While our Democratic friends are criticizing King Trump about bombing Iran, let’s talk about AI, which is far more consequential than bouncing a couple of bunker busters onto Iran’s nuke shop.

All the experts agree that AI is going to transform human existence beyond our imagination and turn us into mind-numbed robots. The latest expert prognostication that I’ve seen was from a university professor of English complaining about students using AI to write their essays and professors using AI to grade them.

So, that’s a problem, Herr Professor?

For some reason, I have always had a problem with universities. I think of universities as ruling-class efforts to control the Narrative, whether it’s the religious narrative in the Middle Ages or the political narrative in the last century.

In fact I have come to think that the whole idea of learning stuff in a classroom from a teacher is crazy-cakes stuff.

Maybe it made sense back in the days when written knowledge was holed up in handwritten scrolls in monasteries. Notice how all hell broke loose on the religion front once Bibles got to be printed by Gutenberg and educated Germans got to study the Bible for themselves.

Still books were pretty expensive, and maybe teachers were cheaper. But not anymore. The “tell” is that public libraries are now places where the homeless can watch on-line porn and keep out of the cold.

Maybe, with the internet and AI, we don’t need no stinkin’ universities. All the knowledge in the world is online.

My favorite “tell” is the One Laptop per Child experiment in Ethiopia. They drop off laptops in boxes in Third World villages. Here’s what tends to happen, according to Nicholas Negroponte:

Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android

Because, you see, the kids wanted to use the disabled camera.

You mean to say that Third World kids learn to work the tablets, sing the ABC song, and hack the tablet, all without educated, credentialed, unionized teachers? What a world!

Now, I understand the worries about technology. It ruined the good old medieval tournament where only noble armored knights would fight with swords on horseback, because peasants couldn’t afford it. Today, no man has a clue how to fight in full armor with a sword on horseback. How dare Samuel Colt and Richard Gatling and Hiram Maxim say goodbye to all that. And don’t get me started on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Think of what technology has done to women’s lives. Back in the day every woman cottager toiled away on her hand loom producing textiles for the oppressive putting-out system. Today no woman has a clue how to operate a hand loom. Now she’s rolling her eyes about Trump on TikTok. You have a problem with that, sexist?

So will humans in the future be freed from our present cubicle slavery and soar into sunlight uplands, or will we be corrupted by AI into extinction? Here’s another possibility. I’m a fan of Willis Eschenbach, a “climate denier” who writes frequently for the “climate denier” site WattsUpWithThat.com. A while back, Willis allowed as how his dad had him tested at Stanford for IQ back when he was in grade school, and he scored over 180.

Warning: Eschenbach has no qualifications to write about climate. None!

I have read a lot of Willis’s stuff over the years, and I have come to think he has a mind as sharp as a samurai sword. Some years ago Willis wrote a piece in which he advanced the theory that the Intertropical Convergence Zone is the climate thermostat. In his latest article, “The Emergence of Emergence,” he describes how he wrestled with Perplexity.ai and got it to agree with him on climate and emergence in a “Comprehensive Synopsis of Emergent Thermoregulatory Weather Phenomena.” Go check it out.

Maybe in the future the measure of a man will be how well he can wrestle AI to the ground and force it to yield up useful knowledge. In other words, nothing has changed since the Odyssey, in which the true hero Odysseus had to battle all kinds of monsters on the way home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. And when he got home, his dog recognized him, but not his faithful wife Penelope.

What will AI mean to the Penelopes of the world? Back in the day, Penelope developed an archery competition to determine who was the real Odysseus that had returned after 20 years to Ithaca. I suspect that our modern Penelopes will harness AI to make the world safe so that women can love and be loved and be protected from unwelcome Suitors. I confess that I have no idea how this will work.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio