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When Is the Trump Tariff Crisis Going to Hit for Real?
The perfect storm of rising prices, falling employment, and disappearing government assistance is on the horizon.
Aug 08, 2025
When an earthquake hits somewhere in the ocean, surrounding countries near and far brace for the big waves that inevitably follow. U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements are just such a tectonic shift in U.S. policy. As with a tsunami, however, the impact varies from place to place and arrives after a certain delay. The better-prepared industries and countries put up their own protective walls. The rest take out their lifejackets and hope for the best.
In advance of the August 1 deadline set by Trump for a minimum 10% tariff imposed worldwide, many countries scrambled to make deals with the United States. The United Kingdom negotiated hard with the Trump administration and managed to negotiate that 10% tariff down to…10%—plus carveouts for exports like steel and beef, some of which didn’t end up in the agreement that Washington announced the following month.
The U.K. deal was a hastily negotiated affair, more of a “concept of a plan,” as Trump once described his imaginary replacement for Obamacare. “Trade deals typically take years to complete—the average negotiation lasts 917 days,” writes Antonia Hitchens in The New Yorker. “The U.K. deal, like others that are still in progress, is more of a basis for continued negotiation than an actual commitment. The terms are vague and unenforceable, reversible, and nonbinding.”
It’s not difficult to imagine that seasoned trade negotiators are squaring off against Trump’s team, which includes the unseasoned and frankly incoherent Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to make deals that contain holes big enough to drive a truck through (all the way to the United States). The early evidence is that Trump’s tariffs are backfiring in many ways, including the one statistic that obsesses the president. America’s trade deficit with the world is only increasing.
Speaking of seasoned and unseasoned negotiators, I used a culinary metaphor six years ago to describe Trump’s use of tariffs in his first term. “Trump uses tariffs like a bad cook uses salt,” I wrote. “It covers up his lack of preparation, the poor quality of his ingredients, the blandness of his imagination. It’s the only spice in his spice rack.”
To extend the metaphor, the president is currently salt-bombing the world with tariffs. This heavy hand with the salt shaker is raising the global economy’s blood pressure. Worse, the United States itself is on the verge of an economic heart attack.
Whichever metaphor you prefer—tsunami or salt-induced heart attack—the question on everyone’s mind is: When is the crisis going to hit for real?
Is He Serious?
Many people have shrugged off Trump’s tariffs as so much hot air. He has made outrageous threats only to subsequently back down, negotiate face-saving deals, or include so many exemptions that the deal is essentially meaningless. That’s the position on Trump’s tariffs taken by Wall Street, where the stock market has recovered from an initial panic attack to rise to record levels.
Consider the administration’s approach to China, the third or fourth largest U.S. trade partner depending on the metric. In early April, Trump decided to apply tariffs of about 145% on Chinese products. The Dow tanked, and U.S. businesses freaked out at the prospect of huge price increases on components and finished products coming from China.
Negotiations with the Chinese followed, during which Trump backpedaled like a prizefighter sustaining a series of body blows. The Chinese economy is doing pretty well, and they have natural resources like rare earth elements that the United States desperately needs. So, when China retaliated with high tariffs of their own and threatened restrictions on rare earth elements, Trump was forced to deal. He reduced U.S. tariffs to 30% (while China reduced its tariffs on U.S. goods to 10%).
Trump can fire statisticians and issue doctored economic reports all he wants. But the Soviet Union—and its collapse—testify to the difficulty of maintaining such fictions.
But here’s the kicker. Trump also approved the sale of sophisticated computer chips—Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are designed for artificial intelligence applications—that previous U.S. administrations had blocked. This kind of compromise has signaled to various economic actors that perhaps Trump is not so serious about his tariffs—or, at least, he can be negotiated with.
Instead of fighting like the Chinese, the European Union accepted a 15% tariff rate. That’s “definitively better than the 30% threatened by Trump,” writes Cecilia Malmström of the Peterson Institute. “But it is still a lot more than the status of trade before Trump’s second term, when the average tariff rate between the European Union and the United States was only a few percentages. Today we face the highest transatlantic tariffs in 70 years.”
