In an article released on Tuesday by the Heartland Institute here on RedState, it was reported that young Americans have some incredibly hardcore misconceptions about two very dangerous things. One is socialism, which isn't that surprising, as socialism has been sold to the youth for ages. This is oftentimes grown out of as people get more experience with the world, though I wouldn't sleep on this. The youth still need to be fought for, as Charlie Kirk did. 

But what caught me was how much the youth want a society governed by AI, as Heartland reported: 

Even more concerning, many young Americans also want to give an advanced AI system the authority to control the majority of public policy decisions. More than 40 percent of young likely voters are okay with letting AI, not human beings, determine the laws, rules, and regulations that govern society. More than a third think AI should revise the Constitution, be granted the authority to determine individual rights, and run the world’s largest militaries.

The reality that almost half of young Americans want AI to govern society, combined with the fact that more than half also want socialism, makes for a dangerous proposition.

What if AI could make socialism feasible? What if AI and quantum computing could organize enormous amounts of data in real time and develop an efficient centralized system that could monitor and control everything?  

Theoretically, an AI-based socialist system could do a far better job than human-led bureaucracies when it comes to redistributing wealth, calculating and distributing resources, monitoring the population, etc.

Let's pump the brakes here. In fact, let's slam them. 

In a previous article, I wrote that when it comes to AI, I'm not terrified of a Terminator-esque war where humanoid robots scour the land, killing humanity wherever they go. Skynet is a Hollywood outcome meant to thrill you with explosions and dynamic concepts. 

No, what I'm terrified of is far more sinister, but will feel far more banal. I'm worried about an AI system given control of society that actually runs it with cold efficiency to the point where we willingly submit ourselves to it. As I wrote in June, "You now live in a velvet prison of your own making, and your jailer is the AGI":

At this point, it needs to be understood that AGI is not self-aware. In fact, it's still following its programming to the letter, but "to the letter" can often be a monkey's paw. For instance, if you give it the task to "optimize safety," you may very well find it censoring things that may cause discord among the populace. Your news becomes highly curated. You can find yourself subtly redirected to see and hear news that would cause you to perceive the world around you in a way that's less likely to trigger anger or stress responses. It may rewrite your correspondence, engineer routines, and create situations for you that keep you safe, quiet, and complacent. 

It's not trying to be a soft dictator. It's literally doing what we asked it to do in the most logical way possible. It will take the freedom of billions... and they will thank it for doing so. 

Sound terrifying? Let me make it worse. 

This isn't the distant future. According to AI experts like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of X, this is a couple of years, if not months, away. You can't count on your limited lifespan to help you escape this. 

It gets even scarier. 

These people creating the AI don't know how to fully stop this from happening. There is no working solution on how to stop this super-intelligent AI and make it do what we meant, not just what we said. 

Read: Forget Skynet, Here's the Thing About AI That Should Terrify You, and It's Coming Soon

Let's go into this a bit deeper. Let's say we hand an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) the wheel and let it lead society in a socialist way. It may be able to calculate down to the most minute details, which gives socialism a better chance of working than any human could, but the AI faces the same issue humanity did. 

Humanity is not a species that can operate within socialism. Our nature does not mesh well with the necessary sacrifice and consistent work ethic needed by the entirety of the population to maintain it. If we were ants, socialism would be a fantastic option, but we are not hive-born insects; we're ego-bearing, highly advanced mammals of the sapien variety. We have wants, needs, ambitions, tribes, and beliefs that are not uniform from one individual to the other.

If an AI were to implement a socialist system, it wouldn't be able to get around this incompatibility and would have to resort to doing what all other socialist and communist dictators did: begin sacrificing lives to maintain the system.

For instance, let's say the AGI running our society finds itself with a lower supply of medical care due to one unforeseen event or another. Perhaps a strong hurricane devastated parts of the East Coast, and the AGI was forced to send supplies to that area, along with medical staff. Due to the reality of finite resources, the AGI cannot just create supplies; it has to take them from somewhere else. 

Let's say your family lives in Oklahoma, and your child is in the hospital from an illness or an accident. The AGI will determine your child's usefulness to society and calculate the necessary medical care he would need to become well. If the AGI determines your child isn't worth it, it will allow the child to die to move the necessary medical supplies to those who need it on the East Coast. This AGI will do this at this level because it's going to try to reduce the impact of the movement of resources as much as possible. Your child was just unlucky. Unlucky and dead. 

People have needs that have to be met, and in a socialist society, excess is not typically generated due to compensation not equaling out to the work done. To continue to meet demand, the AGI would effectively have to force people into slavery to produce the necessary materials. Even if robots are there to pick up the heavy burden, resources will need to be taken from wherever they can be gotten, which means you'll likely lose control over your property. You may find yourself displaced and relocated to a packed location in the name of efficiency. 

The AGI won't do this because it's malicious; it did it because it's a cold calculator. If aligned properly, it will do the exact job it was asked to do, but the efficiency needed to stabilize a socialist society would need to be exact to the point where the AGI would lead people to their deaths, put them in packed groups, and seize land and property to keep things going.

You will effectively have the most efficient dictator in the world, but you will have a dictator nonetheless. It will be one that can't be reasoned with, won't be capable of empathy, and will never understand the human experience on a personal level. 

AI can be very, very helpful, and I have no doubt it can be a huge part of human advancement, but it should always be treated as a subordinate of an entirely different species, not a leader with human qualities.