Friday essay: it’s ‘the intelligence age’, say tech titans – but information will not save us

“We have entered the Intelligence Age,” proclaimed Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, in September. “Deep learning worked,” he explained, and this breakthrough in learning from data will unleash a smart era in which the more data becomes available, “the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems”.

Altman joins other thought leaders, corporations like Google and Amazon, and organisations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, in pinning humanity’s hopes on better information.

The logic is enticing. By harvesting all the world’s knowledge, AI models can locate patterns, make correlations, and offer data-driven “insights”. The optimal solutions to our biggest problems are needles in a data haystack, so finding them exceeds the limited human mind. It is up to technology like deep learning to “capture it all”, analyse or train on it –  and then offer up the brilliant game-changing idea or most rational response.

Climate change, according to a Google report, can be simulated and alleviated using forecasting and modelling. Global conflicts, suggest AI engineers Tshilidzi Marwala and Monica Lagazio, can be modelled and mitigated.

But the recent US election showed the limits of this rational framing of reality. Viral rumours and conspiracy theories (JD Vance and the couch, or “they’re eating the pets”) were gleefully shared. It seems some voters were motivated less by abstract policy and more by visceral disgust at those deemed different.

Humans are not perfectly rational and ethical. They are deeply emotional, factional and frictional – driven by feelings and friendships, fear and anger.

Donald Trump’s win was aided by tapping deeply into this darker and more “irrational” core of human nature, defying the polls. It was never about perfect information.

In the past five years, my research has explored how technologies construct knowledge – but also exploit emotion and amplify radicalisation. To understand the current political moment, we need to understand both the limits of reason and the power of unreason.

Climate change, genocide and data

Intelligence is a dead end. The entangled social, political and environmental crises we now face will not be addressed by having more information.

Climate change is Exhibit A. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published six assessments detailing the drivers and impacts of global warming. The latest report is 3,949 pages and was based on more than 14,000 scientific papers.

Despite this deluge of data and expert evidence, the planet has already passed the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels and may pass 2°C by the end of the decade. Indeed, over the three decades of the United Nations’ Conference of Parties meetings (1994–2024), carbon emissions have steadily ticked upwards. A mountain of facts has not budged the voracious extraction and consumption of “business as usual”.

Gaza is Exhibit B. Law for Palestine, a not-for-profit, youth-led legal organisation, has meticulously compiled a database with more than 500 instances of incitements to genocide.

Last week, South Africa filed its Memorial to the International Court of Justice, a key document in its case against Israel. Its evidence is detailed in more than 750 pages of text, supported by exhibits and annexes of more than 4,000 pages.

And yet Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, with deaths mounting up. According to Al-Jazeera, some of the government’s kill lists are generated via big data analysis, a kind of AI-assisted genocide.

In both of these examples, intelligence was ignored or simply co-opted to rationalise a desired action. As a George W. Bush adviser famously stated: there are people who believe solutions emerge from a “judicious study of discernible reality” and there are those who “create our own reality”. While analysts are analysing, empires are acting, reshaping the world.

Facts can be trumped by alternative facts. Scientific reason can be ignored or refused. Machine learning can be overpowered (or weaponised) by men with guns.

In Trump’s first presidential term, I analysed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement had begun to use Palantir technologies, which assembles data into a powerful visual interface to aid in deportations.

Even a decade ago, the agency was scanning three billion pieces of information, from licence plates to border-crossing data, using ostensibly sophisticated software to identify targets and home in on “illegals”. And yet these data-driven insights were ultimately a pretence: tokenistic evidence for a war on immigrants the Trump administration had already decided to wage.

Any claims that this computational logic was “post-racial” quickly disappeared in the violence of deportation raids, when immigration officers punched individuals in the face, ordered them to the ground, placed boots on their head, and referred to them as “Mexican shit”.

Machine intelligence, ethics and morals

“Enlightenment reverts to mythology,” predicted influential cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 80 years ago in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

A society obsessed with the perfection of reason inevitably breeds its opposite: brute force and proud irrationality. Their insights were far from abstract. The German theorists had fled for their lives, penning their groundbreaking classic in exile in California while Hitler’s murderous regime played out across the Atlantic.

Reason, the duo observed, has morphed from its ancient origins to become an approach and a set of techniques. Reason is about ordering, classifying, and deducing from data –  and applying this “abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism” in a suitable or scientific way.

Such techniques sit at the core of contemporary machine learning systems, which train, fine-tune and generate claims from data.

