Elon Musk's A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency

[Uncle Joe]

Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.

Not long ago, the American public could have been forgiven for thinking of Elon Musk’s vaunted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a version of a familiar Republican cost-cutting, government-shrinking project. The man who took over Twitter, now X, and slashed its staff by around eighty per cent would take a similarly aggressive tack against bureaucratic inefficiency, reining in budgets and laying off federal employees. In the past couple of weeks, though, it’s become clear that Musk’s aim within the Trump Administration goes further: he wants not only to reduce the U.S. government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart.

To run his agency, Musk brought on a group of tech-company managers and inexperienced twentysomethings whose credentials included internships at SpaceX. We watched as this crew began interrogating federal employees about their jobs, interfering with the system that controls payments at the Treasury Department, and trawling government budgets while Musk used X to call out the agencies and programs in his crosshairs. The team was aided in this demolition job by a suite of tools from the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an “A.I.-first strategy,” which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts. DOGE is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

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A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk’s program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk’s special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them. With DOGE, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.

Some policy-related decisions in our daily lives are already made with the help of artificial intelligence. A 2020 government-commissioned report identified the use of A.I. tools in departments including the S.E.C. and the Social Security Administration; OpenAI already runs ChatGPT Gov, a self-hosted version of its chatbot that’s designed for secure government use. But the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself. Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees. One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning. Americans got a taste of the technology’s shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google’s Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption. Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.’s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused “career Treasury officials” of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress. His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X’s A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly disputed the claim.)

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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/elon-musks-ai-fuelled-war-on-human-agency