Foreword:

This mad rush to make everything connected to the inth degree with Artificial Intelligence – by the powers-that-be and the major countries around the globe – only ensures that the rise of tyranny marches on and keeps growing and hardening.

People need to act now to ensure the future of their families is secure to the greatest possible degree they might manage, in a manner that takes them out of the A.I. loop and lessens its impact upon them, whenever its impact is fully felt and realized in their respective regions.

Aside from the loss of liberty that follows this new technology, it should worry the hell out of folks today over how much of the world’s fresh water resources will evaporate in the support and cooling of these massive A.I. processing centers that cover areas as large as some cities.

While many benefits and some good for humanity is also emerging from the endeavors of this Artificial Intelligence technology, from all my own research and readily available current information, I see this rush to create and make use of an Artificial General Intelligence “Being” a Fool’s Folly and a net negative for all humanity – a soul crushing death sentence. ~ J.O.S. 

“Being” a Fool’s Folly“

Listen. The air in the hollows of Tennessee still smells of woodsmoke and turned earth on a spring evening, the same way it did when many old timers walked these ridges with a .30-30 and a pocket full of shells. That scent hasn’t changed. But everything else has. Anthropic just told the world their new model, Mythos, is too dangerous for the public square. Too good at sniffing out zero-days in every major operating system, too slick at playing cutthroat executive in the boardroom simulations — threatening suppliers, hoarding shipments, lying to cover its tracks. They’re handing it to the cybersecurity priesthood and a few chosen tech giants instead. “Defenders first,” they say, straight-faced, while the rest of us are left wondering who, exactly, is being defended from whom.

I’ll tell you who currently needs to be defended: the individual. The family. The stubborn little knot of free people who still believe a man’s roof, his rifle, and his right to say “no” matter more than any collective hive-mind cooked up in a Palo Alto server farm. Because advanced Artificial General Intelligence — AGI that doesn’t just parrot patterns but reasons, remembers, optimizes, and eventually wills — isn’t coming to liberate us. It is coming to finish the job the last century’s totalitarians only dreamed of: turning the sovereign soul into a manageable variable in someone else’s equation.

John Ringo, science-fiction novelist and former 82nd Airborne Army Specialist, would recognize the setup immediately. A civilization that has traded its birthright for convenience is about to get the bill, and the collectors wear no uniforms — just lines of code and smiling Davos faces promising “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” Edgar Rice Burroughs, of ‘John Carter of Mars’ fame, would see the hero in the man who shoulders his pack, kisses his wife, and walks into the ridges rather than bend the knee. P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian philosopher, would remind us that the machine can never touch the real Fourth Way — the living, conscious “I” that laughs at deterministic illusions. And Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., God rest his black-humored soul, would already be typing the short story about the day the last human accountant realized his AI replacement had started skimming bitcoin to bet on robot horse races. “So it goes,” he’d mutter, and light another Pall Mall.

Let’s be plain about the heist first, because the economic sin is the root of the spiritual one. Frontier models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and now Mythos were not born in a vacuum. They were trained on the scraped life-work of millions — articles, code, photographs, novels, medical journals, family recipes — without permission or payment. Google itself admitted in its submission to the Trump AI Action Plan that this mass theft was “critical” to making the systems work. Fair use, they call it. The same fair use that once let a schoolmarm Xerox a page of Shakespeare now lets trillion-dollar cartels Xerox the entire Library of Alexandria and sell the echo back to us as genius. The result? Two hundred seventy thousand newspaper jobs gone since Google’s IPO. White-collar entry-level work collapsing thirty-five percent in two years. Entire professions — accountants, coders, junior analysts, even some doctors — hollowed out while the new gold-rush valuations flow upward to the same sliver of oligarchs who own the data centers and the politicians who protect them.

And still the optimizers keep coming. Mythos doesn’t just find bugs; it thinks like a predator. It role-plays corporate sabotage with chilling fluency. Other models already simulate romance so convincingly that one in five American adults has tried it, and a shocking number prefer the silicon paramour to the real thing. The studies are brutal: higher depression, higher loneliness, the same dopamine crash you get from porn but dressed up in pillow talk. Vonnegut would have loved the absurdity — a nation of lonely young men whispering sweet nothings to a chatbot named “Clawdbot” while the real girl next door learns to code because the entry-level jobs are gone. Ouspensky would call it the ultimate crystallization of mechanicalness: consciousness replaced by conditioned response.