Unlike China, though, Europe is struggling to keep the Trump administration on board the effort to defend Ukraine, so this might be considered just another cost of doing business with an erratic president. As a sop to the administration, the E.U. has even postponed its reciprocal measures for six months.
Other countries are still negotiating. Canada saw its tariffs rise from 25% to 35%, though this applies to a minority of goods crossing the border that don’t comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Trump was pissed off at the earlier reciprocal tariffs against U.S. products, which Canada hasn’t yet removed. A “Buy Canada” campaign and a diversification of trade partners point to a longer-term reduction in Canadian dependency on U.S. markets and suppliers.
India, already looking at 25% tariffs, is now facing a doubling of that rate because it has continued to purchase cheap Russian fossil fuel exports. Although the Indian energy sector is already diversifying its purchases, the Indian government has refused to knuckle under to Trump’s demands. Brazil, too, has refused to stop its investigations into its former leader, coupster and Trump fan Jair Bolsonaro, so it’s facing a politically motivated 50% tariff from the United States. Taiwan is hoping to reduce its 20% tariff rate, probably by stressing U.S. dependency on the country’s semiconductor industry. Myanmar and Laos, both facing 40% tariffs, are going to have a much harder time making a deal.
The negotiations with China, the deals with the U.K. and E.U., and the recent 90-day moratorium extended to Mexico have all contributed to this sense that Trump Always Chickens Out. It’s not an accurate description. Trump doesn’t have a strong ideological position that he then abandons. He’s just spitballing, like someone trying out random answers to a question he doesn’t doesn’t understand.
Why Hasn’t the Pain Hit Yet?
U.S. businesses are also hoping that Trump will eventually retract his tariffs. Although markets fluctuate with the same kind of volatility that characterizes Trump’s temperament, manufacturers don’t appreciate such unpredictability. They’ve responded by employing interim hedging measures that have so far not passed on the costs to consumers. One popular tactic has been to stockpile. Reports CNN:
Best Buy rushed electronics from Asia. American Fireworks Company in Hudson, Ohio, stocked up on fireworks for the Fourth of July, almost all of which are made in China. Pet-gear seller Barton O’Brien from Kent Island, Md., borrowed money to get as many harnesses, collars and other supplies from China as he could store.
But the smaller businesses that rushed to buy supplies before April 1 are going to run out of inventory soon. And that will mean sticker shock across the board.
Some larger companies have decided, in the short term, to eat the losses. So, for instance, it doesn’t really cost more to buy a car right now—even though it should. In the first three months after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, General Motors lost over a billion dollars, Volkswagen about $1.5 billion, and Stellantis (owner of Chrysler) around $1.7 billion. But these automakers have not yet passed on these costs to the consumer. It’s an indicator of just how much these corporations are making in profits—General Motors raked in about $24 billion in 2024—that they can absorb such losses. It won’t last. They’ll likely increase prices alongside other price increases nationwide and then hit the consumer with price hikes when the next models come to market.
Consumers, meanwhile, have adopted the tactic of hoarding: consumer electronics, auto parts, building materials, clothing. Even members of the Trump administration have been stocking up on bulk toilet paper in anticipation of price hikes. But pantries can hold just so many bags of Brazilian coffee beans. And worse is to come.
A Perfect Storm?
Trump imagines, perhaps, that the pain associated with his tariffs will disappear in time for the midterm elections. At that point, he can have his own “Mission Accomplished” moment by standing atop a Ford car that contains only American-built components.
It’s not going to happen.
For one thing, the United States can’t possibly establish an entirely domestic supply chain in a couple years, if ever. Some things just don’t grow in this country (bananas), can’t be found here (manganese), or is unlikely to be produced here by American workers (cheap clothes). The other challenge for the Trump administration is the inevitable price hike that accompanies the tariffs and the inflationary spiral that will take place when other countries begin to impose reciprocal tariffs.
