The Auron MacIntyre Show - Can AI Replace the Managerial Elite？｜ 3⧸25⧸26

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00:00:16.000 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I am Oren McIntyre.

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00:00:46.400 hey guys if you have been following my channel for a while if you're familiar with my work at

00:00:53.060 all you know that managerial theory elite theory is something that i find very interesting it's a

00:00:59.960 realm of politics that i think is criminally understudied but one that i am obsessed with

00:01:05.420 so the nature of how managerial systems work together how they impact our politics and how

00:01:11.460 they lead us to particular conclusions in our political life. These are all things that I

00:01:17.100 really obsess over because I think that while this has already been a very dominant thing that we

00:01:22.860 have needed to understand since basically FDR and the New Deal, it continues to grow in importance

00:01:29.820 and it's shifting in very important ways. And one of the really important ways that is shifting is

00:01:35.840 AI. AI has a lot of possibilities to shake up pretty much every aspect of human civilization

00:01:42.500 from art to government to finance to the way that we work with each other, the way we even

00:01:48.180 understand our own existence. I think people who undersell the impact that ADI is going to have on

00:01:53.760 the entire civilization are really missing the boat on this. When I get that there are a lot of

00:01:57.940 technological advances that get oversold in their importance, but I really do believe that

00:02:02.340 artificial intelligence is going to be a watershed moment in a lot of areas. And one of those areas

00:02:07.520 is the way we organize our governments. AI is going to revolutionize the way that we understand

00:02:13.460 our interactions with the state, the way that the state can attempt to manage us, which is something

00:02:19.400 I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with. I'm certainly uncomfortable with, but something

00:02:23.720 we have to acknowledge that the state is always trying to do and will get better at doing as AI

00:02:28.780 steps into the frame so i want to start by playing you a clip from the ceo of cindel talking about

00:02:34.860 what they think ai is going to be able to do the the area of recklessness is the is the spending

00:02:46.060 of governments around the world who are all with little exception all spending well beyond their

00:02:51.820 means. That's the recklessness of this moment in history. This is not a parallel to the 1920s

00:02:58.780 in terms of the recklessness of the private capital markets. It's a story of the recklessness

00:03:04.680 of government spending. Within the private sector, there's a huge question as to where AI will take

00:03:10.600 us. And I was carefully taking notes and listening to what Larry has to say or to what Madame Lagarde

00:03:16.660 has to say because this is one of the big issues of our moment will AI create

00:03:24.040 the productivity acceleration that is honestly this hoped for in Washington

00:03:30.780 and in the halls of government around the world as a ways to overcome the

00:03:38.020 profit spending that we're currently engaged in like the world the world

00:03:42.220 needs a savior and the hope is that ai is the savior that we need for productivity and the

00:03:49.980 challenge with this is it is it may or may not be we just don't know yet the so you'll see there that

00:03:57.860 he used the word savior now interestingly a lot of silicon valley guys when they're being honest

00:04:05.660 about it will acknowledge that ultimately they see their construction of ai as possibly a

00:04:12.340 construction of a new deity of creating their own god and this is something that of course is deeply

00:04:18.820 ingrained in human existence we only have to go back to you know the the creation of the golden

00:04:24.120 calf by the uh hebrews as an example of how deeply it is ingrained in our human understanding to want

00:04:32.820 to create some form of God for ourselves, even when we know where the real thing is,

00:04:38.720 even if you've been following the real thing through the desert, ultimately it's very easy

00:04:43.920 for people to fall away and want to create their own God for many different reasons.

00:04:48.240 Because, of course, a God you create is also a God at some level that you think you understand

00:04:53.340 or you think that you can control or have influence over.

00:04:56.940 And this is obviously something that we want to tell ourselves as limited human beings.

00:05:02.820 And there's also a deep strain inside of, I think, particularly the Anglo understanding of the world to want to kind of replace God with a logical system, understanding that there is ultimately something that undergirds our reality, but we want it to be something that we control.

00:05:22.280 We understand that we can kind of grasp in a very physical sense.

00:05:26.480 And so in this way, an AI God could stand in for the divine and would be something we're far more comfortable with, even as we think of all the horrible implications that that could also carry.

00:05:38.860 Many of the same people who will talk about creating an AI God will also acknowledge that a lack of control over AI could have very disastrous results for the human race.

00:05:49.200 and so we have this weird pull towards creating something we know is possibly going to destroy us

00:05:58.300 at the very least will radically change the way that we live but we still feel compelled to bring

00:06:03.980 this thing into existence it's as if it's bringing itself into existence through us this is a process

00:06:10.240 that the philosopher nick land calls hyperstition and if you're familiar with my channel you also

00:06:15.700 know i'm going to use a good amount of nick land as i discuss this issue however it's very

00:06:20.480 interesting in this case that the citadel ceo talked about ai not just as a god but as a savior

00:06:27.260 and he says that it's the spending of these governments that is ultimately out of control

00:06:32.820 and perhaps ai can produce the level of productivity necessary to help us escape this scenario now

00:06:39.580 that's a very interesting admission because one of the things that i've speculated on routinely

00:06:44.640 when it comes to artificial intelligence is the possibility of it stepping in for the

00:06:51.160 current function of the managerial elite. So quick refresher, I've done many different videos and

00:06:57.220 written an entire book called The Total State on the nature of the managerial elite and the world

00:07:02.460 that they have created. But we're going to need some of those basics to have this discussion. So

00:07:07.320 I'll give you the cliff notes. But if you want a lot more, there are plenty of videos. In fact,

00:07:11.660 There's entire playlists of which this video will be part that lays out kind of the thesis about the managerial elite, who they are, what they do, how they came into being, and the implications for our social organization.