This makes reason free-floating, a set of operations that can be applied to anything and everything. Such “intelligence” is effectively content-agnostic: devoid of any intrinsic aim or purpose. Reason does not (and indeed cannot) judge the ethical or moral implications of its use.

But if “all affects are of equal value”, the duo note, then survival becomes “the most probable source of maxims for human conduct”. Self-interest is the most “reasonable” approach of all, and anything that hinders this — social cohesion, protections for the marginal or vulnerable, contributions towards the public good —must be dispensed with.

In a zero-sum game, giving anything to “them” simply means less for “us”. Within nations, we see this in polarisation and division. Internationally, we see it in hardened borders and bunker mentalities. Any other strategy besides domination is suboptimal.

The ticking time bomb of reason

Reason creates a kind of ticking time bomb at the core of society. Reason is a flexible amalgam of information harvesting, data-driven decisions and optimised operations that wins votes and attracts investment.

But because reason is uncoupled from ethics, it can and should be applied to anything: no aim is better or worse than any other. The result for Horkheimer and Adorno is a kind of moral relativism.

A perfect example is Robodebt, Australia’s use of data analytics and machine learning to halt welfare payments. This mechanism for “automating inequality” created untold misery for those who were already vulnerable. Denying care became procedural and therefore “reasonable”.

This calculative logic is both practical and unassailable. Once rooted in the national consciousness, it becomes tough to dislodge. Actions not tied to survival are hard to defend; values not directly linked to self-interest are difficult to rationalise. Any connection or responsibility to the millions of others in the country risks breaking altogether.

In the end, this national community can only be held together by sheer force or terror, Horkheimer observes: liberalism tilts over into fascism.

The rise and rise of strongman leaders, poised between fascism and popular nationalism, exemplifies this tilt.

In Hungary, authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán has a 14-year grip on power, undermining judicial independence and press freedom with his brand of self-styled “electoral autocracy” or “illiberal democracy”. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has created a cult of power, annexing Crimea, waging war in Ukraine — and crushing protest with violence and imprisonment.

Most recently, Trump has once more risen to power, vowing to punish the “enemy within” and carry out mass deportations. “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he vowed, “and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

The arc of reason eventually arrives at a brutish world ruled by the most brutal. Democratic “civilisation” collapses back into domineering barbarism.

Age of intelligence or age of anger?

As reason’s grand promises inevitably collapse, people grow disenchanted or disaffected, latching onto regressive worldviews that make the world make sense.

My own work has explored how online platforms have repackaged racist, sexist and xenophobic ideologies into alluring new forms of hate, spawning incels and edge-lords, Christian nationalists and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

While such prejudices can certainly be condemned, they shed light on our world today. For those who adopt them, these narratives offer a compelling account of how the world works, why someone is stuck – and who or what is to blame.

New studies have shown that white Americans who perceive themselves to be in “last place” in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism. The fact that this perception is divorced from reality — that in terms of education, income and imprisonment rates they remain at or near the top — does not diminish its power.

The power behind these narratives is not logical, but emotional. This is not the liberal subject, carefully weighing the facts before choosing the claim that best conforms to empirical evidence and contributes to the public sphere. No, it is about grievance, loss and a sense of betrayal by the powers that be.

This affective power is echoed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who spent five years in the Republican stronghold of Louisiana, where many suffer from poor health and lifetime poverty, in the years preceding Trump’s first election. After countless conversations with residents, she stresses that their story is one of anger and mourning: a “feels-as-if” story that bypasses judgement and fact.

For the white subject, the shock and sense of loss is tangible. Advantage is not just “slipping away” but is being “taken by undeserving others”. Having stood atop the social hierarchy for so long, the loss of stature feels like a tumble into the abyss. Regressive views such as hyperconservatism or ethnonationalism offer a handhold or lifeline. And yet, if they bring a renewed sense of stability, they also cultivate a deep-seated hostility.

In this sense, our moment is not the Age of Intelligence but the Age of Anger. This is not to condone naked violence, baseless hatred and shameless propaganda, but to recognise the limits of reason in contemporary life.

The irrational human animal

“If there is anything unique about the human animal,” philosopher John Gray observes, “it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate, while being chronically incapable of learning from experience”.

For modern humanists, humans are inherently rational. The primary future challenge is merely how to make them more logical, more civil, more reasonable. This is the human that Altman and other techno-positivists have in mind when they suggest AI will solve our problems. It is only a matter of augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence.

But history suggests our crises and responses have always been shot through with the “irrational”, a darker mélange of emotional power, bodily violence and political will.

Intelligence — even scaled, automated and operationalised by artificial intelligence — will not save us.