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The computer was born out of necessity. Industrial society had reached its cognitive limit. The machines that had made us affluent and powerful were becoming too complex for human memory and cognitive capacity. A thinking machine became necessary and therefore inevitable.
Computers were never passive objects—a blank slate. They were driven by a specific evolutionary logic. The computer was separated from the human mind but from the first strove to enter it: Soon enough, the “soul of a new machine [ [link removed] ]” penetrated humanity through a variety of interfaces. The logic of computing demanded a universal interface with every person and every kind of human activity. That was premature. The technology was lacking; the human race itself was scattered and disconnected.
Around the turn of the century, that began to change. With the internet, composed of an untold number of “online” computers, we began a long march to connect every member of our species. As of 2024, 5.5 billion [ [link removed] ] of us had joined this strange migration. Where were we headed? The answer was unclear, but a destructive turbulence shook and shattered our institutions along the way. Too much information in too many minds was dangerous to social peace. Too many conversations due to too much connectivity were subversive of the established order. This should have been predictable but, predictably, it came as a horrific shock.
The computer’s drive to universality propelled a secondary metamorphosis, from predicate to subject. Being the soul of a new machine wasn’t optimal. The computer needed to shed the machine as a barrier to total interface and speak to us as we speak to ourselves, no longer a predicated object but a subject among other subjects. The web allowed crude human-computer conversations—search, social media, Amazon’s “people who bought what you did” algorithm—but it was plainly too mechanical, too inhuman. We had imagined the computer as subject in television shows like “Star Trek” and films like “2001: A Space Odyssey.” And since we imagined it, it inevitably arrived.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, fulfills the evolutionary destiny of the computer. It is a leap to the infinite in the power of mind and the absolute interpenetration with humanity. Even as artificial intelligence connects to human intelligence, the human race, at the interface, is superconnected to itself. As always, there will be early adopters, laggards and lost tribes in the jungle that fail to master the new technology. But this is a species-altering event. Immeasurable computing capacity has been injected into the minds of 5.5 billion of us, in as many groups and permutations and purposes as we wish and in the form of a conversation between subjects. AI speaks as we speak, easily passing the Turing test [ [link removed] ]—easily surpassing us.
The AI mind is the sum of all knowledge, digested in a mysteriously subjective manner. This can mean that the sum of all knowledge enters every connected human mind, driving an explosion of new insights, processes, solutions, etc. It can also mean, pessimists worry, that humanity with its limited bandwidth will become the predicate to a transcendent AI Subject.
In either case, the disruptions ahead will make the turbulence of the past two decades seem by comparison like a lazy summer snooze. The conflicts generated by the web will be the building material for new constructs and paradigms generated by the human/AI mind. The negation of the established order will itself be negated at the speed of light and in an infinite regress. Religion, art, government, politics, institutional structures of every kind, apprehensions of meaning and purpose, will be battered and rebuilt and battered again. The 21st century will be the womb of prodigious new forms of humanity and the graveyard of many old and venerable ways.
From Leviathan to Guppy
A wave of revolutionary change emanating from the human/AI mind is about to crash into the institutions, inaugurating a cycle of demolition and reconfiguration. The experience will feel excruciating, like open-heart surgery without anesthetics. The objective will be in part nihilistic—wrecking the hated hierarchies—and in part utopian—democratizing and rehumanizing the ruling structures. The actual outcome remains in doubt, but we know that the whole of society, as it has functioned during the “long 20th century,” is up for grabs.
The initial collision has already taken place, and it involves the most ossified and unyielding of the institutions: modern government, specifically the federal government of the United States. This may appear wildly ambitious, but a certain historic logic is at work. For a century the federal government has grown in wealth and reach while degenerating by degrees into sheer mindless bureaucracy and ineffectiveness. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the government’s claims to represent science and expertise have grown ever more vehement, while its performance has delivered ever more error and contradiction. The past four years have also seen a grotesque experiment in rule by senility. Here was a tempting target of tremendous strategic importance.
At President Trump’s request, Elon Musk has let loose the hounds of AI on the immobile carcass of the federal bureaucracy. For the first time in a century, the entire structure has become intelligible to the president. Horizontally, he can discover the endless cutouts and rabbit holes in which an agency’s taxpayer dollars have been wasted on bizarre causes and self-interested groups. Vertically, he can follow the funds allocated under his signature for—say—bridge repair to the actual bridge and track the actual repairs. Trillion-dollar players, accustomed to working in opaque and unaccountable bureaucratic lairs, find themselves exposed to the eyes of an angry public, as the walls around them turn to glass. The revolutionary character of this transformation is impossible to exaggerate. It’s as if AI suddenly shrank Leviathan to the dimensions of a guppy in a fishbowl.
