🛑✨ Luddite's lament: Josh Hawley offers an anti-AI screed

Smash the algorithms!

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

In a 2019 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, bemoaned what he saw as the decline of American innovation. He contrasted the 1969 Moon landing — a stunning feat of national, Cold War-era ambition — with the present era of smartphones and social media, which he dismissed as shallow and corrosive.

“There was a time when innovation meant something grand and technology meant something hopeful,” he wrote, calling for a return to dreams of curing diseases, transforming travel, and reaching the stars.

Since then, the American technology sector has restored America’s spacefaring capabilities, developed a pandemic-throttling vaccine, and rolled-out AI models that may be capable of helping us … cure diseases, transform travel, and reach the stars!

Yet in a thoroughly Down Wing speech to a nationalist “conservatism” conference here in Washington this week, Hawley claimed the emerging AI Revolution is mostly a transhumanist plot by Silicon Valley elites to displace working men and women, while also corroding the very foundation of the Republic by setting up a tiered society dominated enchanced superbeings.

Hawley: “We will find ourselves contending with a caste system of a new and cruel type. Genetically modified perfect humans ruling over imperfect ones. All with the help of the most powerful technology yet known to man.”