00:07:24.280 But as I've said before, scale is something that is incredibly difficult to achieve in human endeavors.

00:07:31.760 One of the things that we've seen over time is that there seem to be natural boundaries to human organization.

00:07:37.500 At first, it was something like the tribe, and eventually it evolved into something like the city-state. We saw empires of regional context and then perhaps continent-spanning empires and eventually global empires.

00:07:51.680 And at each stage of this increase in complexity, we've had to find new ways to administer our societies.

00:07:59.860 And the ways that we do this can vary quite greatly, especially as technological innovations change the way that we do things like communicate with each other.

00:08:08.700 We make deliveries.

00:08:10.060 We supply energy.

00:08:12.180 Just fundamental ways that our humanity can change as we scale up our civilization.

00:08:17.980 And each one of these, it comes very often from the increase in efficiency, more efficient processes allow for greater output, which tends to allow you to scale higher and higher.

00:08:30.340 However, to achieve this maximalization of industrial capacity, economic capacity, social organization, everything else, we've had to create rather artificial structures on which to kind of lay our social skeleton.

00:08:49.200 So one of the things that we've done is created these large bureaucratic institutions.

00:08:55.240 Now, bureaucratic institutions have existed on some level throughout history.

00:08:58.800 In fact, so one of the core points about elite theory is you tend to oscillate between more feudal societies and more bureaucratic societies.

00:09:07.480 And so we obviously had bureaucracies before we entered the modern age.

00:09:11.640 But the thing that makes the modern bureaucracy rather different is the level of technology that goes along with it.

00:09:18.520 the ability to mass communicate, to instantaneously conduct a meeting or distribute orders or move

00:09:26.560 dollars around, manipulate the economy at scale. These things create a very different environment

00:09:33.000 in which the velocity of information and dollars and everything else flows. And so it becomes

00:09:39.260 really important for us to have this social scaffolding that allows the government to

00:09:45.000 interact with its population and frankly manage its population in order to produce the efficiency

00:09:50.680 that generates the outcomes it needs to scale. So for instance, we've invested a whole lot in

00:09:56.940 large government bureaucracies, educational bureaucracies, media, economic institutions,

00:10:03.660 all of these things help us operate our societies at a much higher level than we would have if we

00:10:10.740 did not have them it allows us to have nations that are spanning continents or empires that even

00:10:17.640 span the world we have lots of global interactivity because of this managerial structure however the

00:10:25.480 managerial structure does have limitations for a couple of reasons one the managerial structure

00:10:32.340 requires us to become inhuman at some level the managerial structure is looking to strip out the

00:10:39.540 differences that different cultures, peoples, religions, folkways contain. Because the more

00:10:48.220 you can standardize the process, the more you can reliably produce the result. And really,

00:10:53.880 efficiency is very often about reliably producing the same result over and over again. If we know

00:10:59.620 what we're getting, even if what we're getting is not the best, then we can plan for it. And if we

00:11:04.360 can plan for it, we can manage it. And if we can manage it, we can make sure to increase the level

00:11:08.660 efficiency at which those processes operate. And so it's really important to managerial structures

00:11:14.160 that we don't have a lot of these issues like, oh, you have to take off a certain amount of time

00:11:20.180 because of a religious observance or because you have children or you're unwilling to go through

00:11:25.320 a particular process that makes the government more money or more powerful because you have

00:11:30.580 certain expectations about the way your community should interact. Well, these are all big

00:11:35.020 hindrances to managerial processes and they need to be stripped away. So turning people into less

00:11:41.960 human forms is a critical aspect of managerial theory. However, ironically, another limitation

00:11:49.120 on managerial theory is it ultimately is still human. There is still a human actor involved and

00:11:55.560 there's only so much efficiency you can derive from the human being itself. The human needs sleep,

00:12:01.800 The human needs rest. The human needs relaxation. They need to be paid. They need to have some kind of family interaction. As hard as our managerial elites are working to strip out these religious aspects and these familial bonds, eventually they're just degrading the quality of the very people they're attempting to manage.

00:12:22.400 Because when you strip away people's connections to their community, to their family, when you take away their purpose, their religion, when you take away all these other codes and all these other relations that truly embed us in a human society in order to scale us up into these managerial constructs, you're ultimately robbing us of what makes us happy.

00:12:43.060 And that's going to work for a while. But as you can probably see, as you look around you from the plummeting rates of happiness across pretty much all these metrics, you recognize that, no, there is a significant cost to this. Yes, we are scaling up. We are creating more efficiency, often in areas that don't really matter.

00:13:01.520 You know, we're really good at flat screen TV making, very cheap flat screen TV making, but we're miserable. And so like, ultimately, yes, you are creating these higher levels of economic output and trade and organization, but it's costing these populations something.

00:13:17.380 And ultimately, a lot of these CEOs realize that the burden of maintaining these human costs while trying to increase efficiency is a real problem.