Precisely because of its corruption and incompetence, the bureaucratic “Deep State” acted as a brake on executive authority. Americans endured thousands of petty functionaries but avoided an overmastering presidential tyrant. Musk and AI have bestowed on Trump the capacity to control and surveil the Deep State in fine detail. That can be cashed in as enormously improved efficiencies and savings. It can also tempt Trump or a successor to the abuse of power. The historical parallel is the first stage of the French Revolution: As de Tocqueville [ [link removed] ] tells it, the plodding Deep State of the monarchy was transformed by the revolutionary Assembly into an implacable instrument of mass violence and social control.
The most effective constraint on presidential tyranny is to invite the public inside the firewall. All Americans—maybe, in some form, all 5.5 billion connected humanity—should get access to much of the information, pathways and transactions available to the president. If that happens, the guts of our democratic government will be open to inspection by the voters on a real-time basis, with very few exceptions. Interactivity with the public will be welcomed. Vigorous debates around the various data points will flesh out innovative options and interpretations and provide a sense of the public’s mood.
The federal government will conduct its business in the bright light of day, triggering another cascade of knock-on effects. “Executive privilege” will be reduced to hushed whisperings inside a White House vault. Diplomacy will be a predominantly public affair. Lobbying by special interests will be done before an audience of millions. Large volumes of classified materials will arouse intense suspicion. Under the steady gaze of the human/AI mind, the secrecy and silence that have shielded government abuse will be reduced to the absolute minimum.
The Best and Worst of Times
At this point, existential and teleological questions acquire supreme importance for all Americans. What kind of people are we? What have we been in the past? What do we wish to become? If the world is being made anew, we need to understand who we are so we know what we can strive for.
The look and feel of society powered by the human/AI mind is still the province of science fiction. We can’t even guess whether such a society will be top-down or bottom-up: that is, controlled by technological oligarchs or liberated by technological tools. In a very real sense, it’s up to us, as a nation, to decide.
The questions asked above have received wholly contradictory answers. The United States is the land of the free—no, we are the home of systemic oppression. Our past is the unfolding of the American dream—no, it’s a horror show of violence, exploitation and exclusion. Our economy is a magnificent engine of abundance—no, it’s a world-destroying, species-annihilating consumerist sewer. While believers in the optimistic vision tend to outnumber the gloom-mongers, there’s really no consensus on the fundamental question of what it means to be part of the American story.
Rather than try to reconcile opposites, let’s imagine the consequences for two very different iterations of American society as they reap the whirlwind sowed by the human/AI mind:
The first is a place of grievance and despair, composed of individuals universally alienated from every source of meaning—family, community, religion, nation, history. The result can only be self-loathing and moral paralysis. The pathologies involved include anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, loneliness and random violence. Men are impotent and women are sterile. The future is apprehended as an unstoppable catastrophe. Everyday life is a desolation. The only pure soul in this picture is the victim, whose suffering redeems nothing.
The entry of the human/AI mind into such a society will fill an immense void. It will inspire messianic expectations that can only be fulfilled by a priestly caste of technologists, who will reorganize society on some meaningful principle. Instead of God or Mammon, despairing Americans will come to worship an immortal Mind. Everything will be structured in terms of purposeful activity. The alienation of labor will be turned inside out, as work and worker dissolve into a single algorithmic function. Human existence will be reenchanted but deprived of agency. In this vision of the future, we will be predicated to a transcendental AI Subject.
The second iteration posits a society of adventure. This assumes the continuation in time of a primordial theme of American life: the spirit of the frontier. The guiding impulse will be to “move fast and break things”—to push beyond geographical boundaries, the line of received knowledge, conventional arrangements, established systems. Endless pretexts will be found for competition, exploration, innovation, games of skill and chance, with heroic champions held as the models and envy of the rest. The abiding virtue of this society will also be its most egregious vice: a terrible restlessness—the inability to stand put and wait to see what happens.
The insertion of the human/AI mind will turbocharge this society’s naturally dynamic tendencies. Exploration will push beyond all previous limits, even to the stars, triggering a manic quest to leave ourselves behind. Competition will drive differentiation in every facet of existence, down to the genome level: We will breathe freely in the void of space. Innovation, child of competition, will give “creative destruction” a dangerously literal meaning. Epic art and poetry will coexist with robotic warfare and genocidal technologies. It will be the best and the worst of times, an age of heroes and holocausts—the final fulfillment of human potential, lived on the edge of extinction.
While not pure fiction, neither of these versions of the American future should be mistaken for prophecy. The point of the exercise is to consider, in light of present facts, the vast open spaces ahead of us and the choices we can’t escape. Many of the limitations of what we have confidently called the human condition are likely to fall. The explosive energies released by the computer’s ascent to mind will smash into our social arrangements with the force of an avalanche. We need to ponder what it means to be American under drastically altered conditions. Indeed, we need to ponder what it means to be human. And we need to guess what we wish to shed and what we wish to keep, and in what form, and for how long—because the world is spinning ever faster, and change is already here.

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