America’s newest jail has no walls



Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

RELATED: We’re winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn’t going away that easily

Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock/Getty Images

A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It’s ‘terroristic’ to want to know where we put our spy cameras

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

During the pandemic, technology companies yielded to government pressure, censored disfavored speech, and turned over user information. Neither the administrative state nor its corporate partners have earned the benefit of the doubt. They have repeatedly demonstrated that enforcement depends on the target.

I am less hostile to state power than many conservatives. A government that cannot control its borders, remove violent criminals, or maintain public order is not a serious government.

But power must be directed toward the common good. The officials asking for universal surveillance are the same officials who refuse to use ordinary authority against illegal immigration, organized crime, urban disorder, and politically favored mobs.

Giving them a database that tracks every American driver will not correct their priorities. It will magnify them.

Supporters will insist that only criminals need to worry. That argument assumes surveillance will remain limited to serious crime and that government will apply its powers impartially. Recent history destroys both assumptions.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system. A hot list can identify a murder suspect, an immigration protester, a gun owner, a church attendee, or anyone traveling to a disfavored rally.

The danger does not require a secret conspiracy. Bureaucracies naturally expand their missions. Politicians redefine threats. Private vendors seek new contracts. Once the infrastructure exists, every crisis supplies another justification for using it.

America’s disorder has obvious political causes. Elites imported cheap labor, weakened borders, excused criminality, and dissolved the social bonds that once allowed communities to police themselves informally. Citizens now feel like strangers in their own homeland.

Technology cannot repair that betrayal.

The difficult answers remain immigration restriction, deportation, competent policing, equal enforcement, and the restoration of families, neighborhoods, and civic trust. Cameras may assist legitimate police work, but they cannot substitute for political courage.

Flock promises safety without social repair. The bargain is tempting because rebuilding order is difficult.

Americans should refuse it.

Rewarding the people who created the crisis with the power to monitor every movement will not restore a high-trust society. It will lock law-abiding citizens inside an open-air prison while the disorder continues beyond the cameras’ reach.

The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?



Five years ago this month, I finished the manuscript for “Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.” By fall, it was in print, available as an e-book, and inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain. It remains available today exclusively in Bitcoin on canonic.xyz.

Despite its narrow audience — then considered a kiss of death, today hailed as smart “niching down” — “Human Forever” has made an enduring impact.

Why assume that posthuman intelligence would honor what ‘we’ mean by progress as an ultimate good?

Working from a relative handful of influences, insights, and goals, I was able to see quite a ways around the corner of the next five years. That may seem surprising, given how much has changed since then, especially in AI.

But the book’s continued relevance in an age of rapid obsolescence has to do with its thesis being larger than tech. Its central question was what, if anything, could be bigger than technology — more fundamental, more authoritative, more inherent to who and what we are.

While many are now locked in debate over whether technology is upstream of politics or politics is upstream of technology, “Human Forever” explored the primacy over both of spiritual being, spiritual life, and spiritual order.

Few were discussing this dynamic in 2021. Many are discussing it now.

That is not surprising. As I argued in the book, and have continued to explore in the essays and posts it set in motion, the cultural and social resurgence of spirituality in all its dimensions — including those most of us were trained to believe would never return from the distant past — is largely attributable to the direction, speed, and scope of technological advancement.

Technology has now reached a point at which it is discrediting many of the sophisticated intellectual mechanisms once designed to justify human existence and supply human purpose without spirituality, revelation, or faith in the divine.

Today even — perhaps especially — those working at the frontier of AI development are gravitating toward spiritual structures, from the ancient Christian church to novel and idiosyncratic cults.

But momentum at the technological frontier still favors those who would rather replace all previous and existing religions than kneel with the faithful of any.

RELATED: At 250, America’s fate is wonderfully unwritten

smartboy10/iStock/Getty Images

Welcome to the party

I now notice two main trends relative to what I argued in “Human Forever.”

