Artificial intelligence is a buzzword these days, captivating America’s imagination but also stirring fears.

At the heart of our AI fascination lies this dilemma: Is AI a force for good, is it neutral, or is it evil? And how will AI impact our democracy?

First, it must be acknowledged that there are indeed substantial benefits associated with AI. Speaking purely from my own professional experience, AI is, and will continue to be, a useful tool in the service of the U.S. intelligence community. With human oversight, AI will get after problems and make connections that intelligence professionals can’t make alone—and do it in less time. AI could save taxpayer dollars and, more importantly, could save lives. I imagine that this holds true for other industries as well and that AI will offer many benefits in the industrial, technological, and commercial spheres.

But AI isn’t all benefits and no drawbacks, and as it turns out, the cost may be quite steep. In trying to understand the potential detriments of AI, consider the internet, which spawned social media and made it easy to access pornography, as well as other technologies of the Information Age, all of which have had a fairly negative effect on the health of the Republic.

More specifically, social media has proved a powerful weapon of politicization in recent years, often by censoring views that do not align with those of Big Tech. Speaking up about COVID-19 vaccine malpractice, for instance, will garner Facebook or Instagram suspension, and the release of the Twitter Files has revealed another prime example of ideological tyranny.

As the founders of our nation so eloquently stressed, free speech and sincere disagreement are necessary to sift out the truth and hence to arrive at good policy. Without free speech, the democracy that we exercise in a democratic republic almost certainly slides into either anarchy or tyranny.

In addition to providing obstacles to free speech through censorship, the internet has also weakened American society—and subsequently democracy—by lessening the caliber of her citizens. Social media and screen addiction have eroded the mental health of an entire generation of Americans (and that’s not even touching on the easy access to pornography, which has poisoned particularly our men).

Artificial intelligence, unfortunately, harbors plenty of this same potential for harm and lends itself toward politicization of a more insidious kind. Imagine if we get comfortable entrusting our professional and creative enterprises to a smart computing system that replicates human cognitive function, except better—and then imagine that this system has a certain political bias.

For example, if you ask ChatGPT to define woman, the answer—which includes a lengthy section on gender identity—is likely to cause conservatives to shake their heads.

Now imagine that we entrust our very thoughts to such an entity—which is not an exaggeration if AI such as Chat GPT continues to be used for brainstorming, writing, list-making, and other everyday tasks. What might be the consequences if most people begin to rely on a politically biased AI for daily intellectual tasks?

But that’s not to say that we can’t recover from such a situation. The achievements of the Information Age—access to the internet, social media, and handheld devices, to name a few—have highlighted important lessons about our humanity, as well as impressed upon us the importance of preserving free speech in the digital realm.

For instance, more and more parents are opting for screen-minimal childhoods for their kids. It’s also not uncommon these days to see adults themselves take a social media retreat or hiatus. The COVID-19 pandemic proved a catalyst in demonstrating the emptiness and limitation of virtual interaction.

We might also confront the importance of free speech and learn to appreciate liberty anew in the virtual realm as we battle over whether and to what extent Big Tech has the right to censor dissenters on social media platforms.

Despite facing censorship, online platforms (like Intellectual Takeout) continue to publish stories and draw attention to COVID-19 malpractice and other “forbidden” topics. The transformation of Twitter into X has resurfaced the debate over free speech and what constitutes censorship in the social media domain.

It suffices to say that we have faced and will continue to face technological advancements. And, while new technologies have threatened genuine human connection and restricted freedom of expression, they have also spurred Americans to lay boundaries in order to establish a healthier relationship with such technologies. They have driven home the uniqueness of real human contact, and they continue to impress upon us that freedom of speech cannot be taken for granted and must be actively protected, especially when it comes to new communication mediums.

Likewise, if AI does become increasingly politicized, I believe we will see a democratizing of AI models. We will eventually appreciate those ideas that undermine the bias inherent to mainstream AI applications, finding renewed appreciation for intellectual freedom, the diversity of human thought, and the brilliance of human artistry. AI ideological tyranny will spur a market need, and I am hopeful that there will be a liberalizing of AI models so that people will have a choice between what AI algorithms they use to ensure that there are marketplace checks and balances on AI.

As AI becomes more widespread and more ingrained in American life, we will learn (or relearn) a whole host of things about human nature. The human psyche is more than the sum of its cognitive functions and physiological predispositions, and I suspect that we will eventually come to prefer our limited human intellect over AI when it comes to specific industries and endeavors.

I imagine, for example, that we will prefer human medical oversight in health care, human moral sensitivity when it comes to potentially life or death decisions, and human authors and creators, even if AI is capable of making and executing such functions.

Just as we learned that social media prestige is empty and virtual interactions are dull by comparison to those with flesh and blood, I suspect that we will learn that artificial intelligence is just that—artificial—and we will cherish anew raw human intellect, with all its virtues and flaws.

So perhaps the greatest lesson from AI won’t be political at all but rather a lesson in our own humanity.

Whether it becomes politically weaponized or not, we will ultimately have to square the use of AI with human well-being and, in so doing, come back to its relationship with the human soul, just as we have done, albeit clumsily, throughout the decades of human invention and industrialization. We will find that we are not beings reducible to mere scientifically defined biological processes.

Our ability to understand our humanity, with its inherent need for relationship and purpose, will dictate how well society wields the latest technological marvel. It will also illuminate the health of our democracy, which depends entirely on the caliber of its citizens.

John Adams put it this way: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

If we lose our democracy, it will be because we have lost our religious and moral character and therefore our ability to govern ourselves and our use of AI, not because AI or the next technological advancement has taken over.

My hope is that if we must burn ourselves flying too close to the sun in pursuit of the latest algorithm, then we will at least come crawling back reminded that the health of our democratic society, and indeed our humanity, rests in our ability to establish human connections and freely live out a greater life purpose based on a religious faith and morality.

Only then, when we cherish our ethos as human beings, can we retain the ability to govern ourselves and properly wield the ever-advancing technological achievements of this modern era, AI being the most recent and certainly not the last.

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Image credit: Pexels

The views/statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this article are strictly the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government.