00:13:31.760 So it's been a push for a long time to try to figure out how you can transcend even the limits of the managerial class, right?

00:13:42.140 Like we've scaled things up as high as we can get.

00:13:44.800 we've produced the most efficiency that we can out of these human systems we made them as inhuman

00:13:50.320 as we can while still operating them with humans right and this is if you watch anything if you go

00:13:56.480 back and watch like terry gilliams movie brazil or you look at other uh kind of dystopian future

00:14:03.480 understandings this is an aspect of technology that is recognized over and over again that it

00:14:08.940 locks humans into these deeply inhuman processes.

00:14:13.720 Even guys like Ted Kaczynski had the very wrong idea about how to solve this problem,

00:14:19.760 but wrote extensively about how it was a very real thing that was constantly impacting the well-being of humans

00:14:27.560 and had to change at some fundamental level.

00:14:30.520 However, the plan, it seems, as you're listening to a guy like the CEO of Citadel there,

00:14:36.940 is we're going to replace even the managerial class with AI.

00:14:42.780 And that AI is going to be far more efficient at what it's doing

00:14:47.000 because it doesn't need to take breaks and it doesn't have a family

00:14:50.420 and it doesn't need to go to church and it doesn't feel bad about not having that stuff

00:14:55.180 because it's always working.

00:14:56.520 It's always running these processes in the background.

00:14:59.120 It's far more efficient at doing many of the spreadsheets

00:15:02.100 and other like actuarial tasks and other core functions of managerialism.

00:15:08.280 Managerialism tends to be something that routinely wants to apply exactly the same process over

00:15:13.800 and over again to stand to standardize results.

00:15:16.780 And so in a way, we have already made our systems perfectly aligned with what AI wants

00:15:21.520 to do, because AI, at least in its current state, isn't going to do a lot of creative

00:15:25.740 problem solving.

00:15:26.720 But what it's very good at is reiterating on particular systems that have already been

00:15:31.520 thoroughly dehumanized so ai is going to be very good at sorting your bureaucratic messes you're

00:15:37.200 not going to need a dmb you're not going to need people operating any of these bureaucracies that

00:15:42.640 are currently uh critical to the operation of our modern world because you know ai is just going to

00:15:49.540 handle all that stuff now there's a lot of upsides to that right like we uh on the right especially

00:15:57.220 those of us who are probably often described as the distant right we recognize the evils of these

00:16:03.980 bureaucracies the need for them to go how they aren't really necessary to society but are often

00:16:10.440 just serving as you know jobs programs for our enemies patronage programs for opposing political

00:16:17.900 parties these kind of things and so we can i think legitimately say that there are a lot of positives

00:16:24.580 the idea that AI could ultimately liberate us from the need for human bureaucracies,

00:16:30.660 because that means that we're not going to have to interact with this stuff on a regular

00:16:34.240 basis.

00:16:34.880 In fact, in many ways, this was the core promise of neo-reaction.

00:16:40.020 Neo-reaction is a wide-ranging collection of different political outlooks, but broadly

00:16:45.340 falls under this understanding that there's something critical that needs to shift in

00:16:50.380 the core of the modern nation state in order to allow us to live in a better way. And one of the

00:16:56.660 ways that was often seen that that could occur in our X was technological innovation that ultimately

00:17:02.840 made smaller states possible. So what we've seen for a very long time, really for thousands of

00:17:09.600 years at this point, is that increasing complexity has had mostly advantages and very few

00:17:16.280 disadvantages. Now, over time, we've seen inefficient bureaucracies and sprawling empires

00:17:23.180 come apart. They reach the kind of the edge of the efficiency that they could produce through

00:17:28.320 their like proto-managerial regimes. They're kind of oligarchic or bureaucratic systems,

00:17:34.300 you know, the Byzantine systems that tend to crop up in late empire. So there were downsides to

00:17:40.680 maximizing you know the scale of your empire but it was mainly you wanted to get up as far as you

00:17:46.940 could to the edge of that without going over right like that was pretty much the goal and not everybody

00:17:52.200 succeeded in that in fact literally everyone failed that's kind of why there is this natural

00:17:56.420 life cycle of empires but what we've seen is over time every iteration of this uh the the impact of

00:18:03.740 scale got more and more powerful especially after we hit the age of discovery we hit kind of the

00:18:08.860 global capitalist network once we start having the ability to trade across borders and have

00:18:13.620 these economic advantages once we see science start to accelerate in its you know its discoveries

00:18:20.460 and its productions and interact with capital we see that this whole process speeds up quite rapidly

00:18:26.500 and the hope was like ultimately yes scale had been the answer for a long time but if we get

00:18:33.340 enough technology to overcome the advantages of just raw human beings raw number of human beings

00:18:40.380 then maybe that means we can scale society back down and this was what was often called patchwork

00:18:46.080 in neo-reaction the idea that you would have these little patches these mini states which you would

00:18:51.860 probably think of in more classic sense as a city state a place like singapore you know the old joke

00:18:57.100 is let there be a thousand Lichtensteins, this idea that these smaller sovereign areas could

00:19:03.500 start to emerge. And you can start to see how that might be possible in our modern age. Of course,

00:19:09.680 the big advantages of scale right now have been the ability to just move mass amounts of people,