The first is a gratifying high-level awareness of what is at stake and what is needed to preserve our accustomed freedom and command in the digital age.

Recently, none other than Palantir CEO Alex Karp helped kick off a remarkable turn among key hyperscalers toward concepts and priorities laid out in the book: control of compute as an index of sovereignty; technological competition consolidating among a handful of civilization-states; the need to protect and preserve the shared memory, or ontology, of people and organizations; and the spiritual risk of a new kind of slavery typified by what cybernetics theorists call homeostasis — an unceasing feedback loop optimizing for predictability, uniformity, and interchangeability.

In the book, I emphasized that Bitcoin offered ordinary human beings an exemplary opportunity to re-establish healthy freedom and command under digital conditions. Bitcoin is relatively mature, stable, comprehensible, and ready to use now, without requiring trust in massive organizations with equally massive trust gaps.

I am still waiting for leading tech figures to sing that tune. On the other hand, perhaps it is best for ordinary people to figure it out for themselves, without monitoring or supervision.

The secular trap

The second trend is more uncanny and unnerving.

A funny paradox has emerged. Many of those most euphoric about developing AI into a recursively self-improving cosmic intelligence — one that removes our pain, solves our problems, and likely erases many of the limits of human being — simply assume that the machines will preserve their very human ideas about “improvement” itself.

They seem to believe that machines designed to surpass us in every way will somehow neither surpass nor contradict them when defining the core concepts and purposes at the heart of the AI project.

Improvement, advancement, perfection — these and related ideas define the AI-maxxing ideology. But for us, absent divine teaching about what they truly mean, they remain inescapably human ideas.

If “we” are building entities with the goal of liberating them from the petty confines of human intellect, agency, and identity, why would we expect them to retain modern secular-human notions of value and progress?

RELATED: The backlash against AI reveals it’s a terrible scapegoat

RYGERSZEM/iStock/Getty Images

Why assume that posthuman intelligence would honor what “we” mean by progress as an ultimate good?

Strangely, the stubborn reliance on merely human definitions at the heart of the ostensibly posthuman agenda mirrors the same reliance among many of the most visible and well-funded anti-AI movements, which rally around symbols of human identity such as a caveman’s handprint.

Neither side of the conflict seems eager to confront the hard lesson of history: When we stray from divine teaching about what it means to improve, progress, and perfect, and when we replace that teaching with merely human measures of justice, truth, beauty, and goodness, the result is often the opposite — sometimes catastrophically so.

The true frontier

Of course, there are many incompatible religious teachings in the world today. But they are nearly unanimous on the folly of turning away from divine instruction and trying to do it ourselves — especially when that effort frustrates us so badly that we attempt to outsource it to institutions of our own creation.

Historical warts and all, the implication is strong: Stubborn secular humanism will undermine even the most ambitious and well-intentioned goals of both AI lovers and AI haters.

For many Americans, and for many others across the globe, the only authoritative, resonant, reliable, and compatible frame of spiritual authority will be a Christian one.

For Americans in particular, that poses a unique challenge.

Just as an AI theocracy would be unconstitutional, so would a Christian theocracy. America will have to work harder than other countries to resolve the relationship among spiritual authority, political order, and technological development.

Instead of worrying about whether we still have time, we had better make the time.

Supreme Court Data Privacy Ruling Threatens EdTech That Tracks Students’ Parents 24/7

The tension between these K-12 education programs and Chatrie is bound to create a stir as parents — and their students — begin questioning these surveillance practices and asserting their Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.

Trump Admin Launches Probe Into H-1B Visa Fraudsters Stealing Jobs From Americans

The invesitgation aims to further President Trump's goal to end foreign violence on American soil and return jobs to the American people.

Anti-aging mogul who used son as 'blood boy' reveals his incurable diagnosis



Bryan Johnson, the transhumanist founder of the neurotechnology company Kernel, sold his digital payments company Braintree to eBay Inc. for $800 million in 2013, then pursued his bio-hacking obsession headlong, tinkering with his body in the hope of pausing the aging process and potentially even evading death.