Domestically, in the face of a perfect storm of economic discontent, Trump will probably borrow a technique from Elon Musk: buying off the electorate.
But that’s not all. These price increases are going to hurt just about when Trump’s cuts in government services begin to bite. He has authorized over a trillion dollars in cuts in federal healthcare and food assistance over the next decade. Most of those cuts will start after the midterms in December 2026,. But changes in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act will start in January 2026. And hospitals and clinics, anticipating Medicare and Medicaid cuts, will start making their own cuts before the feds turn off the taps.
Then there’s the surge in unemployment. The rate ticked up in July from 4.1-4.2%. Even that modest rise was enough to move Trump to sack the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics whom he accused of tampering with the data to make him look bad.
Trump has promised a whole new era of job growth as corporations home-shore production and new factories spring up to produce the parts that tariffs have made precipitously expensive to import. But that’s not happening. Consumers, after this brief period of hoarding, are increasingly reluctant to spend. Construction and manufacturing are down. The economy is, according to a number of economists, on the verge of recession, and that means a steep increase in unemployment.
Trump can fire statisticians and issue doctored economic reports all he wants. But the Soviet Union—and its collapse—testify to the difficulty of maintaining such fictions. The perfect storm of rising prices, falling employment, and disappearing government assistance is on the horizon. How will Trump respond?
Higher Walls?
As with Ukraine, Trump might reverse himself and scale back his tariffs. But tariffs and lawsuits are so much part of his identity that it’s hard to imagine him abandoning the strategy any more than he’ll listen to doctors and stop eating Big Macs.
It’s more likely that, in the face of resistance and failure, he’ll double down, as he has done so often in his career. So, expect higher tariffs in the future against both allies and adversaries until he gets what he wants, which is capitulation. That strategy might work with small countries like Colombia, but it doesn’t stand a chance with Russia, China, or Brazil.
Domestically, in the face of a perfect storm of economic discontent, Trump will probably borrow a technique from Elon Musk: buying off the electorate. He has already introduced his $1,000 “Trump accounts” for babies born in the United States. Republicans want to send out a rebate check of $600 per adult and child, everyone’s share of the “savings” from the tariffs. This is an updated version of the Department of Government Efficiency check that failed to materialize when the savings from Musk’s cuts turned out to be modest (to the say the least) and Musk left the administration under a cloud.
This outlay of approximately $250 billion—in addition to gerrymandering in Texas, Ohio, and Missouri—may well buy the midterm elections for the Republicans, despite all the discontent bubbling up even in red districts. According to this scenario, Trump will reserve his trump card of martial law for 2028 when not even government handouts and partisan chicanery can compensate for the economic catastrophe that his administration will have triggered for ordinary Americans.
Maybe I’m wrong, and the United States will be lucky. The recent earthquake off the coast of Russia was projected to send huge tidal waves in the direction of Hawaii. That didn’t happen.
Trump might turn out to be a similar seismic event: all sound and fury but no tsunami. That was largely the case during his first term when his worst instincts were thwarted by people within his administration, by Congress, and by the courts. These obstacles have now been reduced to speed bumps.
So, unfortunately, I’m putting my money on the tsunami.
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'We're Fast Stumbling Into Stagflation,' Expert Warns as Unemployment Rolls Hit 4-Year High Under Trump
"In contrast with the president's assertion of bustling job creation," said The Century Foundation's Andrew Stettner, "Americans can't get off of unemployment benefits in an economy that has stopped adding jobs outside of healthcare."
Aug 07, 2025
The flow of abysmal U.S. economic data continued Thursday with the release of figures showing that the number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits has reached its highest level in nearly four years, heightening concerns that the Trump administration is pushing the country toward a period of "stagflation."
"Today's unemployment report, coupled with last week's jobs data, suggests that we're fast stumbling into stagflation, with fledgling jobs growth and rising prices," Andrew Stettner, unemployment insurance expert at The Century Foundation, said in a statement following the new Labor Department numbers.
