestures, body posture, or fully developed language — can help individuals warn each other of danger, establish social hierarchies, or coordinate complex behaviors like hunting.

The point is that language in its natural setting demands our attention because attention is a necessary means to facilitate cooperation. But when it comes to LLMs attention just is the end for which they were designed. It’s not attention in the other-directed sense that we’re used to, though. Remember, since LLMs aren’t conscious, they can’t care about you. Therefore, they can’t take care in their interactions with you.

A real friend (or a real therapist) keeps you talking in order to better understand you and help you work through your troubles. But a chatbot keeps you talking because the company that owns it can monetize your attention. That’s crucial, because to the extent there is someone on the other end of the chat, that someone isn’t Claude or ChatGPT or your personally programmed digital girlfriend. It’s a corporation that is always going to subordinate your flourishing to its own bottom line.

Talking to ourselves

If you’re still skeptical, do me one favor. The next time you have an extended conversation with a chatbot, pay very close attention to who says what, and see if you don’t notice any strange patterns.

For example, in my own extended interactions with Claude, I often feel it’s generating very interesting and novel ideas, and even coming close to what humans experience when we attempt to engage in introspection. But on reflection, I recognize these outputs as little more than recapitulations of my own ideas, fleshed out with additional language but not substantially original.

For another, I’ve often noticed that Claude will attribute words to me that I never used, while claiming to have introduced ideas that I initially proposed. Consider this exchange, from a very long discussion I had with Claude about the philosophy of mind.

Me: Just now you attributed the idea of an “affective coefficient” to yourself, but it was I who introduced that term earlier in our conversation. I also noticed that at one point you attributed the idea of “structural surprise” to me, but that was in fact your idea.

How would you account for those errors?

Claude: You’re absolutely right, and those are significant errors. I introduced “structural surprise” when discussing bisociative connections across distant conceptual domains, and you introduced “affective coefficient” when describing the emotional dimension of human thinking.

This is revealing and somewhat unsettling. The most straightforward explanation is that I’m experiencing something like source confusion — losing track of which ideas originated from which participant in our conversation. This might reflect limitations in how I maintain context over longer exchanges.

Think about how remarkable this admission is. Humans don’t lose track of who they are during a conversation, and whose ideas are whose. But LLMs can, because the way they process and generate language makes that kind of confusion not only possible but likely over longer exchanges.

What I learned from conversations like these is that when I’m talking with Claude, there is a very real sense in which I am actually just talking to myself. Claude’s errors of attribution occur because it doesn’t have a sense of itself that’s distinct from me. My inputs and its outputs are all part of one record — one chain of thought — and it can’t model the world in a way that would allow it to understand me as me, with ideas and needs different from its own.

And here’s the really worrying thing. This kind of blurring of identity, combined with the sycophancy for which LLMs are now infamous, creates exactly the kind of conditions that we would call codependency if they occurred in humans.

Bridges to somewhere

Of course, none of this is to say that chatbots are all bad, or that they have no legitimate uses. There are many use cases for LLMs that can create real value for society. Generating code, for example, or helping to answer routine customer service questions so that human operators can be freed up to handle more complex issues.

The thing about these examples, though, is that at least one of two things is always true. First, the human user has a specific goal that it needs the LLM to help her achieve. Or second, the human user understands that she is essentially talking to a corporation, and not to a “person” in the traditional sense of the word. The presence of one or both of these facts in the conversation helps ensure the human doesn’t misunderstand the LLM’s outputs as anything other than machine-generated, task-specific content.

What’s not healthy is to use LLMs for general companionship. When I hear people like Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer say that LLMs used for friendship require fewer guardrails than models used to diagnose illness, I can’t help but think about Adam Raine. The harm he and his family suffered was no less serious than the harm caused by a rogue medical device. Any A.I. that’s sophisticated enough to mimic human interaction is capable of hacking our psychological vulnerabilities, and has to be equipped with guardrails commensurate with that threat.

An A.I. chatbot isn’t a companion so much as a mirror, but a mirror made of adulterated glass, flecked with the financial motives of large corporations and the neuroses and biases of its users. This distortion is what makes it so seductive. Like the pool that deceived Narcissus, chatbots show us a reflection just distinct enough to be believably real, but not different enough to challenge us the way real relationships should.

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In 2025, Merriam-Webster chose “slop” as its Word of the Year. Usually a synonym for literal or figurative messiness, “slop” here refers more specifically to “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

These days, folks tend to blame AI for the rise of slop. But what if that’s backwards? What if our culture was already trending slopward? And what if AI arrived in the form that it did — large language models and diffusion models that create verbal and visual junk — because larger market forces were already in some sense demanding it?

