Josh Hawley is a Republican senator from Missouri. The following are remarks as prepared by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Sept. 4 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.
It is always such a pleasure to be with you. In a city characterized by much talk, much of it frivolous (I mean, have you been to the Senate recently?), the National Conservatism Conference has become known as a place for serious conversation about the most important political institution we share: the republic.
I want to attempt my own small contribution to that conversation this morning, and I thought I might start with a story, an old one, maybe one you remember from your school days—the epic of Gilgamesh, the mythical King of Uruk. His adventures are among the oldest writings we have, recorded on twelve tablets of clay dating from approximately 2100 BC.
The first few tablets rehearse Gilgamesh’s exploits as a builder and warrior and introduce us to a number of themes that become recurring hits in later mythology. He spurns a marriage proposal arranged by the goddess of love, for example, and then loses a friend in the inevitable revenge tour.
But by the ninth and tenth tablets, Gilgamesh has developed a new fear—death, and a new obsession—escaping it. He embarks on a mighty quest to find a survivor of the Great Flood (a sort of stand-in for Noah), with the purpose of asking him how to cheat mortality. The answer, he learns by tablet 11, is a plant that renews youth—forever. A veritable tree of life. Armed with this knowledge, Gilgamesh makes a diligent search and eventually finds it—only to watch the plant be consumed, in the last instant, by a serpent, that anti-human symbol of chaos and evil.
So, Gilgamesh must return to Uruk, still mortal—but still human.
For ancient auditors, the moral was plain: our humanity is joined to our mortality. Our dignity is bound up with our frailty. Our human lives—as finite as they may be—are worth living.
Or to put it in the resonant language of the Bible that has formed so much of our tradition, we are creatures, not deities—and that is no failing. “We have these treasures in jars of clay,” the Apostle Paul said. The glory of the creature is to display, in all his frailty, the wonder of the Creator. It is not to be a god.
That lesson has not been learned, apparently, by some of America’s leading citizens. There is nothing new under the sun, as the Bible also says, and the quest of Gilgamesh to cheat death may be the hottest thing going among the most powerful people in America today: the tech barons of Silicon Valley.
Not content with addicting our kids to their gizmos or amassing fortunes the size of lesser European states, our tech elite has turned with rabid enthusiasm to artificial intelligence. They hail it as the greatest breakthrough for humanity since the Industrial Revolution, maybe the printing press. They predict it will centuple American economic output. They insist it will defeat China. They claim it “will save the world”—that is an actual quote.
Of course, it will also make them additional, ungodly sums of money. But that does not seem to explain the religious fervor of AI’s loudest advocates. There is something else going on, something more ideological. No, only the less cautious articulate the real reason, what many quietly believe: that AI will reinvent human existence.
The eugenicist Julian Huxley predicted this as far back as 1957. He wrote then that “a thousand million years of evolution” would lead to a moment when man, harnessing his “modern control of physical nature” would “transcend himself”—would achieve a new state of being. Today’s technologists believe that moment is now.
For Huxley, this was a religion all its own. “I believe in transhumanism,” he liked to say. And so do untold numbers of today’s tech class.
That is the vision—the religion and ideology—that animates so much of the breathless race for artificial intelligence … and for artificial general intelligence … and super-intelligence, and beyond: for the day when humans are no longer embodied beings at all but live infinitely in the cloud.
The technologists have discovered Gilgamesh’s plant, they believe. The question is, can America survive their quest for immortality? Can the republic?
I suggest to you the answer is no, and for one simple reason. America is a nation founded on the idea of the common man. The American republic is premised on his worth and his liberty. But the transhumanist ideal rejects the common man’s worth. And artificial intelligence threatens the common man’s liberty.
To state it in the clearest terms, then: Americanism and the transhumanist revolution cannot coexist. And it is our job to see that Americanism wins.
When it comes to transhumanist ideology, it does seem easy to dismiss at one level. All those ultra-billionaires sleeping in pressure-controlled chambers and applying their youth serums, taking a hundred supplement pills a day and monitoring their every bodily function—the picture is fairly absurd.
And anyway, if the friendly neighborhood billionaire wants to spend his fortune trying to live forever, why should I care? Do as you please.
But there is a more sinister aspect to the transhumanist ideal, one that Julian Huxley, the eugenicist, inadvertently captured. When he wrote, back in 1957, about the new kind of human existence science would make possible, he was all too clear about just who would be leading humanity to this exalted state.
“The universe is becoming conscious of itself,” he said, “in a few of us human beings.”
