As we are warned by the rosiest, roundest, and reddest beauty in all Spithead in HMS Pinafore: “Things are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream; Highlows pass as patent leathers; Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.”
How many times have you seen an image shared on Twitter or Facebook and taken it at first glance, before realising it was AI generated? When the technology was a little more crude and less widely available, maybe it would have taken you far less time to spot the tell-tale signs — hands with seven fingers, arms at odd angles, objects upside down. But the more it has proliferated, the more difficult it has become to see the robotic hand at work.
It’s no senseless moral panic to be concerned about people’s inability to differentiate between real and false. When people’s eyes are deceived, there is the obvious risk of fraud. But there is also often a fear generated that leads people to embrace damaging authoritarian ideas. When you see a “forwarded many times” photo of a 5-year-old joyriding a Bugatti Veyron on Facebook, there are obvious problems when the conclusion is that we should ban Top Gear from the TV rather than asking why the AI generated car has three gear sticks.
There are clear parallels with our reactions to the malign influence of the state. Much like the ubiquity of computer generated images, we are so surrounded by state interference that we have lost the ability to differentiate between something that upon first glance appears to be a negative externality arising from the frictions of people interacting freely within a society, and what is a second order effect of meddling by central planners (“The Gentleman In Whitehall”).
While the consequences of people struggling to differentiate AI from truth can be unpleasant, we have long recognised the damage that can be caused to society by a breakdown in trust. But we need to regain the instinct to look for the crude hand of central planning in our society.
Look at the growing demands for bans of the wearing of burkas, as well as the outrage over elected officials promoting segregationist Islamic practices, all eliciting calls for the state to Do Something. We’re so surrounded by a state telling us that they are doing their very best to protect us from the negative effects of immigration, that we struggle to see the problems that are generated by the state itself.
I’ve written before about the perils of demanding state intervention in extremis, and I repeat myself only because it is such a pitfall. If we want a free and prosperous society, you don’t fight socialism with more statism. Instead of calling to ban items of clothing or imposing norms on freedom of assembly, we should instead have the instinct to first of all go through these scenarios with a fine tooth comb and strip away taxpayer subsidy wherever we find it. We should do this because removing state-engineered economic pull factors more often than not resolves imported cultural incompatibilities, but also because it is not moral for the state to be subsidising immigration.
Immigration is perhaps the most confusing topic for those that would under most circumstances err on the side of liberty and prefer freedom from government intervention. After all, if the state is so crap at deciding which cars everyone should drive, why should it be trusted to pick winners and losers at the border? It mostly comes down to how freedom of movement butts up against the rights of the natives of a given country. By opening up borders to foreigners without restriction, the state allows access to public goods (not just healthcare and education, but all areas of the commons; roads, parks, public squares), with these new arrivals acting as free riders and imposing external costs on the natives of that country. Anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action programmes, and other forced integration measures are common examples of where the state will often override the wishes of natives or force them into accepting conditions that they would otherwise object to. Witness the huge anger from native British communities towards the state bussing asylum seekers into hotels in their area — the lack of clearly-defined property rights meant that they only had incredibly weak recourse to prevent free riding effects, and they demonstrated their frustrations accordingly. Every election of the last 30 years has been won by a party promising to limit the negative externalities of immigration, but the migrant hotel crisis shows that voting has demonstrably been an ineffective mechanism to obtain real protection for the rights of the incumbent population.
To better understand why much of what can be mistakenly attributed to “too much freedom” and lead to appeals for authoritarian measures, we should consider what immigration would look like in a truly privatised “anarcho-capitalist” system — not because we are necessarily holding it up as an ideal, but to better understand why it is so important to view immigration disputes through the prism of a failure of statism.
