How AI Is Splitting the Right - The American Conservative
How AI Is Splitting the Right - The American Conservative
摘要: Politics
How AI Is Splitting the Right
Conservatives are divided on how to approach the technology.
Featured in the September/October 2026 issue
正文
Politics
How AI Is Splitting the Right
Conservatives are divided on how to approach the technology.
Featured in the September/October 2026 issue
Luke Nicastro
Aug 22, 2026
12:03 AM
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One of the many drawbacks of living in an era of ultra-polarization is that politics have become quite boring. It may seem odd to say that in the Age of Trump, when every week brings some new bombshell, but when we consider politics
politics—that is, as a serious attempt to answer the question of who gets what, when, and how—there is a depressing predictability to the positions taken by the major actors. From abortion to tax policy to voter fraud, the battle lines are drawn, the incentives clear, the tracks well-worn.
AI is different.
It is extremely new, for one thing. ChatGPT, which debuted in November 2022, is younger than my preschooler.
It is also enormously powerful. One used to hear AI lampooned as a kind of Mechanical Turk—able to recognize and predict patterns, perhaps, but leagues away from anything that looked like human reasoning. No longer. Today, few doubt either the sophistication of its capabilities or the vast range of its applications.
And it is very poorly understood, both on a technical level (researchers have disturbingly
characterized
it as a “black box”), but also in terms of the potential effects on our society. AI might usher in a utopian age of mass affluence—or throw millions out of work and into a permanent underclass. It seems equally capable of providing undreamt-of power to states (24/7 nationwide surveillance, robot super-soldiers, the works) and enabling any old psychopath to build a weapon of mass destruction in his garage. It could immensely enhance the intellectual attainments of our species, or lead to the functional extinction of critical thinking and basic cognitive skills. And so on and so on.
It is, in other words, that rarest of things—an important political issue a