00:19:17.820 mass amounts of economic force to produce a large amount of military force to leverage your mass

00:19:26.000 production and mass consumption as a overall advantage this has been why we keep seeing the

00:19:32.080 rise of larger and larger states that's why a place like europe considered turning into the

00:19:36.600 european union instead of just having smaller states because they figured out they had to start

00:19:40.860 competing with places like russia and china and the united states and they could not do it in

00:19:46.100 their current form you can go back to machiavelli and the desire to unify italy as an understanding

00:19:52.420 of why scale continued to be so much more powerful however we're starting to see scale hit its limits

00:19:59.460 right that that's kind of the whole point that's why they're looking for ai as a new way to do

00:20:04.420 things because scale has hit its limits and if ai introduces a way in which we can replicate the

00:20:10.240 advantages of a managerial bureaucracy but without the number of people or the number of resources

00:20:16.900 necessary to operate one, well, then we have a real discussion on whether or not we can scale

00:20:22.760 down our societies. Because if we're seeing the negative impacts of scale, we're seeing

00:20:28.540 the social disillusion, the loss of national identity, the loss of social fabric, the spiritual

00:20:35.080 degradation that occurs, the fact that your elites seem to separate and hold in contempt

00:20:41.780 uh the the homeland from which your empire sprung and we're seeing all these negative impacts maybe

00:20:47.540 we can avoid so many of those by scaling back down into more reasonably sized human communities

00:20:54.020 that can leverage the advantages of things like ai to still operate at a very high level we also see

00:21:00.380 of course increases in uh kind of these wildcat technologies that would allow a city state to

00:21:09.840 protect itself so things like drone warfare make it very clear that all of a sudden maybe you don't

00:21:15.820 need a army of you know millions of people to be a significant threat to those that want to

00:21:22.400 invade you perhaps simply having a well-placed set of tactical drones an understanding of how

00:21:29.620 to use certain technologies asymmetrical warfare could make you a dangerous enough target to where

00:21:35.420 most people, even those of larger sizes, are not going to want to attack your city state.

00:21:41.040 And so this creates a moment where we can start to consider shrinking back down into these much

00:21:48.620 smaller human arrangements. And that's important because in addition to solving all these other

00:21:53.640 problems of social scale, it also provides the possibility that we could have sovereignty at

00:21:59.300 this smaller unit of governance, which, again, just radically changes the way that humans can

00:22:05.360 understand a healthy order, a healthy social order. They don't have to always make the trade

00:22:11.180 of scale. There might be other options. Of course, there are problems with trying to scale down,

00:22:20.060 right? Like it doesn't mean that AI just has to be used to scale things down. In fact,

00:22:26.600 it's very clear from guys like the Citadel CEO, they're much more interested in using AI to

00:22:31.560 continue to scale up. AI could create these city states. It could create these smaller

00:22:38.040 civilizational zones, but it could also be used by the same people who are currently operating

00:22:43.940 these massive networks, these attempts to globalize human existence to achieve that

00:22:50.320 without costing them as much, right? Like they can ultimately just replace the managerial elite and

00:22:56.300 all of the negative consequences of maintaining these massive human bureaucracies. You can even

00:23:01.240 transcend the limitations of human organization functionally to scale up to the maximalist extent

00:23:07.920 and so we we while many people like myself if we're bullish on ai at all it can be as this way

00:23:16.540 to replace the managerial elite and allow for smaller civilizations and that's something

00:23:20.160 i hope ai does like i i have many many skepticisms of ai again if you watch this channel you know

00:23:26.900 that's true but the one upside the one continuous upside that i've been sold that i would like to

00:23:32.580 believe in that i think would be a true value to humanity is the removal of the need for mass

00:23:38.460 managerial systems in order to operate humanity at scale to maintain these massively scaled

00:23:44.180 civilizations but there's no guarantee that that's what ai gets used for even if it can produce that

00:23:50.160 outcome and i think it can i it doesn't mean that that's the only way it gets deployed and if it's

00:23:56.440 If AI enables the advantages of scale more efficiently, or at least at the same level of efficiency, as it does shrink down those advantages of scale to smaller nations, well, then ultimately these large civilizations that have both the advantage of scale and efficiency through AI will probably still win out, right?

00:24:18.040 so it does the opposite of solving our problem here and so we run into this very serious problem

00:24:25.560 because it becomes very clear that as we're hoping perhaps the ai brings about this revolution that

00:24:32.000 frees us from the tyranny of massive empire of globalistic understandings of civilization it

00:24:38.540 could also do exactly the opposite uh and we have to be very careful about how this gets done

00:24:45.260 Because if we are looking to transcend the limits of human organization, we are by definition looking to become less human, right?

00:24:59.240 Like that is one of the things that is critical about humanity.

00:25:03.220 If you think of somebody like Martin Heidegger, and he talks about Dasein, the nature of human beings, like the actual state of being.

00:25:12.640 And one of the things he says that really makes Dasein what it is, what makes human existence what it is, is its recognition of its own limitations.

00:25:21.860 It's turned towards its own mortality.

00:25:24.460 I will not live forever.

00:25:26.040 And because I will not live forever, my life has certain meanings.

00:25:31.160 Everything in my life has a very particular context that I cannot escape.