In a 2023 interview with Bloomberg, Johnson revealed that in addition to staying out of the sun, he was preparing to invest at least $2 million on his body with the aim of having the body and organs — penis and rectum included — of an 18-year-old. To this end, he hired a team of over 30 doctors and health experts to monitor his every bodily function.

'My stomach is eating itself.'

"What I do may sound extreme, but I'm trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable," Johnson said just months before supplementing his usual supply of rejuvenating plasma from so-called blood boys with blood from his son.

Johnson, who calls himself "the healthiest person alive" and founded the "Don't Die" health cult, revealed last week that he has been diagnosed with an incurable disease.

"Bad news #1: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself," the middle-aged transhumanist wrote in an X post.

"Good news: I'm going to try and solve it," he added.

Johnson suggested that he developed autoimmune gastritis during a period in his life when he was juggling "stress and grind" and let his health slip.

Autoimmune gastritis is an inherited chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when an individual's immune system attacks their stomach lining cells. According to the Cleveland Clinic, this condition can lead to an increased risk of developing small neuroendocrine tumors in the stomach and an increased risk of gastric cancer.

RELATED: Transhumanism is coming to destroy the human soul

© CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images

"I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it," the transhumanist said. "AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects."

Johnson indicated further that his supposedly healthy living regimen failed to address his low iron levels.

'Bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live.'

Autoimmune gastritis destroys the stomach's parietal cells, which reduces secretion of the gastric acid required for absorption of inorganic iron.

Only after the supposed "healthiest person alive" overhauled his medical team and underwent further testing was his incurable condition revealed.

While there is presently no cure for autoimmune gastritis, Johnson said that he and his team are "going to try and solve my AIG."

Johnson's non-terminal diagnosis appears to have only worsened his health obsession.

"We fill our days mostly on things that are trivial next to what we ultimately care about. We know, deep down, however, that in the noise of it all, health is easily forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters," the transhumanist wrote.

Bryan did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

Following his disease reveal, Johnson lashed out at those whose who, according to his paraphrase, suggested that "bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live."

In response, the transhumanist offered a pessimistic and reductive interpretation of the world, suggesting that people ultimately construct personas to shield themselves "from the terror of their inevitable death," then "to make this irreconcilable pain invisible to themselves, they dissolve themselves into the group and enact its rituals."

He proceeded to characterize himself as a heroic figure — the "abstainer" from "societal death rituals" who "reveals to the room that they are drunk."

According to the transhumanist — who takes hundreds of pills a day, follows a strict plant-based diet, has injected some of his son's blood, and has spent a fortune in a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable — Johnson's critics aren't troubled by his decisions but by "their reflection in the mirror."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Let Your Kids Grow Up Without A Homing Signal

By constant monitoring, we’re not just giving up freedom for temporary safety, we’re raising kids to think the surveillance state is normal.
Would You Trust a Robot Toilet? #technology #news
play icon

Would You Trust a Robot Toilet? #technology #news

The latest 'solution' to reckless driving could limit freedom for all of us



If a driver is so dangerous that the government needs to electronically control his car, why is he still allowed to drive?

That's the question New York lawmakers don't seem interested in answering.

Today the threshold is 16 violations. Tomorrow it could be 10.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) recently signed legislation requiring certain repeat speeding offenders to install GPS-based speed-limiting technology in their vehicles. Under the new law, drivers who rack up 16 or more speed-camera violations within a year can be ordered to install an Intelligent Speed Limiter that prevents their vehicle from exceeding posted speed limits. Drivers who refuse can ultimately lose their vehicle registration.

Reckless legislation

At first glance, the proposal sounds reasonable. Most Americans agree that chronic reckless drivers should face serious consequences. But the real question is not whether dangerous drivers deserve punishment. The real question is why someone with 16 speeding violations still has driving privileges in the first place.