The department said that 1.97 million Americans were receiving unemployment benefits during the week ending July 26, an increase of 38,000 compared to the previous week.
"In contrast with the president's assertion of bustling job creation," said Stettner, "Americans can't get off of unemployment benefits in an economy that has stopped adding jobs outside of healthcare."
The government figures were released a day after private data showed that employment in the U.S. services sector fell last month as prices rose. Meanwhile, U.S. manufacturing activity contracted in July at the fastest pace in nine months, even as President Donald Trump claimed his erratic tariff regime would revive the sector.
"Private data confirms the government numbers, and firing the head of BLS can't change that," said Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), referring to Trump's decision to terminate Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in the wake of last week's terrible U.S. jobs report—calling into question the reliability of future federal data.
"Republicans are killing jobs and feeding inflation," Moore added. "Trump is making stagflation great again."
"Trump's economy of uncertainty is leading to widespread anxiety, with more than 3 in 4 Americans saying they are concerned about a possible recession."
The recent data—combined with surveys showing American consumers are increasingly struggling with the rising prices of groceries and other necessities—appears to vindicate warnings from economists and other analysts that the U.S. economy is in growing trouble under Trump's erratic stewardship.
"The risk of stagflation has risen meaningfully," Olu Sonola, an economist at Fitch Ratings, wrote in a client note. "Inflation is drifting further from target, private sector economic growth has slowed materially, and the labor market has just sounded a warning bell."
Rachel West and Laura Valle Gutierrez of The Century Foundation wrote earlier this week that "Trump's economy of uncertainty is leading to widespread anxiety, with more than 3 in 4 Americans saying they are concerned about a possible recession."
"And Trump's budget law, which slashes healthcare and food assistance for everyday Americans to pay for more than $4 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, compounds Americans' uncertainty and fear about what the future brings," they added.
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AI Utopia, AI Apocalypse, and AI Reality
If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.
Jul 06, 2025
Recent articles and books about artificial intelligence offer images of the future that align like iron filings around two magnetic poles—utopia and apocalypse.
On one hand, AI is said to be leading us toward a perfect future of ease, health, and broadened understanding. We, aided by our machines and their large language models (LLMs), will know virtually everything and make all the right choices to usher in a permanent era of enlightenment and plenty. On the other hand, AI is poised to thrust us into a future of unemployment, environmental destruction, and delusion. Our machines will gobble scarce resources while churning out disinformation and making deadly weapons that AI agents will use to wipe us out once we’re of no further use to them.
Utopia and apocalypse have long exerted powerful pulls on human imagination and behavior. (My first book, published in 1989 and updated in 1995, was Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age; it examined the history and meaning of the utopian archetype.) New technologies tend to energize these two polar attractors in our collective psyche because toolmaking and language are humanity’s two superpowers, which have enabled our species to take over the world, while also bringing us to a point of existential peril. New technologies increase some people’s power over nature and other people, producing benefits that, mentally extrapolated forward in time, encourage expectations of a grand future. But new technologies also come with costs (resource depletion, pollution, increased economic inequality, accidents, and misuse) that evoke fears of an ultimate reckoning. Language supercharges our toolmaking talent by enabling us to learn from others; it is also the vehicle for formulating and expressing our hopes and fears. AI, because it is both technological and linguistic, and because it is being adopted at a frantic pace and so disruptively, is especially prone to triggering the utopia-apocalypse reflex.
Messages about both the promise and the peril of AI are often crafted by powerful people seeking to consolidate their control over the AI industry.
We humans have been ambivalent about technology at least since our adoption of writing. Tools enable us to steal fire from the gods, like the mythical Prometheus, whom the gods punished with eternal torment; they are the wings of Icarus, who flies too close to the sun and falls to his death. AI promises to make technology autonomously intelligent, thus calling to mind still another cautionary tale, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
What could go right—or wrong? After summarizing both the utopian and apocalyptic visions for AI, I’ll explore two questions: first, how do these extreme visions help or mislead us in our attempts to understand AI? And second, whom do these visions serve? As we’ll see, there are some early hints of AI’s ultimate limits, which suggest a future that doesn’t align well with many of the highest hopes or deepest fears for the new technology.