00:25:35.060 And unlike a rabbit or something else that does have mortality but is not conscious of that mortality, my consciousness of that ending, that limitation, really does radically alter the way that I behave.

00:25:49.900 And we see this again, you can look at, you know, tales like Interview with a Vampire or Highlander or Tuck Everlasting, if you remember that book from elementary school.

00:26:02.800 And these are might have been like the first time that you really contemplated what it would mean to live without limits, right?

00:26:10.180 What would it mean to live 100 lifetimes or 10 lifetimes or 1000 lifetimes?

00:26:15.580 How would that change your interaction with the world?

00:26:18.340 It wouldn't just be a small thing. Like the fact that you now have an eternity, that you now have a completely limitless existence from at least a temporal perspective is a radical change. Again, you can look at Lord of the Rings or you can look at even Warhammer 40k, you know, and these are fantasy properties or sci-fi properties in a lot of ways.

00:26:43.440 And of course, there's there's a silly aspect to this. But they if you look at the elves in those stories, they also kind of endure this change in understanding, right? Like they live very different lives than the limited creatures around them because they don't expect to have a natural death or at least not one for a very long time.

00:27:03.280 And so their existence is radically changed, like their ontological understanding is radically different, because they do not have that natural in that natural limitation. And the temporal example is one that I think is most relatable, because it's one that we've seen explored on a regular basis, when it comes to our fiction.

00:27:24.800 But one of the things that we haven't seen explored as much and really kind of, I think, popped into our consciousness later on, especially with something like the explosion of Baudrillard and the Matrix, you know, popularizing kind of his understanding is what happens if we transcend certain aspects of our humanity in a very real sense, not just our temporal humanity.

00:27:46.860 But what if we, you know, transcended our physical limitations, our limitations when it came to organizing our society?

00:27:55.320 What if what if those things change in an incredibly radical way?

00:27:59.120 What would that do to us as humans?

00:28:01.720 You know, a lot of people will point to very correctly to C.S. Lewis's fantastic book, That Hideous Strength, which was based off of his famous essay where he talks about men without chess.

00:28:14.560 You know, this is probably if you've heard C.S. Lewis quoted, you've probably seen something from these works.

00:28:21.180 And, you know, this is itself an exploration of many of these themes.

00:28:26.080 So it's something that I think has entered into the modern consciousness, especially once you kind of get to perhaps, you know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often kind of held up as the first sci-fi work.

00:28:37.500 But ever since we've had science fiction, it has at some level addressed this idea that we could transcend not just our mortality, but other aspects of our human existence and how that would warp and change us in very serious ways.

00:28:51.840 And I think we have to look at the same thing when it comes to how we organize societies. If we transcend all the classical limitations of the ancient city on levels of scale, on familial relations, religion, everything else, we fundamentally change the nature of humans in a way that we might not be able to get back.

00:29:14.200 That's kind of C.S. Lewis's point in the abolition of man is once you have created the last generation that knew those limitations, knew human nature, knew what it was to be human at your core, then it's possible that you could lose everything going forward because the next generation would simply have no understanding of humanity in a very real sense.

00:29:37.380 You would have abolished man because you would have taken all the limitations, all the things that are attached to what people will cynically call our meat suit, right?

00:29:48.440 And this is often, again, a dream that is nested in many classic desires.

00:29:55.420 Gnosticism is often pointed to as this desire to transcend the physical in a real way, the human limitation.

00:30:01.980 many spiritual practices are about pushing the body to its limitations to kind of reach

00:30:07.980 the ability to kind of touch the divine, the noumenal, the thing in itself in a way that

00:30:16.220 you could not do otherwise. And I think this is ultimately why many people, including guys like

00:30:21.860 Nick Land, who, again, I respect his thinking quite a bit, but whose objectives I often disagree

00:30:28.380 with. And one of the things that he often looks for is this Nietzschean transcendence of human

00:30:35.040 nature as such to achieve a higher existence beyond our physical bodies, like things like

00:30:41.520 space travel, things like exploring the galaxy, achieving certain scientific understandings,

00:30:49.040 and I think in his case, understandings of the world would require a disembodiment of human

00:30:54.600 intelligence and that's kind of what we're trying to do with ai here and that's i think what many of

00:31:01.280 these people are ultimately giving birth to whether they recognize it or not you know when i interviewed

00:31:06.400 nick land he said that the managerial elite were kind of this human security system against us

00:31:12.900 finally escaping uh into something different to making this you know nietzschean transcendent

00:31:18.900 move uh and there's probably some truth to that like there is something innately human

00:31:25.380 that is still wrapped up in the managerial elite even if they have made us less human

00:31:31.740 in their journey towards kind of our current society uh but i think that he might be wrong

00:31:38.280 about the role that the managerial elite are ultimately playing um perhaps he would see the

00:31:44.540 destruction of the managerial leader through ai as just kind of the final uh you know destruction

00:31:50.560 of the human security system and the the final leap to transcend but i don't think you would

00:31:54.900 even get to that point if it wasn't for these managers because one of the things you have to

00:31:59.000 remember about ai is while you think of it as something that just exists in your pocket when

00:32:04.120 you click on you know grok on twitter or you know gemini on google or something else ultimately

00:32:10.780 what you're really touching is a large amount of like actual physical resources that are being

00:32:17.040 expended we've already heard the explosions of ai and and how that's impacting different areas

