I have developed something of a reputation as the “anti-AI guy,” primarily because I refuse to join the technological priesthood in singing hymns to artificial intelligence while a handful of billionaires quietly purchase the printing press, the library, the factory, the surveillance camera, the public square, and eventually the human brain. In this new AI-dominated era, even simply asking who controls the machinery is considered an impolite interruption during the worship service.
I am not opposed to artificial intelligence as a technological tool. AI can help doctors identify disease, assist disabled people, accelerate scientific research, automate administrative work, strengthen cybersecurity, improve education, and dramatically expand the capabilities of entrepreneurs and creators. I use technology, I build technology, and I understand its extraordinary potential. My objection concerns the weaponization of AI, the centralization of its ownership, and the political and economic system that many of its most influential advocates openly describe as its destination.
The inevitability argument has become Silicon Valley’s favorite method of avoiding accountability. We are told that AI will eliminate most jobs, replace human decision-making, connect our brains to computers, monitor our behavior, restructure capitalism, and require some form of universal government income. Then, after announcing this revolutionary demolition of human society, its architects shrug and tell us that none of it can be stopped. One must admire the efficiency of building the bulldozer, choosing the building, starting the engine, and then explaining that demolition is simply a force of nature.
Elon Musk told the VivaTech conference in 2024 that, in a “benign scenario,” probably none of us would have a job. He predicted a “universal high income,” an abundance of goods and services, and a world in which the central human question becomes whether life retains meaning when computers and robots can perform everything better than we can. This is an extraordinarily revealing admission because Musk recognizes the problem of meaning while continuing to promote the economic conditions that would produce it. His imagined future bears a remarkable resemblance to WALL-E, except the floating chairs with screens would be replaced by brain-chip implants.
Musk has described Neuralink’s long-term purpose as creating a high-bandwidth brain interface through which human beings could become “symbiotic with AI.” Neuralink’s immediate medical work, including helping people with paralysis control computers, is genuinely promising and deserves recognition. The broader transhumanist ambition raises an entirely different category of questions. Once human thought becomes technologically accessible, the issues of privacy, consent, ownership, manipulation, security, and government access are no longer theoretical. They become constitutional emergencies taking place inside the human skull.
Sam Altman has been equally explicit about the economic transformation he expects. In his essay “Moore’s Law for Everything,” Altman wrote that the technological revolution would be “unstoppable,” that power would shift further from labor toward capital, and that society would require drastic policies to distribute the wealth created by AI. His proposed American Equity Fund would tax companies and privately held land, then distribute annual payments to citizens. The language is dressed in entrepreneurial optimism, but the governing premise is unmistakable: the productive economy will belong to an increasingly concentrated class of capital owners while the public receives a politically administered dividend.
Bill Gates has expressed the inevitability argument with unusual clarity. Writing about the development of powerful technology, Gates said that if he possessed a magic button that could slow development for several decades, he might press it, but “that button doesn’t exist.” He concluded that these technologies will be created regardless of what any individual or company does, driven by competition among nations, corporations, and individuals seeking profit, power, glory, and leadership. Gates has also suggested that AI could reduce the workweek as machines produce more goods and services with less human labor.
Larry Ellison has offered perhaps the most honest preview of how AI centralization could affect civil liberty. During Oracle’s 2024 Financial Analyst Meeting, Ellison described AI systems processing information from police body cameras, vehicle cameras, doorbell cameras, drones, and other recording devices. He predicted that “citizens will be on their best behavior” because everything would be constantly recorded and reported. That sentence should be engraved above the entrance to every congressional hearing on artificial intelligence because it perfectly captures the managerial worldview behind the coming surveillance state. Freedom is apparently much safer once every citizen behaves as though an invisible parole officer is watching from the cloud.
These leaders do not necessarily call themselves communists, and I am not claiming that they are secretly carrying membership cards from the Soviet Politburo. I am identifying the structure of the society they repeatedly describe. Human labor ceases to be economically necessary, productive capital becomes concentrated among those who own the machines, ordinary citizens depend upon centrally distributed income or access, private ownership steadily gives way to subscription-based existence, and behavior is monitored through integrated digital systems.