New York already has speeding laws. It already has fines, insurance penalties, license points, court appearances, and suspension mechanisms. If a driver has accumulated enough violations to be considered such a serious threat that the state now wants to electronically control their vehicle, then why weren't existing laws sufficient to remove that driver from the road?

That question goes directly to the heart of the issue. Rather than addressing the apparent failure of existing enforcement systems, lawmakers have chosen to create an entirely new layer of technology, surveillance, and government oversight. Instead of asking why repeat offenders remain licensed, they're asking the public to accept the idea that government should have a greater role in controlling privately owned vehicles.

That's a significant shift, and it deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.

Pre-crime preview

The legislation relies on Intelligent Speed Assistance technology, commonly referred to as ISA. The system uses GPS data and digital mapping to determine the posted speed limit on a roadway and can prevent a vehicle from exceeding that speed. Unlike traditional enforcement, where a driver is punished after breaking the law, this technology is designed to intervene before the driver can make the decision.

The automotive industry is already moving toward an unprecedented level of connectivity. Modern vehicles collect enormous amounts of information. They receive over-the-air software updates, communicate with manufacturers, monitor driving behavior, and increasingly operate as rolling computers. Consumers have already watched vehicle ownership evolve into something that looks increasingly like a subscription service, with features activated remotely and software determining how products function.

Now government is entering the equation with technology designed to control how a vehicle operates.

That should concern anyone who values personal privacy and consumer rights.

Starting small

Supporters insist the law applies only to a small group of repeat offenders. That's true today. The problem is that government programs rarely remain confined to their original scope. Nearly every major regulatory program begins with a narrowly defined target. Politicians identify a group that few people are willing to defend, implement a new policy, and assure the public that the measure will be limited. Once the infrastructure exists, however, expanding it becomes significantly easier than creating it.

Today the threshold is 16 violations. Tomorrow it could be 10. Later it could be expanded to fleet vehicles, commercial operators, or other categories of drivers. Once the principle is accepted, the debate shifts from whether government should have this authority to how broadly it should be applied.

Imperfect technology

The practical questions surrounding this law are equally troubling. GPS technology is useful, but it is not infallible. Speed-limit databases are not always current. Construction zones change. Temporary restrictions appear. Road conditions evolve faster than mapping systems can update.

What happens when the speed-limit database is wrong? What happens when a roadway has recently changed and the system hasn't been updated? What happens when a driver needs rapid acceleration to avoid an accident?

These are not hypothetical concerns. They are the types of real-world situations automotive engineers consider every day. Yet lawmakers frequently discuss speed-limiting technology as though vehicles operate in a controlled environment where every situation can be anticipated by software. The reality is far more complicated.

RELATED: Gone in 60 seconds: How high-tech thieves can steal your car

Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images

Punishing cars, not drivers

Then there is the issue of fairness.

One of the most overlooked aspects of this legislation is its reliance on camera enforcement. Traditional traffic stops identify the driver. Automated camera systems identify the vehicle. Those are not the same thing. Families share cars. Businesses operate fleets. Vehicles are borrowed, rented, and loaned every day. Yet policymakers continue to build enforcement systems around the vehicle itself rather than the individual behind the wheel.

That distinction matters because accountability should be directed at the person responsible for the behavior, not simply the machine involved.

There is also a financial component that deserves attention. Installation costs for these systems can run into the thousands of dollars, with additional fees for monitoring, maintenance, administration, and compliance. Government officials often frame these costs as penalties for offenders, but every new regulatory program creates opportunities for vendors, contractors, software providers, installers, and administrators.

Whenever government mandates a new technology, there is almost always an industry waiting to benefit from it.

New York is hardly alone in pursuing this approach. Washington State has adopted its own Intelligent Speed Assistance requirements for certain offenders. Virginia and Washington, D.C., have moved in a similar direction, while Illinois lawmakers have advanced proposals involving mandatory speed-limiting technology. What once appeared to be an isolated experiment is rapidly becoming a national trend.

As more states adopt similar programs, lawmakers should answer a basic question: Why create a technological workaround instead of enforcing the penalties already available under existing law?

