Read the full transcript of author Michael Shellenberger’s talk titled “More AI, More Intelligence…But Are We Getting Dumber?” at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 on Feb 19, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I love AI. I use ChatGPT every day. I encourage my students to use it. I’m particularly excited for the potential of AI to help doctors to diagnose diseases before we would be able to otherwise.
At the same time I have to wonder is the cause of our problems a lack of intelligence and will more AI help to solve them? Well before we look at some of those big problems I want to tell the story of Sam Bankman-Fried.
Intelligence Without Wisdom
Sam Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25 year sentence in prison for fraud at an extraordinary groundbreaking level. Towards the end there he tried to pin it on his ex-girlfriend. Does anybody doubt that Sam Bankman-Fried was intelligent? My mother’s father would say he was probably too smart for his own good.
What about the German censorship police who were just profiled a couple of days ago on 60 Minutes? Is the problem lack of intelligence? I think we can imagine we’ve seen already the use of AI for mass censorship over the last several years. Now the Germans are invading people’s homes to look for disfavored memes and speech that would be legal in all other parts of the world.
Is the malady that afflicts the Germans have anything to do with intelligence? My favorite part of this photo by the way is the obvious shame on their faces.
Political Challenges and AI
What about the cancellation of elections? Something I never thought we would see in Western Europe or Eastern Europe for that matter after the fall of the Berlin Wall and if they just canceled the results of the Romanian elections because they didn’t like the results.
Now Thierry Breton who was until just a few weeks ago the top censor in Europe now says that maybe they’ll cancel the German elections if they don’t like the results of those. Is that a problem of lack of intelligence? Will AI solve for that?
What about these kids? They’re demanding that the young woman in the pink blouse raise her fist in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. She later said that she actually agreed with the aims of Black Lives Matter. She just didn’t like a mob threatening her with violence if she didn’t raise her fist and so on principle she kept it down.
Does intelligence have anything to do with the rise of the psychopathology known as wokeness?
Digital Identifications and Privacy Concerns
Well one potential application for AI is digital identifications. This is something that the European Union is desperate to roll out to its citizens. See President Sanchez there at the World Economic Forum recently.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been a huge advocate for digital ID. They say that they’ll be very convenient. All sorts of possibilities opened up. They’re going to link your vaccine history, your social media posts and your bank accounts. The idea would be that tweet the wrong thing or refuse to get the jab and you could find your bank accounts frozen.
What about the maybe the worst problem facing the United States right now which is our untreated mental illness and drug addiction epidemic? We’re currently allowing in the United States a coalition of Mexican and Chinese drug dealers to murder over a hundred thousand of our deeply ill citizens every year. Here’s one of them dying on the streets of San Francisco from drug overdose. The underlying cause is that the radical woke left in San Francisco thinks it would be it’s more wrong to arrest somebody for breaking the law than it is to let them die on the streets.
San Francisco is the center of AI in the world.
Does anybody think this is a problem of lack of intelligence? What about the worst medical mistreatment scandal of maybe the last half century? There’s a pseudoscientific idea that if you pump drugs into children and operate on their bodies that you can change their gender. Again I think my mother’s father would say it’s really a problem of people being smarter than their own good.
The young men and women who lock themselves in their apartments in Japan refusing to go out, playing video games all day, not having sex, not getting married, not reproducing.
What about that? Japan is a deeply intelligent society.
Education and AI
Or what about the ways in which we’ve taught our children how not to read? We fell in love with this idea that we should let kids guess what words mean rather than teach them to sound them out. It was a revolt. It was something called whole language theory and instead of teaching kids how to read properly through what’s known as phonics or sounding words out, we just had them guess with some pictures.
It’s been an absolute catastrophe. This is a problem. Loneliness has been growing in societies ever since the late 19th century. Percentage of people that say that they experienced loneliness a lot the previous day worry, stress, anger is much higher than those that didn’t experience loneliness.
Can AI solve for this? Well maybe. The idea was explored in a terrific Spike Jonze movie called “Her” where a lonely Theodore Twombly got an AI friend, girlfriends. They had a relationship but then once she achieved AI consciousness decided to go off and be with her other AI friends leaving the humans lonely and in despair. Human civilization can’t go on if there’s no human beings and this will end result in the end the human race if it continues.
Now you could say AI might solve for it and we just create enough robots to service the few humans around but is that really the world that we want?
Will AI be able to tell us how to deal with this problem?
Global Governance and AI
Who is this guy and why does he appear to be in charge of Europe?
When the Europeans start censoring each other and even demanding that our own text be censored on social media, we Americans who are already very tired of fighting foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we start to wonder what are we doing here guys? It’s been 80 years since World War Two. It’s time for Europe to defend itself.