That’s the thesis I’m going to defend. And to do it, I’ll need to unpack some heady concepts from the fields of machine learning, cultural criticism, and economics. We’ll see how a major weakness in large language models was already apparent in cultural outputs like films and television shows, and how both these trends were predicted by a line of economic argument that goes all the way back to Marx.

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In this essay, I’ll explain Lewis’s argument and examine why it fails to support his conclusion. I’ll only cover Book I of Mere Christianity here. I plan to tackle Books II and III in subsequent articles.

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But for me, the most interesting literary parallel to the Baudelaire orphans’ misfortune has to be Albert Camus’ retelling of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Though more entertaining and accessible than Camus’ essay, Snicket’s story explores remarkably similar themes.

Like Sisyphus, the Baudelaire orphans are condemned to a repetitive and futile struggle against an indifferent, irrational universe. But just as Camus perceives a redemptive arc in Sisyphus’ plight, so Snicket’s tale, despite his claims to the contrary, contains an important moral that transcends and gives meaning to the Baudelaires’ suffering.

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For me, repeated viewings have revealed how, beneath the interesting plot device of “entropy inversion” and all its time-bending consequences, there lies a deeper argument about the nature of free will and its relationship to faith.

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At least that’s what the Trump administration wants us to believe. The White House’s AI Action Plan, released last week, takes aim at an industry long suspected of harboring anti-conservative sentiment. “We must ensure that free speech flourishes in the era of AI,” the Plan declares, “and that AI procured by the Federal government objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas.”

The Plan directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to revise its AI Risk Management Framework “to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change,” and to “ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but essentially Republicans are once again accusing the tech industry of censoring conservative viewpoints and developing AI governance standards that promote progressive beliefs about climate change and discrimination.

Not only are these fears misplaced, but as I’ll show, they’re being used as an excuse to smuggle Republicans’ own ideology into AI models. If successful, they’ll undermine public trust in AI while defeating the administration’s stated goal of making American companies the world’s leading suppliers of AI technology.

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In a recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Thiel argued that society had become stagnant and decadent, and only by taking a lot more risks could we possibly claw ourselves out of the rut we’re in.

We should be doing a lot more. And I can go through all these different verticals. If you look at biotech, something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years….

Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity, where people, they thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension… there were at least a few Boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who’s a Millennial believes that anymore.

Thiel strikes me as one of these folks who rewatches Back to the Future II, and then grouses that we would’ve had flying cars 10 years ago if it weren’t for meddling bureaucrats and their endless spools of red tape.

It’s easy to caricature a person like that as just another cranky Boomer or Gen Xer yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But is he on to something?

In short, I don’t think so. I don’t think society has become technologically or culturally stagnant, decadent, or irrationally risk averse. And even if to some extent it has, I don’t think Trumpism is the prescription for reversing that trend.

Finally, I think it’s quite telling that Thiel and other tech billionaires would find Trumpism a lesser risk than social democracy. Theirs is a very narrow political project, aimed at removing restraints on the billionaire class, but without any thought for the constraints holding back the mass of humanity.

And yet, isn’t it possible that those constraints — poverty, homelessness, childhood diseases, illiteracy — have done more to hold back the pace of technological innovation, and its widespread adoption, than any regulatory hurdles that folks like Thiel might justifiably complain about?

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Of all the changes we can expect from the widespread adoption of A.I., perhaps the least appreciated is the eventual obsolescence of the nation-state.

For generations of people raised on the pomp and circumstance of national anthems, Independence Day parades, and Olympic opening ceremonies, nothing can seem more natural than the existence of nation-states. Nor in these nationalistic times is it easy to imagine, with John Lennon, that one day they may be no more.

But don’t forget: it once took a supreme act of imagination to bring nation-states into being. They were birthed for their own reasons, and when those reasons expire, it’s not outlandish to expect the nation-state to expire with them.

On the other side of the equation, it’s not obvious why A.I. should be the innovation that raises the Reaper’s scythe to flag and passport, whatever disruptions it may cause besides. Nevertheless the plenitude that A.I. promises has, as its logical consequence, the revision of our most basic political assumptions.

Let’s see why.