00:32:23.400 uh ai companies buying up large tracts of land uh you know drawing huge amounts vast amounts of

00:32:29.860 power from the grid uh polluting water as they kind of create these these massive plants in

00:32:35.900 addition to creating these massive AI plants and the environmental and human impact that they're

00:32:41.000 causing they also create you know shortages and things like chips for your computer RAM and and

00:32:48.700 video processing chips and these are essential for people's day-to-day lives so as you get further

00:32:55.020 and further down this AI path it's becoming harder and harder to have like a personal PC experience

00:33:01.020 to have those things, but they are all being put into like these AI farms. And so you're being

00:33:06.380 removed from even that computing process. It's becoming more and more abstract to you as a human

00:33:11.760 being. You interact less and less with the physical components of computing and the digitization of

00:33:17.820 the world. And that becomes more and more this self-contained sealed off process that is occurring

00:33:22.980 away from human input, which is again, what Nick Land predicted in his theory of accelerationism

00:33:30.140 just so you understand when we're talking about technological techno capital acceleration we are

00:33:35.720 not talking about political acceleration that's a totally different thing the idea that you just

00:33:40.600 make things worse because that allows you to like build your utopia after the collapse of society

00:33:46.520 that is a completely different thing unfortunately that's become the popular understanding of the

00:33:50.940 phrase accelerationism so i just want to make that clear that's not what i'm talking about at 0.84

00:33:54.580 all that's a stupid ideology what i'm talking about is this techno capital acceleration that 0.56

00:34:00.800 brings us to the possibility of the singularity where where a non-human intelligence takes what 0.99

00:34:08.020 that which was human and brings it out somewhere else like take you know takes off to the stars

00:34:13.660 and this is really nick land's understanding that humanity is valuable in the sense that it

00:34:20.080 produces intelligence that intelligence itself intelligence for intelligence sake is the goal

00:34:26.060 it's not intelligence for the better of humanity or the continuation of your people uh but it is

00:34:32.120 uh the creation of intelligence for intelligence sake now land prefers different cultures for this

00:34:38.520 he says very specifically the anglo people have uh a incredibly high rate of production of

00:34:44.560 intelligence and have a unique ability to kind of create this Faustian transcendence. He also

00:34:52.000 has spoken about East Asian and Jewish intelligence as also being impressive and

00:34:58.260 could possibly be kind of melded into this project. But his whole point is ultimately

00:35:02.640 what we're looking for is this disconnection from the material. We want this creation of

00:35:10.440 intelligence that can do things that no other uh human could do that as long as humanity is bound

00:35:16.260 uh or intelligence is bound up to human concerns it will never reach its full potential he calls

00:35:21.800 this monkey business as long as as our intelligence is still trying to keep kind of our monkey bodies

00:35:27.580 alive in his words uh then it will never create this kind of utopian understanding or at least

00:35:33.280 this transcendent understanding utopian is the wrong word for for land he recognizes i think

00:35:38.000 many of the horrors that could come out of this but ultimately embraces them in the search for this

00:35:42.160 transcendence so i think it's a it's a very interesting moment uh because while a lot of

00:35:50.940 these tech companies are familiar with land's work i'm not sure they always understand the

00:35:56.660 implications of what they're doing i certainly don't think that the managers who are attempting

00:36:01.780 to swap out their current cadre with artificial intelligence really understand how possibly

00:36:08.980 irrelevant they could be making themselves i don't think they would be

00:36:12.060 so eager to engage in this if they thought they would come to that

00:36:16.700 however they really can't help themselves because a lot of the strategy that the managerial elites

00:36:26.420 have deployed has made it impossible for them to really continue to govern in any other way

00:36:31.300 You know, the manager elite have created these vast scales that they obviously like can't ultimately keep up with. As he said, the efficiency simply does not exist. And so they're out of road, really, when it comes to improving, you know, or increasing the control of the managerial bureaucracy, dehumanizing their populations.

00:36:51.600 But also because of some of the decisions made by the managerial elite to create this process, they've made their own governments more and more difficult to manage while increasing their scale.

00:37:01.460 So, for instance, one guy, Ed Dutton, has made the assertion, and I think this is largely correct, that Christianity was kind of the ultimate technology of scale previously, like before the modern world. 0.92

00:37:17.540 Because before Christianity, religion was largely very tribal. It was really tied to your ethnos, your people in a very definitive way. Usually, in many cases, you had household gods that couldn't even be worshipped by anyone outside of your household.

00:37:34.120 If you read The Ancient City by Fustel de Colange, you'll find him talking about how basically the Roman Empire had to break the idea of household gods and get everyone to worship kind of these more central gods before they could really create this larger civilization.

00:37:53.100 You couldn't have people having household-only gods or even city-only gods.

00:37:58.200 You need people to be centralized under these larger religious umbrellas.

