AI is a Performance of Progress, Not the Real Thing
This article first appeared in Fax ad Noctem on December 10, 2025.
Despite driving "growth", AI is failing to improve anyone's life, and its harms are piling up.
Progress is an old idea. An ancient one, in fact. We can find the earliest progress narratives scratched into the first stone tablets at the dawn of recorded history. Progress narrative formulas have long been entwined with what some call “civilization.” Progress narratives primarily exist to justify the endless expansion of such societies, and the extraction—of natural resources, of energy from human and animal labor—on which that expansion always depends.
Listen to our podcast interview with Samuel Miller McDonald about his book, Progress: A History .of Humanity’s Worst Idea
Today, the word for such extraction-driven expansion is “growth,” and indeed, economic growth and progress have become almost synonyms. In the US, most growth today is driven by one sector: investment in artificial intelligence, “AI” being a catchall term for several kinds of technology, like large language models, image generators, and machine learning. One Harvard economist recently claimed that AI investments accounted for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. As such, AI is also one of the main focal points for the current narrative of progress.
Economic growth is otherwise stagnating. The idea of progress in US politics is discredited almost daily, with assaults on democratic institutions, skyrocketing inequality, declines in well-being indicators like life expectancy, rising pollution, deteriorating environments, and the Obama-era promise of racial egalitarianism long since dashed to pieces (well before the end of that era, it should be noted). And so, those at the top of the political-economic hierarchy seek a new spectacle to restore the public’s faith in the country’s ability to achieve growth and progress. While the world’s two richest investors have put some money into space travel as a pageant of progress, most of the big money—including that of the aforesaid individuals—is getting bet on AI. Proponents of this investment claim that AI will lead to rapid medical advancements, provide art- and knowledge-generating tools to the masses, free human beings from labor, and eventually achieve such omniscience as to make human decision-making, thought itself, obsolete.
But while AI may be making some elite revenue lines bend upward, is it really “progress”? Which is to say, can it be said to be improving life, on the whole?
It would be reasonable to see the AI rollout as history’s most diversified form of mass theft. The initial “training” of generative AI programs involved stealing copyright-protected intellectual property across fields of knowledge production, the arts, media, virtually every form of culture. Many jobs, too, are threatened by this act of theft. An IMF study predicts up to 60% of jobs being threatened by AI. Billboards sparked outrage in New York admonishing businesses to “stop hiring humans” and use the company’s AI instead. What do we think will happen to those made jobless, or even unemployable, by AI interventions? Can we really believe—and maintain an adult’s incredulity—that such people will simply be taken care of by benevolent states and corporations? That the wealthy will hand away the money they’ve accrued to sustain these unlaboring lives? Elon Musk currently holds wealth sufficient to fund 108,000 American lifetimes. He has remained historically tightfisted with that wealth. Who will make him fund those lifetimes? It seems likelier that the victims of job theft will be forced to work in some horrendous condition without pay, either in prison labor or the return of some market-based slave labor.
More fundamentally to survival, AI data centers are stealing basic needs, like water, clean air, land, and energy. Water has been diverted from residential sources to cool data centers while land has been gobbled up, sometimes at public expense, that might otherwise house wildlife and human beings. Energy prices have exploded upward to power data centers that typically don’t pay for the electricity themselves, passing the bill onto other consumers. Consequences of this criminal behavior go beyond the immediate: AI, as one CNBC headline proclaimed, is making new billionaires “at a record pace.” Such macroeconomic theft moves wealth from many into ever-fewer hands, a process that contributes to the erosion of democracy, freedom, and mass well-being.
Meanwhile, AI is degrading learning outcomes among students, despoiling existing creative works, and undermining the integrity of information. These problems may be more abstract, but have real-world consequences. The legal system has been plagued by non-existent court cases invented by AI. Embedding AI in every tool is creating a dependency that renders human beings less competent, even while those tools themselves are less functional than the original programs they replaced. The negative impacts of AI-induced cognitive decline on whole populations would cascade through every sector of society, and may become permanent. So much for generating knowledge.
Its negative public health impacts, too, are myriad, with data centers contributing to pollution that causes cancer while also creating or exacerbating water and energy scarcity. Data centers are already emitting large quantities of carbon dioxide and, in some cases, wiping out carbon reductions that had occurred, even as they are expected to emit far, far more into the future. Public mental health is just as vulnerable. There have been cases of AI programs that have triggered psychosis and manic episodes, compelled people to commit suicide, and, by providing a simulation of intimacy, further alienated already lonely people from others. OpenAI revealed that more than a million people per week discuss suicide with ChatGPT.
On top of all this, there’s the less quantifiable yet perhaps more spiritually heinous problem of handing over the sacred act of creation to a soulless algorithm, and the soulless executives that own them. It’s bad enough to remove this miraculous process from a creature with the divine spark of consciousness and give it over to an inert profit-generating theft machine. To actually prevent human hands and minds from creating art and knowledge, all the hours of numinous struggle condensed into some recognizable form, so that someone, talentless, can make money off a program that generates a mangled, perverse simulacrum of art and knowledge reveals the spiritual corruption of the times.
In line with this spiritual corruption is the fact that AI is increasingly coalescing around tyrannical uses, like augmenting surveillance, integration with drone warfare, and automating vehicles. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently said, “The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI.” Whatever scant legitimacy surveillance and drones may arguably have from a defense perspective has been utterly decimated by the lawlessness of the governments wielding them, including the present administration, and their willingness to turn such weapons against their own citizens and innocent civilians. Removing human decision-making and accountability from such heinous technologies reduces its legitimacy even further, fatally so.
Listen to our podcast interview with Samuel Miller McDonald about the elite panic surrounding declining fertility rates.
Overwhelmingly, it has been the fascist end of the political spectrum using generative AI to produce propaganda. It is yet another tool designed for the triumph of the lazy and vicious over the earnest and virtuous. Just last week, a story broke about an AI startup caught using sweatshop labor to spy on US citizens. Has there been any place, in any period of recorded history, in which new technologies such as these that can be used for forcing labor and population control have not been put toward such ends?
There may be some positive uses of AI. Some medical diagnoses may genuinely improve with such interventions. Some tedious tasks, like, say, audio transcription, may be made a little less arduous (though they will always need human quality control intervention). The most grandiose predictions about AI surpassing human intelligence or eradicating the need for human labor are unlikely to occur. Advancements in the technology are already slowing and are likely to hit hard walls. But even if some of the more modest benefits are eventually delivered, will they outweigh all the harms? Could they compensate for even just one of those harms, like increasing atmospheric warming and all its associated catastrophes, or contributing to generational cognitive decline, or stealing someone’s labor?
AI may be a bubble that grows unchecked and then bursts and takes the economy down with it. Or it may deliver sustained growth in returns to investors, for a while. Either way, as with so many other examples of growth and narratives of progress, it is unlikely to deliver anything but pain and suffering to most people’s lives. In the past, many instances of what people have called “progress” have in fact wound up harming most people and degrading environments. “Growth” has typically benefited wealthy investors and well-connected political elites the most, and most often to the exclusion and at the expense of the rest of us. In most of these cases, though, the solution hasn’t been as easy and simple as it is with this one. Luckily, it’s early enough that we can still see how irrational AI really is. And with this problem, all we have to do is pull the plug.
