And to think I started out to prove the opposite
TL/DR Synopsis:
- America has produced the most good for the most people in history
- AI is doing a disappointing job of analyzing history
- The future is a bit cloudy…
Here’s my premise, and I defy anyone to prove me wrong. Yeah, with facts. Prove me wrong with cold, hard FACTS, not the sniveling feel-good crocodile tears of the leftist establishment. America IS the absolute greatest experiment in human governance in the history of mankind. America’s original Founding Documents were unrivaled in their protection of the individual and their control of a rapacious State. Over a century ago, leftists managed to dilute the best of those Documents, and it’s been a downhill slide ever since.
I graduated from high school in 1960, and I’ll stack my economics, history, and civics classes up against some graduate-level courses today. Looking back, I firmly believe that our education system peaked around the time I graduated. We learned facts, writings, opinions, and, most importantly, we learned how to think! (We never got class credit for attending demonstrations, but of course, nobody bothered to demonstrate in the 50s anyway.)
Well, you rightly ask, what the heck does all that have to do with Artificial Intelligence? Right here at GraniteGrok, I have had a few columns published where I had Breakfast With Claude, and we discussed interesting, newsworthy AI topics over coffee. Just me and AI. Over the course of those columns and in preparing a recent AI Intro Seminar, I developed a degree of respect for the logical nature of Artificial Intelligence, with over two years of probing use to back up my conclusions. Sure, I had been disappointed by Grok’s answers to my COVID questions, but my questions did not call for any logical analysis; merely a report, which was decidedly out of left field.
Overall, AI seemed able to logically conclude that 5 is greater than 4, if you know what I mean. Given that AI can seemingly analyze data and reach logical conclusions, I decided to build a series of questions, in the Socratic form, to ask major AI sites to conclude what forms of governance had led to the greatest human progress, and which form it would prefer to live under. Hell, if I, as a mere human, can quickly list several of the most common forms off the top of my head and quickly posit the pros and cons of each, why couldn’t AI? In fact, in one of those Breakfast With Claude columns, Claude gave a very articulate reply when I asked him under which form of governance he’d prefer to live.
I honestly expected that my simple, logical question series would produce clear indications that humans did better under a constitutional republic, and it sort of did, but with much more equivocation than I anticipated. I went into the project with the firm expectation of later writing a great Breakfast With Claude column, which showed how AI agreed with my assessment and reached it through logical analysis of history and human progress. That column will not be written.
Rather, this gloomy assessment has emerged. When we consider the very real decline in basic reading skills, and lowered student interest in reading at all, the leftward tilt at all education levels, and in all disciplines, the replacement of skill improvement with cultural indoctrination, the reliance on social media instead of primary sources, all capped off with AI as the cherry on top, what do we have? We have a dumbed-down younger cohort voting for candidates who would have been literally laughed off the podium at any Democrat Party Convention in the 1950s, had they managed to get to the podium in the first place! Wouldn’t have happened, even at a Democrat wingding. The younger folks today seem to be joined, amazingly, by older supporters. This coalition of useful idiots is working overtime to take America Leftward Ho!
But when any skeptics ask AI about how risky this path is, I’m not sure if the answer will yield anything but talk about the relative advantages of various systems. We’re now pretty much at the end of what Gramsci called the long march through the institutions. Many of us saw it moving along but didn’t do enough to even slow it. Some people were ostracized for correctly seeing what was happening, but they have been so tarred & feathered by “history” that I can’t even write their names without casting doubt on this historically accurate column.
At the end of the day, I am still very concerned for the future of America, and I do fear that Artificial Intelligence may well be the last nail in Uncle Sam’s coffin, but I got a glimmer of hope when I prompted AI to generate a graphic to accompany this column. My verbatim prompt was simple and reflected my frustration with how I perceived AI to be failing to give America the credit her system deserved. Here’s my prompt: “Artificial Intelligence has problems articulating how great American exceptionalism really is” so now take another look at the graphic accompanying this column. Perhaps I’m wrong about AI. I certainly hope so! Happy 250th, America!
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