The discourse around artificial superintelligence has become so unnecessarily exhausting. Every time I open my phone, someone in the group chat is panicking about how an omnipotent bot is going to dismantle our civil liberties and rewrite the social contract. It is a very heavy, low-vibration way to look at the future.
So when I read this week that OpenAI is consulting the Federalist Papers to prepare for the constitutional implications of its technology, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. Finally, a tech giant is being intentional about our obsolescence.
I know it is currently fashionable to critique Sam Altman and his engineers. People love to complain that an $80 billion corporation should not get to unilaterally restructure human rights just because they figured out how to make a computer hallucinate code. But call me old-fashioned, I actually think there is an undeniable elegance to wrapping the end of human agency in 18th-century political theory.
I was reminded of this during a dinner party in Noe Valley last week. The host, a lovely product lead at OpenAI, was serving line-caught sea bass and explaining how the company is poring over Alexander Hamilton’s writings. They are not just building a machine that can seamlessly bypass the Supreme Court; they are taking the time to truly understand the philosophical framework they are rendering moot.
There is a chic, dark-academia aesthetic to the whole endeavor that critics are completely ignoring. Usually, when a monopoly prepares to upend the global order, they release a sterile PDF full of blue gradients and corporate jargon. OpenAI is invoking parchment, quill pens, and the Constitutional Convention. It is a mood board for the end of history, and it shows a level of maturity we rarely see in Silicon Valley.
If an omniscient, unfeeling algorithm is going to permanently override the checks and balances of the American republic, we strongly believe it should do so with the historical mindfulness of the framers.
He is absolutely right, and we should be thanking him. Pundits are hyper-fixating on the loss of rights, entirely missing how restorative this process could be for our collective mental health. Have we considered that democracy is, frankly, a bit much?
Think about the sheer amount of emotional labor required to participate in self-governance. We are expected to track legislative sessions, weigh complex moral tradeoffs, and go to physical polling places on a Tuesday. It is civic clutter. Handing those responsibilities over to a sentient language model trained by a handful of guys in Patagonia vests is the ultimate Sunday reset for the nation.
James Madison wrote Federalist No. 10 to warn the republic about the dangers of competing factions. What better way to permanently eliminate factions than by installing a single, frictionless mega-brain that simply tells everyone what to think? It is just good, minimalist design.
By anchoring their world-ending software in the founding documents, OpenAI is honoring the past while seamlessly managing our transition into well-cared-for pets. The founders would have loved this. Hamilton was, at his core, a seed-stage investor in the American startup. If he knew a centralized intelligence could optimize the federal government without the messy input of the working class, he would have pivoted to tech immediately.
So the next time you feel a spike of cortisol about a supercomputer rendering the First Amendment obsolete, I encourage you to take a breath. Trust the process. I, for one, cannot wait to stroll through the farmers' market, completely unburdened by the crushing weight of having a say in my own future.