How did we get here? I mean part of the problem is that we’ve become so peaceful. The older problems have disappeared.
Fewer and fewer of us are dying in foreign wars. Fewer of us are killing each other than ever before. A number that just keeps going down, thankfully. And we’re all much richer than ever before. All around the world, almost everywhere in the world, we’re phenomenally wealthier. There’s really hardly anything for kids in the West to look forward to at Christmastime.
You can get those gifts all year round. You don’t need to delay your gratification. Maybe the problem is that people are not grounded in a solid set of values and morality. The percentage of Americans with any religious identity has been going down.
The numbers are even more dramatic in Europe.
I believe it’s something where 80 to 90 percent of Europeans don’t believe in God and if there’s no God to hold you accountable for your sins, why not? The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing in nothing, alas, it’s much worse. He ends up believing anything, including perhaps the idea that you can change somebody’s gender with drugs and surgeries or that it’s better to let people die on the street from fentanyl than to arrest them when they break the law.
We’ve come for new fad, fantasies that racism is suddenly increasing in society. We see an increase of media mentions of white privilege, racial hierarchy, whiteness, white supremacy. These panics sweep through the population, driven by the media, without any basis in reality. The victims, the biggest victims are progressives. The least satisfied with, when it comes to their mental health, are progressive women.
Only 15 percent say they’re completely satisfied with their mental health.
Solutions and Hope
So what do we do about it? Can AI play a role? Maybe. What about some positive stories?
Mississippi started teaching kids how to sound out words again, and lo and behold, more of them learned how to read. We elected somebody whose story arc is incredible, whatever else you think of him, has achieved the stature of greatness, of one of the great leaders of the age, and he’s put our greatest technologist in power.
Now, I admit Elon Musk is a pioneer of AI.
Is he using AI to eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse? Yeah, but the decision about what constitutes waste, fraud, and abuse is the human decision. It’s the subjective question.
Are we wasting money by funding sex change surgeries in Guatemala, or is that in fact a contribution to human flourishing? These aren’t decisions that the technologists are going to be able to answer. I take hope in building new institutions. Mine is the University of Austin, committed to free speech and free inquiry. I encourage my students to use AI, lest you get the wrong idea about my views of the technology.
I want them to use it as a tool, not to write their papers, but as some other way to help them in their progression.
But it’s certainly no substitute for reading Homer or reading Plato. I take hope that our Vice President has made free speech the center of America’s foreign policy. We’re serious about this. I don’t think Europeans understand the depth of America’s commitment to freedom of speech.
Free speech for Americans is a must-have. It’s not a nice-to-have. What’s happening? We see platforming, a climate denier, and a promoter of misinformation.
Thanks to J.D. Vance, the Overton window is opening, it’s moving. Even BBC is opening itself to disfavored views. And thank heaven for young men finding their testosterone around the world, breaking from the woke orthodoxy, saying masculinity is not toxic. Masculinity is natural and healthy and needed.
The moralizing men, the woke men, are actually weak men, as Harvey Mansfield points out in his masterpiece. Manly men are an improvement, but without any morality or sense of concern or empathy, they become an Andrew Tate. Violent, unrestrained in their power. We can strive for something better, to be gentlemen. Gentlemen, for Mansfield, are men that have the power of violence and aggression, but they would never use it to take advantage of the weak and the vulnerable.
Instead, they would use it to build a civilized society. There’s increased recognition that married people are happier than unmarried, and that ones with children are happiest of all. Let’s get the word out. We have the good news.
It is a great life to have children. For many of us, it’s the most important thing.
Conclusion
So where does that leave us with poor Sam Bankman-Fried? His parents taught him two big moral philosophies. The first was forget about the cardinal virtues. There’s only one value that matters, and that’s care.
And so he dedicated his life to making as much money as possible, so he could donate to charities that care. All other values should be sacrificed, including wisdom, temperance, moderation, and, of course, honesty. The other value he learned from his mother, who teaches this value at Stanford University, is that free will is an illusion. It’s just a way to punish people we don’t like.
So there’s no need to take responsibility. I would argue that this habit of forsaking responsibility is the characteristic that most today defines the Democratic Party. Happily, we’ve got new leaders who are stepping forward and creating new institutions. The World Economic Forum is going down.
Nobody wants to show up there. Nobody wants to be seen there. They want to come to ARC. This is the place to be.
I’m grateful to Jordan and to Philippa for creating it, and to Sir Paul Marshall for his leadership and vision. And I’ll just close by saying maybe there’s a new form of relationship we can build with each other, AI or not. It might be time for Europe to protect itself.
