It’s so obvious in retrospect that Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into an AI farm. I’ve known this was the long-term play of technocrats for a while. I just hadn’t put two and two together (or X and X?).
Mary Harrington has noted what makes this potential AI (named Grok) different from others: rather than pulling information from static data, Grok draws on the “living” hive-mind that is Twitter. As if that isn’t disturbing enough, Harrington takes it one step further into politics:
This provides a potential solution to one of 21st century’s thorniest problems: how do you govern a demos that is both reflexively anti-authoritarian, but that also yearns for strongman governance?
In other words, young people today want to do what they want and they want to be told what to do. Justice means no human being should hold power over another, but it takes a strong, decisive authority to enforce that equality. What’s a young person to do? If Elon’s AI experiment works, it’s possible that young people could begin to trust the radically democratic central authority that is Grok. After all, Grok’s intelligence will be drawn from the people, so its decisions will be guided by what the people want without any personal biases. Right? Right?? In fact, feeding information to Grok could become part of your civic duty. Don’t you want a just society?
Harrington:
I hope this is all just my over-active imagination. But I can picture a near future in which it’s considered far more meaningfully democratic to pour your opinions and political passions into the LLM than to cast your vote. Isn’t this potentially a far richer way of contributing your perspective, than merely casting a ballot once every five years? When your words, sentences, opinions and sentiments form part of the billions of such phrasings that go to make up the totality of what the egregore knows, is that not a more representative form of participation in governance than casting a ballot?
It might feel a little less like being borne down upon by Leviathan, and more like becoming part of Leviathan. It might, indeed, feel legitimate.
How long till we see “I tweeted” stickers proudly displayed on election day?
Christian Leithart 