Almost overnight, the American public has become bombarded with artificial intelligence. Tech companies have collectively spent over $750 billion to build data center infrastructure this year–more than the entire US housing market. We are drowning in AI slop, the US energy grid is on the verge of collapse, and stories appear almost weekly detailing how another AI agent has escaped captivity or, and this is real, rewritten its own rules to bypass human commands.

The public is practically begging our government to bring the tech companies under control; three out of four say AI companies are not doing enough to prevent disaster. Bizarrely, multiple tech CEOs testified this week to the United Nations pleading for them to regulate the technology they created. Yet, Congress has been in no rush. A last-minute “kill switch” bill (assuming such a thing is even possible) was torpedoed in the Senate this week, and House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chair Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY) said AI legislation is “too complex to rush.” Meanwhile, the president has called AI concerns a “hoax.”

What is the reasoning given by these esteemed leaders for putting no guardrails on the technology (which, by the way, we don’t even fully know how works)?

We are in a race with China.

A race. That event where one competes from point A to point B. The one which has a clearly delineated course and finish line. That’s all well and good but, hang on a second–where exactly is the finish line here?

Not once have I heard a leader or tech entrepreneur explain what the “end” of this supposed race is. With every other competition in history there has been an objective end: the Greeks racing to beat the Persians to Thermopylae, Paul running his race to remain in obedience to Christ until his final breath, even the “space race” had an objective–the moon.

Credit: justsecurity.org

But none of that seems to apply to this race. The best the tech CEOs ever do is give extravagant, abstract sophistry about how AI will solve “all our problems” or do “everything for us.” Read Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. He’s very clear that there are no limits to this one. According to him, we are going to revel in ever-increasing abundance and bliss for all our days.

Therefore, when Rep. Guthrie says (at the behest of no one knows whom) Congress cannot be “in a rush” to place legislative guardrails, what he is in fact enabling is a far more dangerous rush towards this unknown end. What does “beating China” at AI even look like? If one says the answer is better model performance, then what does that achieve us? Is this a race we are running for war, for supply chains, for better cyberhacks to cause misery to their people? Conversely, what would China’s victory look like? No one knows. We are allowing the dark spectre of the unknown to lead us into chaos.

This makes AI unlike any tool ever created; it has in fact caused AI to supersede the category of “tool” entirely. And it is why AI–especially in the hands of unbounded utopian tech bosses–holds such danger.

For every other tool has had a defined purpose for its creation. Automobiles were to get from one point to another quicker. Calculators were to tackle larger math problems. The typewriter for faster word processing. Never, not once, has there been a tool which could “do it all.” And any that were advertised as such have always, always proven to be snake oil.

This propensity towards the abstract is especially unbecoming for the so-called conservatives in both leadership and the public. The entire philosophy of conservatism was created in response to the dangerous abstractions of the French Revolution–a situation with ominous parallels to the utopianism, haste, and schizophrenia of the current moment.

Its creator, Edmund Burke, had this to say of the abstractions of that time: 

“I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”

So, dear leaders, if you are reading this, please continue to prostitute our nation, our energy, and our treasure towards this race to nowhere. We really do have to beat China.