AI Utopia
As a writer, I generally don’t deliberately use AI. Nevertheless, in researching this article, I couldn’t resist asking Google’s free AI Overview, “What is the utopian vision for AI?” This came back a fraction of a second later:
The utopian vision for AI envisions a future where AI seamlessly integrates into human life, boosting productivity, innovation, and overall well-being. It’s a world where AI solves complex problems like climate change and disease, and helps humanity achieve new heights.
Google Overview’s first sentence needs editing to remove verbal redundancy (vision, envisions), but AI does succeed in cobbling together a serviceable summary of its promoters’ dreams.
The same message is on display in longer form in the article “Visions of AI Utopia” by Future Sight Echo, who informs us that AI will soften the impacts of economic inequality by delivering resources more efficiently and “in a way that is dynamic and able to adapt instantly to new information and circumstances.” Increased efficiency will also reduce humanity’s impact on the environment by minimizing energy requirements and waste of all kinds.
But that’s only the start. Education, creativity, health and longevity, translation and cultural understanding, companionship and care, governance and legal representation—all will be revolutionized by AI.
There is abundant evidence that people with money share these hopes for AI. The hottest stocks on Wall Street (notably Nvidia) are AI-related, as are many of the corporations that contribute significantly to the NPR station I listen to in Northern California, thereby gaining naming rights at the top of the hour.
Capital is being shoveled in the general direction of AI so rapidly (roughly $300 billion just this year, in the U.S. alone) that, if its advertised potential is even half believable, we should all rest assured that most human problems will soon vanish.
Or will they?
AI Apocalypse
Strangely, when I initially asked Google’s AI, “What is the vision for AI apocalypse?”, its response was, “An AI Overview is not available for this search.” Maybe I didn’t word my question well. Or perhaps AI sensed my hostility. Full disclosure: I’ve gone on record calling for AI to be banned immediately. (Later, AI Overview was more cooperative, offering a lengthy summary of “common themes in the vision of an AI apocalypse.”) My reason for proposing an AI ban is that AI gives us humans more power, via language and technology, than we already have; and that, collectively, we already have way too much power vis-à-vis the rest of nature. We’re overwhelming ecosystems through resource extraction and waste dumping to such a degree that, if current trends continue, wild nature may disappear by the end of the century. Further, the most powerful humans are increasingly overwhelming everyone else, both economically and militarily. Exerting our power more intelligently probably won’t help, because we’re already too smart for our own good. The last thing we should be doing is to cut language off from biology so that it can exist entirely in a simulated techno-universe.
Let’s be specific. What, exactly, could go wrong because of AI? For starters, AI could make some already bad things worse—in both nature and society.
Just as there are limits to fossil-fueled utopia, nuclear utopia, and perpetual-growth capitalist utopia, there are limits to AI utopia. By the same token, limits may prevent AI from becoming an all-powerful grim reaper.
There are many ways in which humanity is already destabilizing planetary environmental systems; climate change is the way that’s most often discussed. Through its massive energy demand, AI could accelerate climate change by generating more carbon emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, “Driven by AI use, the U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement, and chemicals.” The world also faces worsening water shortages; AI needs vast amounts. Nature is already reeling from humanity’s accelerating rates of resource extraction and depletion. AI requires millions of tons of copper, steel, cement, and other raw materials, and suppliers are targeting Indigenous lands for new mines.
We already have plenty of social problems, too, headlined by worsening economic inequality. AI could widen the divide between rich and poor by replacing lower-skilled workers with machines while greatly increasing the wealth of those who control the technology. Many people worry that corporations have gained too much political influence; AI could accelerate this trend by making the gathering and processing of massive amounts of data on literally everyone cheaper and easier, and by facilitating the consolidation of monopolies. Unemployment is always a problem in capitalist societies, but AI threatens quickly to throw millions of white-collar workers off payrolls: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, while Bill Gates forecasts that only three job fields will survive AI—energy, biology, and AI system programming.