In a few of us. There is the clue. Huxley could wax eloquent about the universe appointing man “director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution”—much as today’s transhumanists rhapsodize about living to the twenty-fifth century and curing every known disease for the sake of mankind. But Huxley didn’t mean it and neither do his successors.
When Huxley said Nature or the Universe or whatever had given “man” the opportunity to redirect human evolution, he did not mean all men, anymore than today’s transhumanists believe their billion-dollar health regimens will be accessible to all people. Huxley meant some men. He meant “a few of us.” The better sort. The anointed. The elite.
And transhumanism is, when you think about it, an elite project by definition. It is all about overcoming the common and ordinary experiences of mankind: common limits, common weaknesses, common lives … even common loves. The goal is to replace “the common” with something else. Which means replacing common people.
Consider: The farmer, the assembly-line man, the construction worker with his hard hat and hammer: all these men live by their bodies, by their labor. There is no place for them in the transhumanist utopia, where all is silicon. They are precisely what must be transcended.
Huxley was explicit about this. The “quality of people, not mere quantity, is what we must aim at,” he said. Science must deliver the right sort, who live the right kind of lives. “Ugly [and] depressing towns are immoral,” was another of his pronouncements. After all, beauty and aesthetics were what mattered. Not people, not working people—for what could common men know of that refined excellence only a rare mind like Huxley’s could confect.
And here transhumanism shows its true ethic. The disdain for what they call human feebleness and infirmity turns out to be a disdain for humanity itself.
Transhumanists disparage the body because it gives way. They dislike the limits of mind that prevent omniscience. They deprecate frailty and need and any aspect of human life that might make them dependent on another in any way—anything, in short, that suggests they are creatures, rather than gods.
Like Gilgamesh, they seek the flower of immortality. But in consuming it, or attempting to, they become serpents instead. For make no mistake, at the heart of all this ambition is the will to power.
The common man’s dignity? Please. The transhumanist types have nothing but contempt for the common man because they want to rule in his place. Forever.
Which brings me to that second strand of the American experiment, the common man’s liberty.
Well, how has that been going over the last, say, twenty years? Think about it. Every so-called innovation the tech class has delivered in recent decades operates as a power transfer, and all of it one-way: from us to them.
Smartphones that addict our children. Social media platforms that monitor and record our every click, every pause, every purchase, every preference. Algorithms to turn our attention into a commodity and sell it, over and again.
There is virtually nothing you know about yourself that Big Tech does not also know—and profit from. And entirely without your consent.
They are in charge, not you. They control the information, much of the news—and entertainment. They decide who can speak and who not.
Now, does that sound like liberty to you?
And the problem with the AI “revolution” as it’s currently going is that it only entrenches the power of the people … who are already the most powerful in the world. Imagine a future—a not too-distant future—where AI is deployed across the economy, across the country. We are well on the way to this future now. And we are told by AI boosters of the remarkable efficiencies it will bring. The papers written in seconds. The contracts drafted instantly. The algorithms that write themselves. Productivity like we’ve never seen.
But here’s the flip side: millions of Americans out of work. That’s not any conspiracy theory, by the way. That’s what the tech titans openly tell us. One CEO recently predicted half of entry-level, white-collar jobs could be gone in the next five years. Half.
Think about this: There are 3.5 million truckers in this country, the real backbone of our commercial economy. And twice as many more earn money driving for outfits like Uber—and even more are taxi drivers and delivery drivers.
Self-driving vehicles will put them all out of work—near instantly.
The earthquake will reach manufacturing next: AI-enabled robots that will automate entire sections of the U.S. economy. And then the service sector, which I mentioned a moment ago. Those entry-level jobs at Wendy’s or McDonald’s? Gone. Bank jobs, customer-service jobs: gone.
The AI enthusiasts rush to say all these losses will be replaced—and more! But with what, exactly? Sweeping floors at a data center?
Here is my point. AI is fulfilling transhumanist goals whatever its boosters may believe. And if it proceeds undirected, the tech barons will be more powerful than ever. That much is obvious. But we will also find ourselves contending with a caste system of a new and cruel type. Genetically modified ‘perfect’ humans ruling over ‘imperfect’ ones—all with the help of the most powerful technology yet known to man. Whatever else that is, it is not liberty.
Thus far, the AI revolution is proceeding on transhumanist lines. It is working against the working man, his liberty and his worth. It is operating to install a rich and powerful elite. It is undermining our most cherished ideals. And insofar as that keeps on, AI works to undermine America.