Accountability ... or control?

The answer may be uncomfortable. Suspending licenses removes the driver from the system. Technological monitoring keeps the driver in the system while creating new layers of oversight and control. One approach focuses on accountability. The other focuses on management.

Those are fundamentally different philosophies.

New York's "super speeder" law is being sold as a narrowly targeted safety measure. Maybe that's how it begins. The larger concern is where it ends. Once government gains the authority to electronically regulate how privately owned vehicles operate, future expansions become much easier to justify.

The most important question isn't whether a driver with 16 violations deserves punishment. It's whether Americans are comfortable creating the technological infrastructure that allows government to control how a privately owned vehicle operates.

Today, lawmakers call it a solution for super speeders. Tomorrow, it could become something much broader.

The backlash against AI reveals it’s a terrible scapegoat



One day, not long ago — no one can recall exactly when — AI dropped from the sky, a deus ex machina springing fully formed from the head of, well, maybe its own head.

Or so it seems.

The context around the technology matters even more than the content.

In reality, AI’s origin story runs much deeper. So does the backlash against it. Both look stranger than they are because our shared memory of the recent past keeps shrinking.

AI has been a long time coming. In the mid-20th century, when human imagination still outran human and machine memory, artists produced vivid narratives about supercomputers and superintelligence. Scientists and engineers did the same, especially after World War II. Go back and read atomic-age Vannevar Bush, who mentored the namesake of Anthropic’s Claude, and the surprise is not that AI arrived. The surprise is that it took so long.

So why has AI produced such powerful future shock?

Not long ago, Americans rushed to embrace new technology. Yes, we were naïve about social media. We underestimated how people and governments would peep into our personal cyberspace. But when social media exposed our own questionable collective character, the reaction was not fury. Troubled? Yes. Shocked? No.

Even now, despite evidence that smartphones have entrenched bad habits and unhealthy temptations, we broadly regard the phone-and-app ecosystem as manageable. The trade-offs seem worth the bother if we clean up our act and make responsible choices.

AI is different. For millions participating in the backlash, AI differs from smartphones and social media not merely in power and scope, but in perceived injustice. Smartphones may rot our brains slowly. According to the backlash, even moderate AI use will swiftly destroy society.

The history we long to forget

Left-wing critics describe this destruction in terms of justice and the human nature Marx called our “species being.” Right-wing critics reach for the language of spiritual illness and stolen souls. The claim remains roughly the same: AI uniquely threatens our humanity, so the conversation about how to respond need not account for anything else.

Introduce any complicating factor outside AI and its creators, and critics may accuse you of distraction, dissembling, excuse-making, or apologizing for a permanent underclass — perhaps even human extinction.

I understand why so many people are so freaked out and so unwilling to pull focus away from AI. But the biggest reason lies outside AI and the AI debate.

Look at the arc Americans traveled with smartphones and social media. These transformative technologies became ubiquitous around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Thanks to “innovative” monetary policy and frantic institutional improvisation, the world avoided penury, and technological development kept moving along its established trajectory.

Many Americans surely spent more time online as economic slack and stagnation spread after the crisis. Yet that shock was nothing like the blow that came during the COVID lockdowns.

Over those two decades, America’s fundamentals became dangerously unsound. Governance embraced can-kicking, corruption, patronage, fraud, and self-dealing legerdemain that cooked the country as much as it cooked the books. But the populist backlash — as veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the Ron Paul “rEVOLution,” or the Bernie Bro movement will remember — remained contained and controlled.

RELATED: There's a surprising fix for our AI oversight anarchy

sonmez karakurt/iStock/Getty Images

At least until Trump came along.

Even during Trump’s first term, few Americans felt like sitting ducks in the shadow of cataclysm. Times were tough, the middle class felt squeezed, and the dollar didn’t go as far. But those pressures had become baseline dynamics — the same problem set Ross Perot once explained with his chicken-foot pointer in populist third-party infomercials.