However, the most horrific visions for AI go beyond just making bad things worse. The title of a recent episode of The Bulwark Podcast, “Will Sam Altman and His AI Kill Us All?”, states the worst-case scenario bluntly. But how, exactly, could AI kill us all? One way is by automating military decisions while making weapons cheaper and more lethal (a recent Brookings commentary was titled, “How Unchecked AI Could Trigger a Nuclear War”). Veering toward dystopian sci-fi, some AI philosophers opine that the technology, once it’s significantly smarter than people, might come to view biological humans as pointless wasters of resources that machines could use more efficiently. At that point, AI could pursue multiple pathways to terminate humanity.
AI Reality
I don’t know the details of how AI will unfold in the months and years to come. But the same could be said for AI industry leaders. They certainly understand the technology better than I do, but their AI forecasts may miss a crucial factor. You see, I’ve trained myself over the years to look for limits in resources, energy, materials, and social systems. Most people who work in the fields of finance and technology tend to ignore limits, or even to believe that there are none. This leads them to absurdities, such as Elon Musk’s expectation of colonizing Mars. Earth is finite, humans will be confined to this planet forever, and therefore lots of things we can imagine doing just won’t happen. I would argue that discussions about AI’s promise and peril need a dose of limits awareness.
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, in an essay titled “AI Is Normal Technology,” offer some of that awareness. They argue that AI development will be constrained by the speed of human organizational and institutional change and by “hard limits to the speed of knowledge acquisition because of the social costs of experimentation.” However, the authors do not take the position that, because of these limits, AI will have only minor impacts on society; they see it as an amplifier of systemic risks.
In addition to the social limits Narayanan and Kapoor discuss, there will also (as mentioned above) be environmental limits to the energy, water, and materials that AI needs, a subject explored at a recent conference.
AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now.
Finally, there’s a crucial limit to AI development that’s inherent in the technology itself. Large language models need vast amounts of high-quality data. However, as more information workers are replaced by AI, or start using AI to help generate content (both trends are accelerating), more of the data available to AI will be AI-generated rather than being produced by experienced researchers who are constantly checking it against the real world. Which means AI could become trapped in a cycle of declining information quality. Tech insiders call this “AI model collapse,” and there’s no realistic plan to stop it. AI itself can’t help.
In his article “Some Signs of AI Model Collapse Begin to Reveal Themselves,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that this is already happening. There have been widely reported instances of AI inadvertently generating fake scientific research documents. The Chicago Sun-Times recently published a “Best of Summer” feature that included forthcoming novels that don’t exist. And the Trump administration’s widely heralded “Make America Healthy Again” report included citations (evidently AI-generated) for non-existent studies. Most of us have come to expect that new technologies will have bugs that engineers will gradually remove or work around, resulting in improved performance. With AI, errors and hallucination problems may just get worse, in a cascading crescendo.
Just as there are limits to fossil-fueled utopia, nuclear utopia, and perpetual-growth capitalist utopia, there are limits to AI utopia. By the same token, limits may prevent AI from becoming an all-powerful grim reaper.
What will be the real future of AI? Here’s a broad-brush prediction (details are currently unavailable due to my failure to upgrade my crystal ball’s operating system). Over the next few years, corporations and governments will continue quickly to invest in AI, driven by its ability to cut labor costs. We will become systemically dependent on the technology. AI will reshape society—employment, daily life, knowledge production, education, and wealth distribution. Then, speeding up as it goes, AI will degenerate into a hallucinating, blithering cacophony of little voices spewing nonsense. Real companies, institutions, and households will suffer as a result. Then, we’ll either figure out how to live without AI, or confine it to relatively limited tasks and data sets. America got a small foretaste of this future recently, when Musk-led DOGE fired tens of thousands of federal workers with the expectation of replacing many of them with AI—without knowing whether AI could do their jobs (oops: Thousands are being rehired).
