The World’s Robots Are Getting an Upgrade

Did you know that almost every major Western politician of the 1930s—except Winston Churchill—believed they could negotiate a lasting peace with Hitler? They flew to neutral ground, signed agreements, smiled for the cameras, and went home convinced reason had prevailed. Then he attacked anyway.

Hitler was not a religious zealot nursing a thousand-year grudge against England. He did not believe God Himself had commanded him to conquer the world. And yet the pattern is familiar.

Today large numbers of Westerners march under “Free Palestine” banners—while Palestinians themselves are not free under Hamas—and simultaneously insist that stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is somehow the greater moral failing. Iran openly finances and directs terrorist attacks on Israel. But according to the new orthodoxy, we are the problem. Borders are the problem. Asserting national interest is the problem. Vote blue. The same blue that spent years treating Russia as the existential threat while largely ignoring the actual ideological enemies who celebrate death and publish maps without Israel on them. Peace and open arms for everyone—except the United States as it currently exists.

So the question writes itself: how does a certain country of 330 million people become this confused, on average?

One answer is the selective enforcement of “hate speech.” The same voices that demand its abolition have turned political opposition to Donald Trump into a moral crusade that often looks indistinguishable from the thing they claim to oppose. There is a historical pattern here. Marxism has repeatedly risen by first poisoning the atmosphere against the existing order—against the Czars, against the old regimes, against whoever currently holds the levers. Hatred is the solvent. Once the present leadership is rendered illegitimate in the public mind, the rest becomes much easier.

What has the American education system been doing for the last thirty years? Students still raise the flag and sing the national anthem, yet they are also taught a version of “inclusion” that treats skepticism toward open borders or ideological imports as a character defect. The result is a population unusually skilled at moral performance and unusually slow to notice when the ground under the performance is moving.

The woke mind virus did not invent itself, and it did not take over large parts of the education and cultural apparatus by accident. It could still be rolled back from the top. It isn’t. Why is an interesting question. Theories abound, but they may not matter for long.

The coming wave of automation and AI is going to reduce the oligarchy’s need for a large, compliant labor force. For most of modern human history, needing a job was not optional. That constraint is loosening. A world of material abundance is technically possible—the open question is abundance for whom.

None of this is a simple morality play of good versus evil. It is mostly the ordinary human tendency to prefer comfortable narratives over hard trade-offs. Dumb is as dumb does, and sustained collective dumbness is what gives destructive ideologies room to operate. We are not primarily being defeated by cartoon villains. We are being outmaneuvered by people who understand incentives and status better than we currently do—plus, of course, China, which is playing a longer and colder game than most Western institutions appear willing to acknowledge.