AI and the Jefferson Option

On August 14 1805, an officer of the Lewis and Clark expedition recorded a conversation with Cameahwait, a Shoshone man whose people’s territory straddled the Rocky Mountains. Cameahwait lived in what is now the Idaho-Montana borderlands, still quite a remote part of the United States and then terra incognita. The men of the expedition, sent by Thomas Jefferson to blaze a trail across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, were the first Europeans these Shoshone had ever met face to face.

To the relief of the Americans, Cameahwait was overjoyed by their arrival, and around the campfire they learned why. The Shoshone’s neighbours — the Hidatsa, Blackfeet, and Atsina—had made contact with trappers working for the British North West Company and were trading furs for guns. The imbalance had left the Shoshone “defenceless and an easy prey to their bloodthirsty neighbours … who being in possession of fire arms hunt them up and murder them without respect to sex or age.” He begged the Americans to establish a similar relationship with the Shoshone. “If we had guns,” Cameahwait said, “we could then live in the country of buffalo and eat as our enemies do and not be compelled to hide ourselves in these mountains and live on roots and berries.”

The plight of the Shoshone is instructive. The weapons their neighbours menaced them with were almost certainly made in Birmingham, the centre of the British gun trade and the city at the cutting-edge of industrial innovation. These guns had travelled 4500 miles from London to western Canada before being traded for furs that would be taken back to Europe to markets in Germany and Russia, with the most prized samples finally ending up in China. Industrial and technological breakthroughs in the British Midlands and a web of commercial relationships spanning three continents had combined to bring misery to the Shoshone — well before they had ever laid eyes on a white man.

Technology is indifferent to democracy. It doesn’t care about the desires and preferences of an individual or a community. It doesn’t care about humanity at all. It exists on its own terms. The Shoshone were remote in every sense from the world of industrial Birmingham and the myriad innovations that had made it possible to assemble a rifle there and ship it to Alberta. Yet that gun was built all the same and found its way to their door. They had no say in the matter. They had to reshape their existence around the fact of its arrival in their midst.

Two centuries later we find ourselves in a similar position with respect to AI. A technology produced by a few thousand extremely intelligent people in California is set to disrupt the basic life calculus of the other eight billion people on the planet. 

How do we preserve our dignity in the face of vast, impersonal forces beyond our control?

And AI is not just another technology: it represents the telos of the technological principle. It is a machine that can build, operate, and maintain another machine. It is a worker that does not unionise and cannot ask for a raise. It is, in the hands of governments, a secret policeman who never sleeps and never errs. It threatens to drag us into a sci-fi future few want to inhabit while simultaneously forcing us to answer the oldest question of all: how do we preserve our dignity in the face of vast, impersonal forces beyond our control?

The best answer I’ve found to that question was articulated by the same man who sent Lewis and Clark across the Rockies: Thomas Jefferson.

America’s third president might seem an odd guide to the AI apocalypse. Jefferson lived most of his life in rural Virginia and died in 1826 without ever having laid his eyes on a railroad let alone a microchip. And Jefferson was not a technophobe. He was an inveterate tinkerer (he won a gold medal from the Agricultural Society of Paris for inventing a new kind of plough), promoted the use of submarines, cotton gins, and steam power, and was an evangelist for the “brotherly spirit of science.”

But Jefferson’s first commitment was to liberty, not engineering. (And still less to the economy. “We must make our election between economy and liberty,” he once wrote, “or profusion and servitude.”) Liberty, he believed, was best entrusted to those who farmed the land. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God,” he famously declared. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” Why? Because a farmer could sustain himself on the product of his labour — in contrast to the wage-labourer whose subsistence depended on the whims of others. 

This latter condition was perilous to republican principles. “Dependance begets subservience and venality,” Jefferson wrote, and “suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” A farmer could participate in America’s republican experiment because his land was his own and so his thoughts and opinions were his own. He was independent —  materially, intellectually, spiritually — and so capable of self-government. A labourer in a Lancashire cotton mill or a Yorkshire foundry was in the exact opposite condition. As Jefferson’s great rival, Alexander Hamilton, once noted “power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” How then could a wage-labourer practice liberty when he had no capacity for independent subsistence?

Over two centuries of campaigning, agitation, revolution and reform have gone into answering that question in a manner which permits most people in the twenty-first century to go to the polls every couple of years without having their votes suborned by their employer. Social democracy and its variants are basically ways of rescuing the salaried majority from the dormant despotism of the salary-paying minority. Inter alia, these interventions have made it vastly more attractive for the average person to be a lawyer or an accountant than a smallholder. 

AI threatens to undo all of this. If a handful of companies eliminate whole categories of employment and accrue to themselves the earnings that once went to hundreds of thousands of individuals then they will become the arbiters of all economic power — and, therefore, of all political power. If, as some people hope, the state would respond by nationalising AI companies and paying out their profits as U.B.I., then the state will occupy the exact same position. In either outcome, the citizen would become a dependent — and so in Jeffersonian terms would have ceased to be a citizen at all.

These are, it might be said, the ravings of Luddites, Unabomber acolytes, and the tin-foil hat crowd. No, ChatGPT isn’t going to take your job and, no, the British state isn’t going to morph into the tyranny depicted in Running Man, Elysium, In Time, and other dystopian films. Things will change but we will figure it out and potter along as we’ve always done. 

But will we? Liberal democracy — indeed, any kind of democracy — has existed for a small fraction of the lifetime of civilised — never mind uncivilised — people. Besides, AI is but one of many threats to the stability of the complex, industrial societies we inhabit. Climate change is another. Another, more severe, global pandemic is a third. Catastrophists can add to the list as they wish. It may or may not be reasonable to believe in the coming of one of (or some combination of) these disasters. What is surely not reasonable is to believe in their coming and to trust that another man will fill your belly when the cataclysm arrives. Similarly, it is irresponsible to lionise liberal democracy and believe that its survival will continue once its basic unit, the individual, has become a ward of whichever body has claimed total control over resource distribution.

We must seize every opportunity to reserve to ourselves some autonomy

Jeffersonian thought offers a way out. In so doing, it beckons us toward a reconciliation with the land and the political possibilities laid open by a closer relationship with it. As the great Kentucky writer (and Jefferson disciple) Wendell Berry once observed, we only discount the value of smallholding because we have forgotten the horror of being landless. “If you have no land you have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no freedom, no life,” Berry wrote. “People who have been landless know that the land is invaluable; it is worth everything.” Becoming farmers, as Berry did, is one option but he also has a more modest proposal, better suited for the realities of twenty-first century life. “Being landed [doesn’t] necessarily mean owning land.” He writes. “It does mean being connected to a home landscape from which one may live by the interactions of a local economy and without the routine intervention of governments, corporations, or charities.” It could be as simple as taking up gardening — another passion of Jefferson’s. “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,” he once wrote, “and no culture comparable to that of the garden. … I am still devoted to the garden. But tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener.”

In an age of intensifying technological encroachment and runaway state expansion, we must seize every opportunity to reserve to ourselves some autonomy from the massive forces seeking to reduce us to dependency. Working an allotment or tending a vegetable patch might seem like a pathetically minuscule act in the face of the immense energies employed in the ongoing assault on the integrity of the individual. But the broader aim is to assume agency in the face of technology that seeks to take agency from us, forever. If we do nothing the decision will be made for us. The choice is between being twenty-first century Jeffersonians or twenty-first century Shoshone.