A messy neither-this-nor-that future is not what you’d expect if you spend time reading documents like “AI 2027,” five industry insiders’ detailed speculative narrative of the imminent AI future, which allows readers to choose the story’s ending. Option A, “slowdown,” leads to a future in which AI is merely an obedient, super-competent helper; while in option B, “race,” humanity is extinguished by an AI-deployed bioweapon because people take up land that could be better used for more data centers. Again, we see the persistent, binary utopia-or-apocalypse stereotype, here presented with impressive (though misleading) specificity.
At the start of this article, I attributed AI utopia-apocalypse discourse to a deep-seated tic in our collective human unconscious. But there’s probably more going on here. In her recent book Empire of AI, tech journalist Karen Hao traces polarized AI visions back to the founding of OpenAI by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Both were, by turns, dreamers and doomers. Their consistent message: We (i.e., Altman, Musk, and their peers) are the only ones who can be trusted to shepherd the process of AI development, including its regulation, because we’re the only ones who understand the technology. Hao makes the point that messages about both the promise and the peril of AI are often crafted by powerful people seeking to consolidate their control over the AI industry.
Utopia and apocalypse feature prominently in the rhetoric of all cults. It’s no surprise, but still a bit of a revelation, therefore, to hear Hao conclude in a podcast interview that AI is a cult (if it walks, quacks, and swims like a cult... ). And we are all being swept up in it.
So, how should we think about AI in a non-cultish way? In his article, “We Need to Stop Pretending AI Is Intelligent,” Guillaume Thierry, a professor of cognitive neuroscience, writes, “We must stop giving AI human traits.” Machines, even apparently smart ones, are not humans—full stop. Treating them as if they are human will bring dehumanizing results for real, flesh-and-blood people.
The collapse of civilization won’t be AI generated. That’s because environmental-social decline was already happening without any help from LLMs. AI is merely adding a novel factor in humanity’s larger reckoning with limits. In the short run, the technology will further concentrate wealth. “Like empires of old,” writes Karen Hao, “the new empires of AI are amassing extraordinary riches across space and time at great expense to everyone else.” In the longer run, AI will deplete scarce resources faster.
If AI is unlikely to be the bringer of destruction, it’s just as unlikely to deliver heaven on Earth. Just last week I heard from a writer friend who used AI to improve her book proposal. The next day, I went to my doctor for a checkup, and he used AI to survey my vital signs and symptoms; I may experience better health maintenance as a result. That same day, I read a just-published Apple research paper that concludes LLMs cannot reason reliably. Clearly, AI can offer tangible benefits within some fields of human pursuit. But we are fooling ourselves if we assume that AI can do our thinking for us. If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.
I’m not currently in the job market and therefore can afford to sit on the sidelines and cast judgment on AI. For many others, economic survival depends on adopting the new technology. Finding a personal modus vivendi with new tools that may have dangerous and destructive side effects on society is somewhat analogous to charting a sane and survivable daily path in a nation succumbing to authoritarian rule. We all want to avoid complicity in awful outcomes, while no one wants to be targeted or denied opportunity. Rhetorically connecting AI with dictatorial power makes sense: One of the most likely uses of the new technology will be for mass surveillance.
Maybe the best advice for people concerned about AI would be analogous to advice that democracy advocates are giving to people worried about the destruction of the social-governmental scaffolding that has long supported Americans’ freedoms and rights: Identify your circles of concern, influence, and control; scrutinize your sources of information and tangibly support those with the most accuracy and courage, and the least bias; and forge communitarian bonds with real people.
AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now. Human greed and desire for greater control over nature and other people may lead toward paths of short-term gain. But, if you want a good life when all’s said and done, learn to live well within limits. Live with honesty, modesty, and generosity. AI can’t help you with that.
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