In this purely privatised system, every inch of land would be held in private ownership. Every tree and blade of grass, every road, every hospital, every square would be privately owned either by an individual, or by a group bound by contract. It’s easy to see how these private communities could compete to “back winners” if they believed that immigration was desirable, but immigration into these spaces would be subject to the permission of the person or corporation and could also be rescinded. Travel between privately owned places would be conducted with contracted agencies ensuring that passengers did not infringe upon the property rights of those traversed, and so on and so forth, and as the economist Jesús Huerta de Soto puts it: “with a variety and wealth of social arrangements and juridical and economic institutions that we cannot even imagine today, since the market and entrepreneurial creativity are not allowed to act in relation to the goods which are, today, considered public.”
Could asylum seeker hotels operate within such a system? Of course they could. It is likely that a wide spectrum of communities would voluntarily engage in contracts to pool resources, and it is perfectly possible that such a community might choose to freely give consent for foreign nationals to access their private property and that they may also choose to provide financial assistance to those people. But unlike the status quo, the burden would fall entirely upon those who have given consent, rather than those that have that burden foisted upon them by a central planner in Whitehall. Private property rights and charity are not opposing ideas, but we can learn from this system that if we want to limit the social costs arising from frustrated outbreaks of violence, we should seek to minimise negative externalities falling on the native population. In the longer term, trending towards a system with stronger private ownership of resources would be effective, but until this can be achieved, access to public goods for immigrants should be heavily restricted to prevent these conflicts of interest.
Without the economic pull factors that currently exist in Britain … the size of those communities would be so small they would be barely noticeable
Similarly, is it feasible that we could have similar communities to those that we currently find in Britain, where foreign nationals engage in cultural and religious practices that are at odds with social harmony? Again, it is perfectly possible. But that behaviour would be limited to those private spaces where consent has been given. Without the economic pull factors that currently exist in Britain arising from its huge and generous welfare state, I suspect, the size of those communities would be so small they would be barely noticeable — if they existed at all. Where those communities existed, the conflict between their cultural norms and those of the native population would be reduced to close to zero.
Turning to voting rights, recent local elections in the UK showed us why it is prudent to restrict access to the polling booth for those immigrating to a new country and culture — or else those mechanisms of coercion can be used to easily capture policies of income distribution and exacerbate externalities imposed on the native population. Maheen Kamran, a pro-Gaza candidate, won a council seat in Lancashire after campaigning in favour of segregation between the sexes. But to turn again to our anarcho-capitalist model, what would voting look like in such a system? In all likelihood it would be a bit of a non-event and elections would have about as much significance in your life as the reminders you get through the post that you have the right to vote in the upcoming AGM of the company you own half a dozen shares in. A privatised community would have little to no scope to vote your way into receiving the fruits of the labour of others. Where you were the voluntary member of a community, and you felt that a vote would impose values upon you that you did not agree with, you could simply break that contract, fulfilling pre-agreed conditions for its termination. Rather than the huge, emotionally charged events that they are in many societies today, leaving a community following an unsatisfactory election result would be as straightforward as cancelling a gym membership because you were unhappy with the music being played. The lesson to be learned is that elections should matter far less than they currently do — as Murray Rothbard said on the issue: “Voting (…) is at best, an inefficient instrument for self-defence, and it is far better to replace it by breaking up central government power altogether.”
The Soviets famously thought that the problems of allocation of resources in the absence of the law of value, money, financial prices for capital goods and private ownership of the means of production could be solved with ever greater computing power — “a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion (…) beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest.” It’s not unreasonable to think that AI could fulfil this role. But the more powerful the engines, the more faithful the mimicry of true art, the more profoundly you are struck by the uncanniness. It has all the hallmarks of “art” but it is soulless and lacks the creativity of human genius.
We should never … trade the social order of free peoples for the artificial construct of the state planner
When we fail to recognise the difference between the real and the fake — the product of spontaneous order and the centrally planned — we fall into the same traps of central planners themselves. We become unwilling to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognisable as the product of intelligent design. We demand that society is remade as “the product” of those believed to have “superior” thinking minds, and we end up wrecking society in our attempts to save it.
We should never underestimate the ability of human action to create art and innovation that no computer could ever dream of, and by the same measure should not trade the social order of free peoples for the artificial construct of the state planner.