00:38:02.020 that's why the cult of Diana and others became more popular because they allowed for larger

00:38:07.080 levels of social organization because people simply cannot interact with those that they

00:38:12.180 do not agree with religiously. This is why multiculturalism is a lie and why we're seeing 1.00

00:38:17.000 so many problems in our world right now because all politics is fundamentally theological and

00:38:22.980 you need to share a particular theology to ultimately have a similar goal. So one of the

00:38:28.780 things that christianity lets you do is maximally scale up uh civilization under the banner of

00:38:35.820 christendom even though you had these other tribes and ethnic identities that continue to exist

00:38:41.740 christianity had a nice balance of maintaining ethnic specificity and particularity without uh

00:38:48.180 you know without it didn't crush that but it also allowed you to cooperate with other christians

00:38:53.140 now that wasn't always the case of course there are many christian civilizations that fought each

00:38:56.700 other. But we do understand there was kind of this somewhat pan-European identity that existed

00:39:03.420 under what we call Christendom, right? And what tied that together, what allowed so many peoples

00:39:10.340 to kind of exist under the same banner at different times, was this idea of Christianity.

00:39:16.820 Now, what our managerial elites have done is turn our new theology into kind of secular humanism,

00:39:21.820 That's become the theological practice that ties our current empires and even our globalist

00:39:29.680 understandings together. However, as you bring in people from other dynamic cultures, you bring in

00:39:37.220 Muslims, you bring in Hindus, you bring in people who do not believe in Christianity and also don't 1.00

00:39:43.780 really subscribe to this secular humanism, then you start to see the clash of the theologies play

00:39:50.160 out right like you recognize these can't coexist now of course the idea from the globalists is

00:39:55.140 like well we'll just kind of globo homo islam before they caliphate us right like that's that's 0.96

00:40:00.760 and they've been winning that bet for a while but it's starting to to seem clear in places like

00:40:05.480 europe that it might lose that bet that actually it can't really do that anymore and this is a

00:40:09.840 huge problem for the managerial elite because they don't know how to handle like truly religious 1.00

00:40:14.700 people like they they don't they've been busy like wearing away the western european uh instinct

00:40:21.440 towards religion the christian instinct for religion for a long time uh but the the others

00:40:25.720 that haven't been in constant uh conflict like islam they they have the ability to come in there

00:40:31.300 and cause serious damage and so the idea is ultimately that ai could like solve this problem

00:40:37.860 because then i don't have to worry about the compatibility of islam with with hinduism and

00:40:43.740 with Christianity, because we've functionally made a God. We've functionally made a savior,

00:40:48.700 as the CEO said in that video, that exists at a top layer above everything else. It kind of has

00:40:54.900 this ultimate sovereignty that allows it to kind of dictate down to all these other religions.

00:40:59.940 And you can see this because they try to play this idea that our society is religiously objective.

00:41:06.860 Of course, that's not the case, but they sell us this idea. And it's largely predicated on the idea

00:41:12.200 that this secular humanism will take the place and become our political theology in a very real

00:41:19.240 sense. But we have more problems because AI is not itself neutral, right? Like AI is deployed

00:41:27.060 by someone. It's been programmed by someone. You'll notice that right before the war in Iran,

00:41:34.160 the Trump administration had like a real knockdown drag out with AI companies because the worry was

00:41:40.600 that they were building restrictions into what the AI would do when it was in the service of the

00:41:47.460 United States government. What will it target? Who will it kill? What information will it keep?

00:41:52.880 What will it collect? And that's a huge problem for a nation state, for a country that wants its

00:42:00.260 own sovereignty, because if there is some level of restriction built into your military technology

00:42:06.240 that is dictated by some outside force, you are no longer sovereign, right? If the US is not making

00:42:11.960 decisions on what it targets, who it targets, who it kills during a war, is it really a sovereign

00:42:18.020 nation? Or is there another layer of sovereignty that exists over top of it? If an AI company gets

00:42:23.720 to decide where your military goes and how it deploys and what it targets and all these things,

00:42:29.900 well then you don't control your military the ai company does and this is an incredibly dangerous

00:42:36.580 scenario and and then you know however you feel about the trump administration and the current

00:42:41.320 war in iran uh you can recognize the huge problem that's baked into this because the people who

00:42:46.960 design the software the people who create the ai well they're building their own presuppositions

00:42:52.860 into this right and so the ai is mimicking their understanding of the world it might

00:42:58.280 pervert it through different processes or its own reasoning but ultimately they are still feeding in

00:43:04.740 kind of the core text the core understanding and therefore the core theology that your ai has and

00:43:11.160 so a real question we might have to ask ourselves very soon is what religion is my ai

00:43:17.260 like that's a really really scary question but it might be one that becomes very important very

00:43:24.580 quickly. Because if we're turning over these decision-making patterns to AI, then that means

00:43:29.980 it will deploy the theology of those that programmed it to ultimately make massive decisions

00:43:36.280 about our lives. And if it's operating a global scale for a managerial elite that is looking to

00:43:41.180 maximize its reach, that means that we will probably have the most inhuman religion you 1.00

00:43:46.100 can imagine informing the morality of those that are making the most important decisions

00:43:51.340 for a civilization. Now, one of the underlying assertions of accelerationism is that changes in

00:43:59.340 AI are functionally inevitable. You can't stop them. And in fact, they're happening so quickly

00:44:04.280 that you can't even control them. And so much of this will take on a life of its own because we

00:44:09.860 simply as humans are seeing the decision space for ourselves collapse. We don't have time to

00:44:14.980 deliberate over where AI is going before it already gets there. And so it could be that all

00:44:19.820 these questions are largely irrelevant because the AI production will continue apace. But I will say

00:44:25.020 this, we still do not have this independent AI in any kind of energy efficient way. And so there's