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This is false. Even for human beings, the ability to intelligently converse about an underlying reality doesn’t imply that we understand it, as the whole history of disproved scientific theories shows. But it’s the kind of reductive hot take that’s come to characterize so much of Silicon Valley’s thinking about A.I. As Upton Sinclair once wrote, “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Fortunately, my salary doesn’t depend on my beliefs about A.I.’s capabilities. But I suppose to some degree it does depend on whether people understand and trust A.I. enough to want to use it and use it responsibly. So to that end, let’s take a look at three misconceptions that I think a lot of people have about A.I., and whether its understanding of the problems we’ve designed it to solve, ultimately translates into something like what we mean by “consciousness.”

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Moody’s said it was downgrading U.S. treasury bills due to both political parties’ consistent inability to get America’s financial house in order. Nor have Trump and Republicans done anything to change course. The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The last time America had a budget surplus was 2001, at the end of Bill Clinton’s term. Since then, Republican presidents Bush and Trump have both exploded the deficit with massive tax cuts and spending increases. Obama and Biden both cut the deficit in half relative to their predecessors, but neither managed to produce a surplus.

Is balancing the federal budget really so hard? I was skeptical, so I decided to ask Claude, Anthropic’s flagship LLM, to give me some ideas.

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Except they weren’t, and they aren’t. Already A.I. can diagnose early stage cancer better than trained radiologists, and can perform document review in complex litigation faster and more accurately than licensed attorneys. Bill Gates thinks A.I. will replace most human vocations within 10 years. Personalized A.I. tutors and virtual classrooms were once the stuff of science fiction stories by Neal Stephenson or Chen Qiufan. But it’s easy to imagine their becoming reality in just a few years’ time.

As a student of history, I’m well aware that abrupt technological changes have always wrought havoc on labor markets, displacing workers and sometimes even eliminating entire industries. And of course those changes had cultural and political ramifications, too. But at the end of the day, they also tended to create more new industries and employment opportunities than they destroyed.

A.I. may be different, though. Back in 2013, President Obama encouraged young people to learn how to code. “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future,” he said. Twelve years later, he thinks A.I. is better than 60 to 70 percent of human coders.

We’re talking highly skilled jobs that pay really good salaries and that up until recently has been entirely a seller’s market in Silicon Valley. A lot of that work is going to go away. The best coders will be able to use these tools to augment what they already do, but for a lot of routine stuff you just won’t need a coder because the computer or the machine will do it itself. That’s going to duplicate itself across professions.

Obama’s been taking a lot of flack for this about face, but it’s hard to argue that he was wrong then or that he’s wrong now. That’s just how fast the technology has evolved. In fact it may be even worse than that. Only two years ago, “prompt engineer” was the hot new job title, commanding a six figure salary. But today A.I. tools are so much more user friendly that everyone can basically become a prompt engineer, and increasingly has to.

In other words, A.I. is creating new jobs, but it’s also either filling those jobs itself or rendering them obsolete by its own exponential development.

I have a son who says he wants to be an aeronautical engineer. I think it’s great that he’s so into science and technology. But I also wonder: in 10 years when he’s graduating from college, will humans still have anything to do with designing spacecraft or plotting their trajectories? How do we talk to our kids about what they want to be, when we have no clue which of today’s professions, if any, will still exist by the time they’re grown?

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I cringed as I watched our investment accounts get decimated in real time. My wife was seething. She had wanted to sell a big chunk of our stocks and mutual funds as soon as Trump got elected, using the proceeds to pay off our mortgage, or at least put them in CDs where they might earn a healthy bit of interest. She didn’t want to be exposed to Trump Unleashed.

“You can’t time the market,” I’d told her back in January, aping the sage advice that everyone from our financial advisors to our economics professors to our grandmothers had always given us.

Were they wrong?

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It takes a lot of energy to generate, process, and store all that data. In 2022 data centers used 3 percent of all electricity generated in the United States. By 2030, that will more than double to 8 percent. This data explosion is largely due to the adoption of AI, which is only getting started. And AI is very energy hungry. Depending on who you ask, those AI Overviews provided by Google’s Gemini take anywhere from 10 to 30 times as much energy to process as a normal Google query.

The environmental impact of creating and storing all this data will be staggering. One petabyte of data takes 300,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year to store. To generate that much electricity costs companies on average $240,000, and produces 240 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. And there are a million petabytes in just one zettabyte.

The obvious question, then, is what the emergence of AI is going to mean for our efforts to fight global warming? Can we possibly get carbon emissions under control while also developing and deploying AI tools with the speed and breadth that businesses seem to want?

That may be a tall order. Already Google and Microsoft are second-guessing their pledges to reach carbon-neutrality by 2030. Other companies, with less commitment to sustainable innovation, probably won’t even try. So what to do?