That system is communist in its economic dependency, technocratic in its administration, and feudal in its concentration of ownership. It allows a small ruling class to control the means of production while the population receives permission to consume whatever the system has allocated. The fact that private corporations might operate portions of the machinery does not make the ordinary citizen free. A government allowance distributed through privately owned infrastructure is still dependency, particularly when the same institutions control identity, banking, communication, employment, health information, and access to public life.
The World Economic Forum helped popularize this vision through a 2016 scenario in which the narrator owns nothing, possesses no privacy, and insists that life has never been better. The organization later described it as a “thought experiment” rather than a formal policy objective. Fair enough. It remains interesting that the global managerial class continually produces thought experiments in which citizens own less, surrender more data, and become increasingly dependent upon systems controlled by someone else. They rarely seem to fantasize about a future in which ordinary families own the technology and bureaucrats have to request permission.
The greatest deception surrounding this entire discussion is the claim that such an outcome is inevitable. Continued development of artificial intelligence is likely, and increasingly capable AI will affect nearly every sector of American life. OpenAI-affiliated researchers estimated that large language models could affect at least 10 percent of the tasks performed by roughly 80 percent of American workers, with about 19 percent potentially seeing at least half of their tasks affected. The researchers explicitly avoided predicting the timing or speed of adoption, which is an important distinction from the billionaires casually announcing the end of human employment between product demonstrations.
Technological development does not dictate political structure, property law, constitutional protections, or the distribution of ownership. Those are human decisions. They are legislative decisions, judicial decisions, corporate decisions, purchasing decisions, and cultural decisions. AI dominance becomes inevitable only when the American people accept the premise that those building the systems possess an inherent right to determine the civilization built around them.
The Founding Fathers designed the Constitution around a realistic understanding of human nature. They did not assume that powerful men would remain benevolent because their mission statements contained the words “humanity,” “safety,” and “abundance.” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The same truth applies to technologists, intelligence agencies, federal contractors, academic institutions, and algorithms trained by all of the above. Concentrated power does not become morally pure because it is processed through a data center.
The Bible is even more direct about the problem. Jeremiah warns that “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). AI does not remove human sin from the exercise of power. It multiplies the reach, speed, efficiency, and concealment of that power. A corrupt official with a filing cabinet can harm thousands of people. A corrupt institution equipped with integrated AI, biometric identification, predictive modeling, financial controls, and continuous surveillance can govern millions of people without requiring most of them to understand that a decision was ever made.
America therefore needs an explicitly constitutional architecture for artificial intelligence. The First Amendment must prohibit government agencies from pressuring AI companies to suppress lawful viewpoints, manipulate political information, or construct ideological blacklists. Dominant AI systems that function as gateways to information should disclose their governing rules, significant training biases, moderation standards, government requests, and material alterations to politically sensitive outputs. Secret censorship does not become acceptable merely because the censor is a statistical model with no facial expression.
The Fourth Amendment must govern AI surveillance with the same seriousness that it governs physical searches. Persistent biometric tracking, facial recognition, voice identification, neural information, location histories, private communications, and AI-generated behavioral profiles should require specific legal authority and, wherever constitutionally applicable, a warrant based upon probable cause. Government should be prohibited from purchasing through data brokers information it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The Constitution should not be defeated by allowing an intelligence agency to click “add to cart.”
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments must guarantee due process when automated systems affect employment, banking, insurance, medical treatment, education, government benefits, licensing, criminal sentencing, or access to essential services. Every American should have the right to know when AI materially influenced a decision, the right to receive a meaningful explanation, and the right to appeal to an accountable human being. “The computer said no” is not due process, no matter how “efficient” it may be.
