Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
My Solution to the AI Problem
This week we have seen an AI panic centered around the good people in the Effective Altruism Community. It seems as if the only way to effectively altruist AI is to get the government involved.
I think that The Free Press has the measure of this: “The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings.”
I agree. You Effective Altruists should step up to the plate and commit your accumulated trillions in ill-gotten Oligarch gains to paying damages to anyone damaged by your AI LLMs or whatever they are called next week. And after the performance of Sammy von Bankman-Fried a few years ago…
Of course, if AI blows the whole place up it won’t matter because there won’t be anyone to pick up the insurance check.
Except for Elon’s multiplanetary colony Occupying Mars…
I had a bit of fun with Grok AI back in June. I had a brainwave. I’ve always had a problem summarizing the ideas of economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, because he used to write in such long sentences that I could never boil his ideas down into a nice tasty aphorism. So I realized: ask Grok! And it gave different answers on different days.
Saturday:
“The price of pretending we can plan society is the loss of the spontaneous order that alone makes it work.”
Sunday:
“The fatal conceit is believing we can design what only spontaneous order can evolve.”
Again:
“The market is a discovery process that no planner can outthink.”
Now really. How long would it have taken me to sift through his work to come up with that? I have eleven books by Hayek on the shelf!
But I tell you this. I know enough about Hayek to know that Grok absolutely nailed it. And the interesting thing is that, I presume, if the answers are different on different days it means that Grok does a real, and unique, search every time I make a request. Unlike our lefty friends at Wikipedia.
The real problem with AI is not the Effective Altruists. It is China. And I don’t mean China stealing our AI technology or using influencers to stop the construction of data centers. (Hey, fly in and out of Dulles Airport next to Washington DC if you want to get a look at wall-to-wall data centers! Hmm. I wonder if the Department of War and our beloved Intelligence Community are the major customers…)
Yeah. The problem with AI is not some rogue AI actors doing bad stuff. It is politicians and dictators and terrorists and intelligence agencies using AI to do bad stuff.
Surely this is obvious.
But here’s a thought. The news is indicating that benevolent CCP leader Xi Jinping had a possible medical incident at the BRICS summit and had to go home. You think that AI was involved in that? Are you sure? Grok says that the whole thing might be rumor.
The claims originated with Wanjun Xie, chairman of the exile China Democracy Party, in posts on X.
Or maybe the whole thing was imagined by AI.
Meanwhile, I declare that the AI community should get together and announce that they are going to be responsible and compensate victims for any harm done by AI.
That’s what Effective Humans do. I don’t know about Effective Altruists.
| Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:16:37 GMT |
Merker “Perishing Promise”: My Takeaways
I was thinking that, at the conclusion of my study of Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise I ought to deliver my judgment on the book.
And then I thought: No.
What I read books for are ideas. And not just ideas, but good ideas.
So, for me, the point of reading Perishing Promise and commenting on it is to mine it for good ideas.
Mind you, Merker has put together a good narrative. That he regards the “other-regard” morality launched by Christianity as a bit of a problem, and a real problem after it got secularized by the Continental Enlightenment thinkers. The Continental thinkers all have a tendency to be “partisans of overthrow” and politics with everything. Hey, whatabout the Brits in the 19th century that created a society that doubled its population and tripled its per-capita income in the utter transformation of the Industrial Revolution. All without a serious political breakdown or revolution?
So let’s review some of the good ideas in Perishing Promise.
“Other-regard” Morality. For Merker this is a problem, because it focuses peoples’ minds on “doing good” for others rather than getting on with their own lives. Dickens made a joke about this in Bleak House with Mrs. Jellyby. Her entire life was focused on helping the natives of Borrioboola-Gha in Africa while ignoring the needs and the sufferings of her own family. In the modern welfare state “other-regard” has created the culture of victim politics which, no doubt, future historians will regard as the most vicious idea since witch-burning.
Victorian era in Britain. Merker shows us what a remarkable achievement it was, to convert an agricultural society of people living in villages to an industrial world power in which most everyone lived and worked in cities. And the population doubled. And per-capita income tripled. He chides us for celebrating the “partisans of overthrow” rather than studied why Victorian Britain succeeded and what we can learn from its success.
Marx didn’t want to get a job. Daddy kept telling him to get a job, but still kept up his allowance. But the Widow Marx pulled the allowance. So Marx latched onto rich kid Engels for support. One wonders whether this is repeating itself with our modern educated rich kids.
Two cultures of human society. We humans are a uniquely unique species. We have two cultures: ritual and instrumental. Ritual culture is doing things “because that’s the way we do it.” The point is to reduce the time and resources devoted to arguing about the right way to live life. Human language is ritual culture, and perhaps the most important thing a child learns. Instrumental culture is about observation and learning from others.
The secret of culture. The “capacity to shape, unbeknownst to its carriers, their behavior in adaptive ways”. And “any model behavior that enjoys any kind of advantage… even the slightest statistical edge, will end up disproportionately represented in the population aggregate in the long run”.
Population replacement. Needless to say, humans as a species start and end with replacing each generation with a new generation. The current situation where many cultures in the West are not having enough children to replace the population will end in extinction. However, normal people living normal lives of work, marriage, and children are replacing themselves. It’s the folk that believe in leftist ideology that aren’t having children.
Society as a “zoo or farm”. The rulers of our current “benevolent” or welfare state behave rather like the managers of a farm or a zoo. “In either case, ‘the management’ has total control and responsibility for the lives and welfare of their denizens.” When is a society not a society?
Knowledge about “what actually works”. Society survives by the slow discovery of things that work. This is perhaps sped up by conscious science, learning about what works and why. The politics of overthrow does not operate on this principle. It just implements a political idea from on high and forces society to conform.
There’s more, of course. Much more. But these are my takeaways Your mileage may vary.
But here is where to start if you want to read the whole thing.
| Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:29:30 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Passion is the distinction between love and hate.
It isn’t a lie if nobody calls you on it.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Brief Takes on Major Topics