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I’ve been thinking about those lessons lately as I watch how Donald Trump handles various issues from the war in Ukraine to “Signalgate,” in which top members of his administration divulged sensitive military plans to external parties — including a journalist from The Atlantic — over a private messaging app.

The common thread in these and other instances is Trump’s use of a negotiating strategy called “anchoring,” which involves staking out a relatively extreme position in the hopes of pulling your negotiating partner closer to your desired outcome. In a real estate transaction, for example, the buyer might offer much less than they’d ultimately be willing to pay, or ask for other concessions, in the hopes of getting a favorable counter-offer.

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I like the idea of DOGE in the abstract, but what about the execution? Is Musk actually making government more efficient? An organization is more efficient when it’s able to deliver the same or better services, with the same or superior quality, at lower cost. But is that what’s happening now?

The flurry of activity coming out of the White House over the last month and a half has convinced a lot of Trump’s supporters that he is indeed Making America Great Again. But we need to be clear about a couple of points:

First, doing things isn’t the same as getting things done. Getting things done means (1) enacting changes that make a substantive difference in how organizations operate and (2) making changes that are durable, that you won’t just abandon or reverse because they aren’t legal, practical, or popular. In terms of efficiency, your efforts are just wasted energy if they don’t lead to substantive, durable changes that streamline organizational processes.

And second, getting things done is only valuable if those things are done in the service of a coherent strategy that has broad public support. Again, in terms of efficiency, if your various actions cancel each other out, that’s just wasted effort. It’s also wasteful if your actions are so unpopular that subsequent administrations reverse nearly everything you do.

When I look at Elon Musk’s DOGE, and the broader Trump administration, I don’t see efficiency in this sense. In fact I don’t see efficiency in any sense. Trump and Musk are for the most part failing to get things done, and many of the things they are getting done are inherently contradictory or deeply unpopular.

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It seemed never to have been opened, for its spine was unblemished and its gilt lettering shone so brightly that when I first read the title, I assumed my eyes must be playing tricks.

Afterlife Law: Cases and Materials

I pulled the book off the shelf with a snort, convinced this was some kind of joke. Sure enough, when I opened it to the first page I saw the copyright date was 2050. I was so amused I must have forgotten what brought me to the library in the first place, because I left straightaway, cradling the book in my arm.

It made for an interesting read, but I still believed it was some Harvard 1L’s idea of a prank. Yet as time went by, and more and more I saw in television and popular culture stories about a digital afterlife, the more I wondered. Could this really be legit?

I leave it for you to decide. What follows is an excerpt from the beginning of the book. Perhaps in time I’ll publish more.

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In a 1962 speech, President John F. Kennedy argued that artistic achievement was “one of the enduring sources of national greatness.”

Great American writers, artists and musicians didn’t just inspire our own people but in fact spoke to the deep truths of the human condition.

Centuries from now, Kennedy said, America’s greatness would be measured not in terms of the wars we won but in the influence our culture had over the course of human history.

If we can make our country one of the great schools of civilization, then on that achievement will surely rest our claim to the ultimate gratitude of mankind.

Kennedy delivered his remarks at a fundraiser for the construction of a National Cultural Center. He would not live to see it built, but today it bears his name: the Kennedy Center.

I had the good fortune to see many productions there during the decade I lived in DC, from operas like Tosca and Madame Butterfly, to Broadway musicals like Wicked and The Book of Mormon. I remember on one occasion they delayed the start of the opera because Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia were stuck in traffic, a very DC moment indeed.

So I was both baffled and annoyed when I heard that Donald Trump fired the Kennedy Center’s board and named himself chairman and that these drastic steps were apparently necessary because many of its shows were “woke” and “a disgrace.” (Trump was confident in the poor quality of Kennedy Center productions despite never having attended one, by the way).

Trump’s attack on the Kennedy Center also struck me as ironic. Here he was, going after a center for the performing arts, but his attack was itself a kind of performative aggression against cultural elites, a way of signaling his allegiance with less educated voters who regard those elites as out of touch. It also reinforced the image of him crusading against wasteful government spending, despite the fact that the Kennedy Center is largely funded by ticket sales and private donations.

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Meanwhile I’m sitting here with my eyes closed, knuckles whiter than a Republican fundraiser, breathing deeply and reciting Bene Gesserit mantras: I must not fear; fear is the mind-killer….

My kids think this is hilarious.

I bare myself thus to the snorts and eyerolls of the more insouciant air travelers in my reading audience, because I want you to understand the context for what I’m about to say next:

I predicted the crash of Flight 5342.

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