(The Epoch Times)—On April 14, a local government administrator in the United States sent my relative a letter that she suspected of including artificial intelligence (AI) content. Sure enough, an AI detector found 83 percent generated by AI GPT.
She said it was the best letter she had ever received from a politician—and she writes to her representatives frequently. She praised the letter for responding to every single point she raised in her own letter, something no unaided politician had ever done.
We toyed with the idea of confronting the administrator publicly. If AI wrote a better letter than the administrator himself, perhaps he could be replaced with the technology, and his salary redeployed for more substantive taxpayer benefits. It was a tongue-in-cheek idea. But the logic is nevertheless disturbing.
If artificial intelligence is now better than one politician for one task, according to one constituent, is it plausible that in 10 or 20 years, AI could be better than all politicians for all their tasks, according to most constituents?
At that point, voters might just vote for an AI politician rather than a human one. Human politicians are, after all, time-constrained by their need to sleep, eat, and hobnob with their elite donors and other benefactors.
My relative decided not to confront the politician at his next public meeting. She wants to influence his decisions in the future, and public shaming is probably not the best way to do this. So he gets a pass to continue using AI on unsuspecting constituents. Even his tiny hold on power at the local level protected him from the truth.
If he can get away with it, perhaps many other politicians are doing the same. This empowers AI-using politicians at the expense of the old-fashioned types who simply do not have enough time to respond to every point of every letter of every constituent, but try anyway. AI politicians then gain an advantage in the next election, and over time, due to natural selection, all politicians will use AI, as those who don’t get voted out.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a small autocratic country in the Middle East, is already way “ahead” of this slow “democratic” transition to AI. In a world first, the UAE is using AI to both track the effects of existing legislation and write drafts of new legislation. Presumably, the president of the UAE will review the legislation prior to enacting it. Let’s hope so, as there would then be at least one human in the loop.
The UAE considers using AI to write legislation to be 70 percent more efficient than relying on human legislators to write laws. How that remarkably round number was arrived at is unclear. But as UAE citizens cannot vote, they could essentially become forced laborers working not only for the president of the UAE but also for AI, given that nobody understands exactly how AI comes up with its recommendations.
Now, consider expanding this to everything. A new startup in Silicon Valley, called Mechanize, audaciously wants to use AI to automate all jobs. The startup, launched on April 17, expects to start replacing white-collar jobs, such as those of accountants, lawyers, and authors (full disclosure: this author is an author, so may be biased in favor of humans).
But the company also envisions pairing AI with robots to mechanize other jobs, for example, in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. Companies like Waymo, Zoox, Tesla, and Lyft are already well on their way to populating our streets with robotaxis that could eventually lead most of us to dump our cars, perhaps in compliance with a government fiat written by AI.
That the military could also be automated, despite the promises of AI companies to do no such thing, is obvious given the rise of armed drones on the battlefields of Ukraine, and the interest of the U.S. and Chinese militaries in matching AI with drone warfare. One reason the United States denies the fastest AI semiconductors to China is that they are needed for the small AI devices onboard military drones that must learn from the adversary’s strategies mid-flight. The drone that learns the fastest and adapts its tactics to enemy drones before returning to base will survive.
The Israel Defense Forces reportedly used AI to target as many as 37,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) suspects with a 90 percent accuracy rate. This was paired with some “acceptable” level of civilian casualties per target to arrive at those approved for aerial bombing, with not-too-accurate dumb bombs. AI saved a lot of time for the targeters, though.
Communists have long promoted the idea of full mechanization to “free” humans of the need to labor. In their “utopian” schemes, full mechanization would allow humans the free time to pursue whatever they want, including leisure, art, and family. With the rise of mechanization, automation, robots, and AI, a new utopianism is coming that will appeal to the “Silicon Valley proletariat” of coders, programmers, and other tech workers.
With AI, this coming “tech vanguard” can seek an AI communism, in which humans frolic in nature while being watched over by the machine. It sounds dystopian and easily manipulable by Leninists if not Stalinists. But its rosy-glassed adherents will see it the other way around. They have likely read Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem envisioning a “cybernetic ecology”:
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Brautigan was not specifically communist, though he was counter-culture.
In the mid-2000s, a British movement developed a concept similar to being “watched over by machines of loving grace” that would become known as “fully automated luxury communism.” It was described by The Guardian in 2015 as “an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting and employment as we know it is a thing of the past.” This was before AI became popular. With AI, even the white collar workers will be “free.”
AI is being touted, by even those who know its dangers more than others, as a carrot and stick, a necessary evil, like nuclear weapons, in the competition with China. This could be considered an “anti-communist” or “anti-authoritarian” use of AI. The idea is that, if the United States does not deploy the most sophisticated AI to both entice Beijing to reform, and deter Beijing from attack, market democracy could be at a disadvantage.
In any conflict that occurs, Beijing will certainly deploy all technologies at its disposal. This puts those who would prefer to go slowly and carefully, or avoid any future of AI, in a bind. Use AI fire to fight fire, or not? And what if the fire blows back on the freedom of the individual in a market democracy, after burning the authoritarian adversary?
Handing over so much power, up to and including “AI communism,” whether in the form of political power to legislate or industrial power that replaces trillions of dollars worth of human labor, is an immense concentration of power in the hands of whoever controls AI. That could be a dictator, an oligarchy, an elected official who accrues too much power, or a hacker. It could even be AI itself, if it goes rogue or is irretrievably granted that power at some point in the future.
The advent of AI is likely a disaster for human agency, especially if it later develops malign rather than benign attitudes toward humanity. A benign AI is in no way guaranteed if we relinquish power to an immensely powerful technology that even its creators do not fully understand, and are not confident they can control.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