Property rights must extend into the digital world. Individuals should own their identities, voices, likenesses, private communications, creative work, behavioral data, and the persistent memory accumulated by personal AI agents. Companies should not be permitted to ingest a person’s life, reproduce his voice, imitate his face, appropriate his work, and then explain that ownership is an outdated concept. Licensing should be voluntary, compensation should follow value creation, and deletion rights should be real rather than ceremonial buttons placed inside forty-seven pages of settings.
Congress should prevent the AI economy from becoming dependent upon a handful of vertically integrated companies controlling chips, cloud infrastructure, foundational models, identity systems, payment rails, and government contracts. Open standards, data portability, model interoperability, local processing, self-hosted systems, and meaningful antitrust enforcement should form the basis of American AI policy. States should retain room to establish protections for their citizens rather than being preemptively silenced whenever Washington becomes enchanted by another industry lobbying campaign.
The same constitutional framework must prepare for quantum computing. The federal government and critical infrastructure should move aggressively toward post-quantum security without installing universal government backdoors. Encryption that protects Americans should not be deliberately weakened under the familiar promise that only responsible officials will use the key. History has provided enough evidence that government secrets leak, databases are abused, and temporary emergency powers develop remarkable survival instincts.
American policy should encourage AI that increases the productivity, ownership, and independence of workers. Tax incentives, federal procurement rules, education programs, and investment policy should reward systems that augment human labor, create small businesses, expand skilled trades, distribute productive tools, and strengthen families and local communities. Public policy should not subsidize corporations for eliminating American jobs and then tax the remaining workers to finance permanent dependency for those displaced.
Work carries moral meaning beyond the production of goods. Even before sin entered the world, God placed Adam in the garden “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Work was part of human purpose before it became burdened by the Fall. The Bible never treats productive responsibility as an embarrassing defect that humanity must engineer out of existence. A society that strips millions of people of responsibility, discipline, contribution, and the dignity of providing for others will not automatically produce a nation of poets, philosophers, and volunteer gardeners. Human beings deprived of purpose frequently become anxious, addicted, isolated, and easily controlled.
The goal should not be to manage the disappearance of human work as though it were an unavoidable consequence of progress. Work is not merely an economic function to be automated away. It is one of the primary ways human beings exercise responsibility, provide for their families, develop discipline, serve their communities, and participate in the stewardship God has entrusted to them. Artificial intelligence should remain subordinate to human labor, human judgment, and human authority, serving as a limited tool that strengthens productive people rather than replacing them. Americans should retain ownership of their data, their businesses, their creative work, and the technology they use, while families, churches, local communities, and independent institutions remain responsible for forming and educating the next generation. The future must not reduce human beings to passive consumers who receive instructions, income, information, and permission from centralized systems controlled by corporations and government agencies.
My work building Pickax has reinforced this principle. Technology can be designed to restore ownership and direct relationships rather than manipulating users through hidden algorithms. Pickax is a social media platform that allows creators to build authentic communities they control, while our integration of Rumble videos directly into our newsfeeds demonstrates how platforms can multiply value through cooperation rather than trapping audiences inside extractive systems. That is the model AI should follow: interoperability, ownership, voluntary association, transparent rules, and power that moves outward toward individuals and communities.
The proper American response to artificial intelligence is neither panic nor worship. It is constitutional government applied with courage before dependency makes courage prohibitively expensive. We must reject the proposition that technological elites possess the authority to abolish work, redesign ownership, monitor the population, merge human consciousness with machines, and place every citizen on a government allowance merely because their companies developed impressive software.
AI will continue to advance, but the political order surrounding it remains ours to determine. We can build an AI future grounded in private property, freedom of speech, due process, personal privacy, decentralized ownership, meaningful work, family authority, local community, and government restrained by law. We can ensure that artificial intelligence serves free human beings created in the image of God rather than training human beings to serve an intelligent system created in the image of its owners.
The outcome is not inevitable. It becomes inevitable only when a free people surrender their responsibility to choose, and the decisive question before America is whether we will establish the rules while we still possess the authority to do so, or accept the rules written for us after our dependence is complete.
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