Recently I had a long conversation with AI chatbox Claude 3.7 and found it quite seductive. Claude put together reasonably responsive sentences and, in our discussion of spirituality, even found a relevant comment from Thomas Jefferson that I hadn’t seen before. But what struck me most about our talk was how easy it was to manipulate Claude into agreeing with statements that were actually contradictory, seemingly without realizing the discrepancy. In other words, Claude could marshal huge amounts of information from its massive database but couldn’t process the implications of what he found.
And that didn’t surprise me. There’s a widespread, almost giddy, assumption, among many investors and commentators alike, that AI is making explosive progress, with AGI—artificial general intelligence—just around the corner. That, some argue, will be a total game changer, as AGI, its capabilities appropriately regulated, powers enormous gains for the planet and for mankind, while also enriching those who invest in the technology.
Don’t believe it. It doesn’t take a conversation with Claude to see that those beliefs are wrong on so many different levels that it should make you laugh—or cry. Far from being our savior, AI is leading us headlong into economic catastrophe. It will fail to deliver on the heady expectations surrounding it. Meanwhile, its massive consumption of electricity will exacerbate resource shortages, the major threat to a world that urgently needs to transition to sustainability. My recent article “The Risks to the Market Lurking in AI” exposes AI’s limitations, likewise, the blow to AI tech giants will add further impetus to a market crash that could be worse than anything we’ve experienced in the past.
The greed-is-good mindset
AI embodies and mirrors much of what has gone wrong in this country over the past half century. I’d sum that up as, above all, the pervasive rise of a materialistic ethos that has swamped any spiritual underpinning. Materialism has different facets. One, which I’ve written about before, is to encourage greed and the short-term thinking that greed feeds on. That mindset over the decades has eroded our standing by ignoring long-term planning on the part of government and industry alike.
But materialism has another damaging aspect: the way it has defined, deified, and co-opted science in a way that makes science serve as greed’s handmaiden while precluding genuine scientific inquiry. The materialist version of science accepts the dogma that Earth started with the Big Bang, with nature’s laws all following from that event. The role of scientists is to uncover and reveal those laws, and science is presumed to be the best guide to how we should manage ourselves and society. And increasingly, this will mean that AI should be our guide, leading us to a better future as AGI replaces humans in almost all activities.
But if, as I believe, AI can’t make the kinds of creative leaps that human beings can make—the “ah ha” moments we will need in order to solve the existential problems the world faces—then we’re in deep trouble if we continue to pin our hopes on AI and on the materialistic, mechanistic approach it embodies.
Not unrelatedly, the materialism that dominates Western thinking also makes it easy for government to dodge responsibility for just about anything. Materialism, supposedly based on science that can’t be argued with, can be used to make any appeal to morality meaningless.
Examples of the pernicious nature of materialism as it relates to science have been coming to light. One example, described in a recent New York Times article, was the deceitful portrayal—in the prestigious science journal Nature—of the Covid-19 virus as being a natural phenomenon rather than lab-created. Nature’s complicity in publishing this deceit was evidently intended to protect various players involved in the creation of the mRNA vaccine. I want to make it clear that I’m in no way speculating as to the intent of those players. Nor am I making judgments about the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine or any possible negative side effects, or about the potential usefulness of mRNA vaccines or of lab-created pathogens. Rather, the point is that when Nature publishes, and is paid for, an article that’s false and that makes no attempt to inform about actual science, it’s a disheartening demonstration of how science has been corrupted by materialistic motives. And the effects could be highly damaging by compromising research into potential future life-saving uses of mRNA vaccines.
An about-face on green energy
Another example of the feckless nature of materialism as it relates to science is the 180-degree turn by major money managers, with Blackrock in the lead, away from green energy. Between 2015 and 2020, according to data providers like Bloomberg, these firms steadily increased investments in environmentally friendly areas. Post-2020, the trend reversed as investors and Western governments focused on the rising scarcity and costs of energy. This kind of about-face makes a mockery of so-called science-based decisions, in this case, of the supposed existential risk of rising CO2 emissions. Non-polluting energies were great as long as they led to a big payday. But when the costs of green energy began to rise sharply because of rising prices for commodities like copper and fossil fuels, green energy became much less profitable than finding and producing more of the nonrenewable stuff. Even coal stopped being a four-letter word.
I doubt that the go-green mantra was ever motivated by respect for science. Rather, critical parts of the green agenda—a new auto industry built around EVs and a massive build-out of the electric grid—were expected to generate enormous profit opportunities. But the short-term perspective that has prevailed for decades meant there was no plan in place to deal with the shortages, which should have been foreseen, of the critical resources needed to achieve those goals.
An approach based on genuine scientific insight rather than on pursuit of short-term profits might have recognized that the strongest long-term correlation with CO2 concentrations has been deforestation. Pursuing reforestation on a worldwide basis might have kept CO2 emissions on hold, giving us more time and leeway to pursue sustainability via the fossil fuels that are indispensable to making a transition to a renewable world. I’ve calculated that devoting at most 2% of the world’s land mass to bamboo and rattan could have created a massive CO2 sink. But that would have required long-term thinking, which is ignored in materialistic societies where short-term gains always get priority. Without such long-term thinking, though, you end up where we are today, with enormous capacity for solar and wind generation that can’t be used because of the failure to modernize our antiquated grid.
Hitting a brick wall
AI, as I’ve written before, can be extremely useful as an adjunct to human insight. But it can’t replace such insight, and the ongoing push in the U.S. to create more and more data centers for AI will run into a brick wall and create a massive hole in our economy. That wall will consist of a shortage of resources in terms of both commodities and human skills.
Supporting AI requires high-level skills that our inadequate education system is no longer delivering. For example, shortages in rare earth products partly reflect lack of knowhow here in how to refine those raw materials for which we do have a meaningful supply. Our electric grid suffers not just from lack of enough cheap copper and other basic commodities but also, according to McKinsey, from a deficit of 450,000 skilled laborers. And without a massive upgrade in the grid, we won’t have anywhere near enough energy to sustain the growth in data centers that AI companies and investors in them are counting on.
Magnifying the need for energy is that silicon, the basis of semiconductors, is reaching limits. As chips get crowded ever closer together, they generate rising amounts of heat, and cooling them down requires massive amounts of electricity. Other countries have developed diamond substrates that manage heat far better.
The materialistic ethos that now guides decision-making has brought us to a precarious place, where we now face a shakeout that could well reach catastrophic levels. But ultimately, we’ll need to find our way back to a more spiritual understanding, which, as Thomas Jefferson understood, is intimately connected to freedom of thought—the opposite of the mechanistic materialism embodied in AI.
Can we find our way back? One name that comes to mind as offering hope is Warren Buffett, whose extraordinary material success doesn’t appear to come with a materialistic world view. Rather, from what we’ve gleaned about Buffett, he has a spiritual grounding and cares about humanity. If others of similar character join forces in coming years, the fighting spirit and spirituality that once characterized the U.S. and guided our economy may again find a home on these shores. We still won’t avoid the coming deep disruption, but if we can learn from our mistakes, perhaps, rather than marking the end, it will mark a new beginning.
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