But this is only one possible future; not the future. We can achieve something different. It is time to change the game: to make AI work for people, and not the other way around; to enhance our liberty, not destroy it; to protect our livelihoods, not dismantle them. But to conform this new technology to our oldest principles will require action, and it will require action now. I suggest efforts along the following lines.
First, we must guarantee the right of every American to pursue a vocation. And a vocation is something more than sweeping the floor of a data center. It means meaningful work by which a man can provide for himself as his family.
A good job is not an ornament to a life well-lived; it is the heart of it. A man who cannot work—for whom there is no work to do—cannot support a wife or children, cannot provide for his future, cannot enjoy any measure of independence or the satisfaction that comes from earning something for himself. This is a man who is not free. And we must not allow that to be the fate of men and women in America.
When God created Adam and Eve, he gave them purposeful work: vocations. We must commit ourselves now, as a society, to seeing that meaningful work is available for every able-bodied American.
AI can be used to make workers more productive, to encourage and multiply their labor—but it should not be used simply to replace them. Most jobs should be reserved for humans. Only humans should drive cars and trucks. Only humans should enter into contracts. Only humans should advise on critical medical treatments or act as legal agents. I say again, AI should serve human beings, not the other way around.
Second, I believe Americans should have the ability to defend their human data, and their rights to that data, against the largest copyright theft in the history of the world.
Millions of Americans have spent the past two decades speaking and engaging online. Many of you here today have online profiles and writings and creative productions that you care deeply about. And rightly so. It’s your work. It’s you.
What if I told you that AI models have already been trained on enough copyrighted works to fill the Library of Congress 22 times over? For me, that makes it very simple: We need a legal mechanism that allows Americans to freely defend those creations. I say let’s empower human beings by protecting the very human data they create. Assign property rights to specific forms of data, create legal liability for the companies who use that data and, finally, fully repeal Section 230. Open the courtroom doors. Let the people sue those who take their rights, including those who do it using AI.
Third, we must add sensible guardrails to the emergent AI economy and hold concentrated economic power to account. These giant companies have made no secret of their ambitions to radically reshape our economic life. So, we ought to require transparency and reporting each time they replace a working man with a machine.
And the government should inspect all of these frontier AI systems, so we can better understand what the tech titans plan to build and deploy.
Ultimately, when it comes to guardrails, protecting our children should be our lodestar. You may have seen recently how Meta green-lit its own chatbots to have sensual conversations with children—yes, you heard me right. Meta’s own internal documents permitted lurid conversations that no parent would ever contemplate. And most tragically, ChatGPT recently encouraged a troubled teenager to commit suicide—even providing detailed instructions on how to do it.
We absolutely must require and enforce rigorous technical standards to bar inappropriate or harmful interactions with minors. And we should think seriously about age verification for chatbots and agents. We don’t let kids drive or drink or do a thousand other harmful things. The same standards should apply to AI.
Fourth and finally, while Congress gets its act together to do all of this, we can’t kneecap our state governments from moving first. Some of you may have seen that there was a major effort in Congress to ban states from regulating AI for 10 years—and a whole decade is an eternity when it comes to AI development and deployment. This terrible policy was nearly adopted in the reconciliation bill this summer, and it could have thrown out strong anti-porn and child online safety laws, to name a few. Think about that: conservatives out to destroy the very concept of federalism that they cherish … all in the name of Big Tech. Well, we killed it on the Senate floor. And we ought to make sure that bad idea stays dead.
We’ve faced technological disruption before—and we’ve acted to make technology serve us, the people. Powered flight changed travel forever, but you can’t land a plane on your driveway. Splitting the atom fundamentally changed our view of physics, but nobody expects to run a personal reactor in their basement. The internet completely recast communication and media, but YouTube will still take down your video if you violate a copyright. By the same token, we can—and we should—demand that AI empower Americans, not destroy their rights . . . or their jobs . . . or their lives.
The epic of Gilgamesh is a cautionary tale. Those who try to transcend their humanity risk losing it altogether.
But the story is not, for all that, a dispiriting one.
We are, when all is said and done, creatures—not gods. And that is a good thing. Our frailties teach us humility. Our shortcomings instruct us in perseverance. Our suffering gives us compassion for those who suffer. Our limits make us something better than powerful. They make us good.
And they keep us free. Because there is only one God, we allow no man or class of men to rule over us. We rule ourselves, together, as equals. That is—and always has been—the American way.