The lockdown era obliterated that holding pattern. It also wiped out many people’s ability to process the new normal. The socioeconomic malaise accelerated into territory so unsustainable that people simply stopped trying to understand it.

They blocked it out like an event too awful to remain in our memory.

Runaway inflation. Church closures. Rising living costs. Soaring entry costs for upward mobility. Devalued savings. Exhausted savings. The mathematical impossibility of building a middle-class life across family, education, and wealth formation within the given number of workweeks in a year.

That was the comprehensive catastrophe.

And it unfolded before robust AI asserted itself on the social scene.

Rebirth and return

That means we cannot understand the AI backlash unless we recognize that the context around the technology matters even more than the content.

For many millions across the political spectrum, the American dream was already destroyed before they could form real judgments about AI. In a national atmosphere of spiritual sickness, financial insolvency, economic weakness, and social disintegration, AI appeared as the final blow — especially as AI leaders themselves forecast the end of paychecks, jobs, careers, and perhaps humanity itself.

Deep down, many Americans feel that the habits, institutions, and confidence that might have allowed them to participate fruitfully in the AI era were stripped away years ago. AI seems big, alien, and wrong. Worse, it seems forced on them at a moment of unprecedented weakness, after any hope of recovery has already vanished.

Because they now feel they can fight the “clankers” and their makers in a way they cannot fight their own downward mobility and immiseration, AI has become the perfect scapegoat.

And that is the danger.

Killing AI will not regrow our spiritual and social roots. In fact, our structural situation has deteriorated so badly that leaning harder on the machines than we otherwise would may now be necessary.

We need a financial reboot. We need to dismantle the governance system that sucked us dry. We need to shift from overextended sole superpower to sustainable civilization-state fast enough to avoid the geopolitical spike pit between those two conditions.

Without those urgent needs, we would have more time and room to maneuver on AI. But we do need those things, and we do not have much choice or time — at least not if we want to hold the country together long enough to give Americans back the freedom to regrow their spiritual and social shoots.

The real way. The slow way. The human way.

Treating AI as the ultimate scapegoat for all our ills will distort and delay that process. Treating AI as the ultimate savior will derail and damage us in the opposite direction.

Nor will the fantasy of curing our national trauma by using AI to solve all human problems restore American life as a challenge worth living. Our new technology can be much more, and much less, than a replacement plan for people reduced to polyp status.

That is the opening for a constructive approach to AI that most of us can ultimately live with.

$965 billion AI giant warns we need to hit the brakes — but will China?



Anthropic helped build the AI race. Now, it's warning the finish line may be coming faster than anyone expected.

The company, recently valued at a staggering $965 billion, says its latest AI systems are approaching dangerous capabilities that could fundamentally change the future of technology, prompting calls for a worldwide slowdown in frontier AI development.

“They did this because it’s getting close to improving itself without human help,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray explains on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“In April, Claude ran a full AI research project completely on its own. Humans picked the topic and then it just did it. Claude came up with every experiment, ran every test, and delivered the results. Two human researchers spent a full week on the same problem,” he continues.


While the researchers only made it 23% of the way there, Claude made it 97% of the way there.

“Claude Mythos preview is now 52 times faster than a skilled human at improving AI training code. So it can fix its own training code. The same task takes a human four to eight hours. Claude does it better. Claude already writes 80% of Anthropic's own code,” Gray says.

While in March 2024, Claude could reportedly handle a four-minute task on its own; now it handles 12-hour tasks.

“That number doubles every four months,” Gray explains, adding that “week-long tasks are expected by 2027.”

“So when they call for a development pause, I mean we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, right, on this technology. No one wants to pause or slow down on this because there’s so much at stake,” he continues.

“There’s money, there’s advancement, there’s so much going on here ... and they can’t risk falling behind others. Worse than companies not being willing to do this, China certainly isn’t going to pause,” he adds.

Want more from Pat Gray?

To enjoy more of Pat's biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.