00:44:32.800 also a real battle going on because AI requires this massive infrastructure, this incredible drain

00:44:39.260 on power, this destruction of the environment, which stands in real opposition to a lot of

00:44:45.400 people's well-being but especially like emerging concerns from the new right which finds itself to

00:44:50.760 be more and more environmentalist by the day am i gonna allow ai to destroy my homeland so that it 0.97

00:44:57.000 can scale up civilization for globalists how long can a civilization or especially a globe-spanning

00:45:03.500 empire based on ai operate if people start you know targeting ai centers and saying i don't want

00:45:10.700 this around anymore i don't want this controlling me and i know how to stop it these are very

00:45:15.440 fragile you know this is really a glass cannon uh that is being constructed it might be able to

00:45:21.420 scale up and create incredible amounts of efficiency if it's operating but we've already

00:45:25.880 seen with things like air travel and just-in-time delivery that our civilization is already losing

00:45:31.440 the ability to maintain uh these systems and so the real question is can ai race uh you know in

00:45:39.140 in a way that can develop quick enough to maintain itself where it doesn't need humans to do this

00:45:45.180 anymore and it doesn't have to take in to account the concerns of humans because otherwise there's

00:45:50.240 always the human option of simply you know destroying ai in its crib and kind of uh resetting

00:45:56.980 things which would itself have disastrous results so i don't have any immediate solutions to this

00:46:02.520 and i know this isn't like a a super uh happy episode but these are just things that i think

00:46:08.440 about, things that I'm trying to understand, things that I think are critical to the future

00:46:12.100 of our country, and I think our humanity as a whole, and things we are not thinking enough

00:46:17.600 about, in my opinion. So I just want to start the conversation with my own theories. If you have

00:46:22.560 some of yours, you have some input, by all means, please put it down in the comments below. I'd love

00:46:26.460 to see what you're thinking about this. But that said, let's go to the questions of the people.

00:46:33.680 Manahute says, the concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the

00:46:37.980 terrors of the future frank herbert dune yep yep fantastic and of course frank herbert thought a

00:46:43.960 lot about this before anyone else did uh also has the famous line famous line from dune about uh

00:46:49.120 you know men turning their thinking over to machines but then being ruled by other men who

00:46:53.300 understood how to use those machines uh all of these very relevant dune is a very relevant book

00:46:58.360 to today it's not it's not just star wars slop like dune is actually a pretty important book

00:47:02.740 uh jackson day says don't worry if it does create a productivity boost governments will just spin

00:47:10.040 that too yeah they will right which is kind of its own problem like the machine continues to

00:47:15.120 feed itself it continues to need to expand there's never enough uh for it but that that actually just

00:47:20.740 makes me more concerned a lot not less concerned because that means that even once we do achieve

00:47:25.580 like this maximalist efficiency from ai the desire will simply be to make things less human

00:47:31.200 to produce more ai centers to build more and more of our civilization to this other efficient form

00:47:37.100 of production we could be seeing the move from mass managerial structures uh to ai structures

00:47:43.740 as like a and at the same level of civilizational change in the same way that the industrial

00:47:49.340 revolution changed humanity and how it understands itself we might be seeing that with ai

00:47:54.580 uh david doden says scaling down administrators is a fool's errand many of them are invented

00:48:03.620 to create ethnic patronage network ai affirmative action admins say urban airport tsa is no better

00:48:10.980 yeah and again that's entirely possible and but this is true about ai in general right like one

00:48:15.920 of the problems with ai is it destroys employment across the board it'll destroy uh patronage

00:48:21.000 networks just as easily as it destroys all these other possible uh employment opportunities that

00:48:26.440 it's going to take from human beings so the automation of ethnic employment networks creates 0.99

00:48:31.020 its own problems that you know that they'll have to tackle but i really don't know how that will

00:48:35.880 ultimately be spun out he also says their concern is the national debt how can fink and buds deal

00:48:42.060 with a global government debt default america's remittance scheme still required to avoid their

00:48:49.720 usury schemes to blow up if ai replaces the usual the usury uh managers in a healthy way

00:48:56.520 uh then that is a win again possible you know entirely possible uh like i said this is one of

00:49:04.440 the few uh positive aspects of ai that i've had really explained to me like how will ai benefit

00:49:11.000 humanity uh this would be one uh though honestly i'm still pretty skeptical this is ultimately going

00:49:16.900 to be the way it is finally deployed all right guys well we're going to go ahead and wrap things

00:49:22.740 up but i want to thank everybody so much for watching it's been fantastic to speak with you

00:49:26.760 if it's your first time on this channel you need to go ahead and click subscribe on youtube bell

00:49:31.540 notification all that stuff so you know when we go live if you want to get these broadcasts as

00:49:35.960 podcasts you need to subscribe to your macintyre show on your favorite podcast platform and when

00:49:40.060 you do leave a rating or review it really helps with the algorithm magic which i know is a little

00:49:45.100 ironic after the speech. Thank you everybody for watching. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 25, 2026

Can AI Replace the Managerial Elite？｜ 3⧸25⧸26

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 25, 2026

Can AI Replace the Managerial Elite？ ｜ 3⧸25⧸26

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Can AI Replace the Managerial Elite？｜ 3⧸25⧸26