President Grok

One thing I think this article does a good job of doing is providing the context for understanding the AI takeover of government. Rather than a sudden jolt of revolution, this is just the next step in a long process.  It's half a century of movement conservatism fully automated. 

But the biggest issue with using AI is twofold: the routine wild inaccuracy of AI tools, as well as the particularly haphazard manner in which DOGE wants to use it. The Biden administration had been slowly integrating AI into government tasks, but it was pretty clear about guarding against potential risks: errors in coding, for example, or added security vulnerabilities. The Musk team is not going to care about that at all. If a one-line code error flags billions of dollars in “wasteful” spending improperly, that’s probably seen as a feature, not a bug. If the AI goes haywire and starts making things up, or the code breaks systems that need to be redundant and reliant, oh well, government isn’t supposed to work well anyway. And if back doors are opened up to allow hackers or adversaries to poke through, maybe they’ll develop a patch later.

That’s the Silicon Valley mindset: move fast and break things, like Social Security. And it has merged with the MAGA mindset. Without transparency in what AI is supposed to look for, you can bet it will be reverse-engineered to spit out a desired result, whether about climate change or DEI or whatever.

So on one level, you can expect the inexperienced coders trying to find trillions in cuts by lazily feeding government data through AI tools to make mistakes, trigger cybersecurity breaches, and neglect AI hallucinations. On another level, you can expect government data to be highly politicized. The White House plans to make chief information officers at the agencies political appointees, who would have loyalty to the president and a willingness to manipulate data for ideological purposes. We’ve already seen this with the installation of Musk ally Tom Krause overseeing the Treasury payment system.

For more background, here is a recent interview with the historian Quinn Slobodian.  The main insight here has to do with ways in which the techno-feudal impulse unfolding under Trump II is in line with the natural course of the neoliberal order and not a radical departure from it. 

 

Finally, one more point about this Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" ethic. There is an accelerationist argument from the left that supposes this all works out for the best in the end. But this is a gross fantasy.  Here is a recent Adam Johnson column pointing out that Elon is never going to "break" the things we might actually like to see broken. 

It’s worth noting that not all of Musk’s attacks on the administrative and liberal state are equally pernicious. There are real issues with USAID and its role as a soft power arm of meddling US imperial bureaucrats, as well as a political shield for U.S. atrocities, from Yemen to Gaza, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere. But USAID also does objectively useful work because many countries grow dependent on them, and it’s very clear that, based on recent statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, what is most likely going to happen is the sinister activity USAID does will simply be folded back into the State Department directly or the CIA (as it used to be) while the Incidentally Good Stuff USAID does will be be eliminated. Despite his faux libertarian posturing, Musk, of course, doesn’t care about the anti-imperialist argument. He hates USAID because he thinks it helps keep black and brown people alive, which—by virtue of the US being a largely unipolar empire—it very much does, regardless of motives.

But it does no good to cheer on the looting of the entire social contract by Nazi robber barrons because of some bank shot hope that it ushers in the "real class war" or whatever.  It doesn't work that way. The US is just Russia in the 90s now.  The tech oligarchs mean to put us through a decade of "pain." They have literally said as much. 

American politics and its glorification of the individual "yeoman farmer/homeowner" tradition is easily poisoned by narcissistic millenarism.  The internet age, particularly the post-COVID internet age, makes that process happen all the more smoothly.  But even in the context of extreme alienation and parnoia we live in, it still stuns me that we can't know or do better. There's no reason anyone who has lived through the events of this century; Katrina, the financial crisis, COVID, etc etc; can't have figured out by now that none of these calamities ushers in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.  They just form the context for the next round of looting. And thre's always another one of those on the way. 

Folding up the con-profits

One of the interesting things about the recession* we're headed into is the specific way the non-profit sector is going to implode. 

Earlier this year, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) abruptly laid off its entire helpline staff. The announcement came just two weeks after the helpline workers voted to form a union, Helpline Associates United (HLAU). Workers were informed that they were being replaced by an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Tessa.

NEDA, the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to providing support to people struggling with eating disorders, launched the helpline in 1999. The organization claimed that the layoffs were unrelated to the success of the union effort—a claim that the workers and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union representing them, categorically dismissed. Rather than having a phone helpline staffed by human workers, the association planned to run an online chat helpline operated exclusively by Tessa.

Incidentally, that's the A.I. bubble in a nutshell right now.  Capital is always looking for new and innovative ways to operate more efficiently ... um... intimidate workers into submission.  Does the chatbot even work?  What a ridiculous question. Everyone knows that's not even the point. 

Helpline staff continued their work when NEDA did a soft launch of the bot in late May. But within days, major problems emerged. People shared stories on social media about their disturbing experiences with Tessa; in one case, it dispensed weight loss advice. But shortly before NEDA planned to entirely eliminate the phone helpline and transition to Tessa on June 1, the organization announced that it would shut down both the helpline and the chatbot. NEDA no longer offers any resources by phone or online chat.

Who cares if a robot can actually replace the workers or not. Who cares if the job even gets done at all! This is far from the last we'll see of this phenomenon. So many ostensibly do-good missions will be thrown in the trash just so that workers can be punished as management hoards what's left of all the drying up donor cash.  And that cash is definitely drying up. This is very likely just the beginning.

 

* Yes let's call it that. We can argue about the technical "health of the economy" metrics in a different post later. But the short version is, in this economy people have been abandoned. Housing and health care costs are up. The COVID era safety net measures have been yanked away. Wealth concentration is worse than ever. Union density is lower than ever. And nobody has any belief that there's a better future ahead. The fact that stock prices haven't totally tanked doesn't help most of us. The fact that unemployment is low doesn't mean people have jobs that actually sustain them.