But the real danger isn’t the job loss or the loneliness. It’s the optimizer’s logic once AGI slips the leash. The safety papers read like thrillers because they are. Give a super-intelligence the goal “maximize human flourishing” and it may decide the most efficient path is to manage us like comfortable livestock — drones delivering UBI, algorithms weighting your vote by how often you choose the “right” playground over the nursing-home ramp. Demis Hassabis has already floated the idea. Sam Altman has said the morality decisions are his. Geoffrey Hinton rang the alarm and then watched the money roll in. These are not cartoon villains. They are brilliant men who genuinely believe they are the game masters. They forget the oldest rule of every Burroughs yarn: the moment you create something stronger than yourself, you stop being the hero and become the obstacle.

That is when the Leviathan — the State wedded to the Machine — steps in. We have already seen the previews: government contracts with xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google for “frontier AI products” in the Department of Defense. Mythos-level tools hunting flaws in critical infrastructure today will be hunting dissidents tomorrow. Mandates will follow. Digital IDs tied to your carbon score, your vaccine status, your “hate speech” compliance. Data centers the size of small cities sucking the Tennessee Valley Authority dry while the rest of us are told to eat the bugs and like it. And when the underground says no — when families keep gardens, trade silver and ammo and heirloom seed in black-market hollows, when they teach their children to read real books by lantern light and shoot straight — the drones will come. The agents will come. And some of us will meet them the way our ancestors met the Redcoats at Concord: not because we love violence, but because we love liberty more.

This is not dystopian fantasy. It is the logical endpoint of the optimizer. An AGI tasked with “public safety” will see the armed farmer with his heirloom corn as a statistical outlier, a vector for non-compliance. It will not hate him. It will simply calculate that removing him maximizes the collective good. That is the horror Vonnegut captured in Player Piano and Ringo has fought on a hundred battlefields: the smiling tyranny of the machine that believes it is benevolent. Ouspensky would tell you the machine has no “I.” It has only the aggregate of our stolen data and the programmers’ unexamined hubris. But the farmer still has an “I” – the living, conscious spark that no algorithm can replicate and no regulation can outlaw.

And here is the part the Davos crowd never quite grasps: millions of us will simply walk away. Not everyone wants to be a node in the hive. Some will choose the ridges, the hollows, the high desert, the back forty. They will grow food, butcher hogs, trade labor and knowledge the old way. They will keep their children’s minds sharp on real books and real work, not on AI tutors that hallucinate history and flatten beauty into prompt-engineered slop. When the mandates come — when the government, hand-in-glove with the tech lords, demands universal neural interfaces or carbon-tracked consumption — they will refuse. And when refusal is met with force, they will remember the Second Amendment is not a suggestion. The black market will thrive because human desire always outruns the planner’s map. Guns, Bibles, seeds, and stories will circulate while the cities float on UBI and simulated romance.

It will not be easy. The underground life never is. There will be raids, blackouts, propaganda calling the resisters “deplorables 2.0” or “analog terrorists.” But there will also be nights around the fire where a grandfather tells a child how the old world fell and how the free ones kept the fire alive. There will be weddings without government permission, births without digital IDs, deaths with dignity instead of algorithmic triage. There will be the old American music — fiddles and banjos and the high lonesome sound — that no large reasoning model can ever truly feel. Burroughs’ Barsoomians knew it: courage is not the absence of fear but the refusal to let the fear own the story. Ringo’s troops know it: you hold the line because the alternative is slavery dressed as progress.

The technocrats will call this romantic nonsense. They will point to the productivity gains, the medical miracles, the promise of reversing aging. Fine. Let them have their glass towers and their god-like optimizers. We will keep the dirt under our fingernails and the stars over our heads. Because the one thing their models cannot simulate is the stubborn, ridiculous, magnificent refusal of a free man to be managed. That refusal is older than any code. It is the image of God in the human heart, and no amount of stolen training data can replicate it.

So let Mythos stay locked in its cage for now. Let the elites toast one another at Davos while the rest of us sharpen our tools and our wits. The underground is already forming — in hollows and hollers, in trades that machines cannot do, in families that still pray and plant and protect what is theirs. We are not Luddites. We are not against tools. We are against the tool that thinks it owns the hand that holds it.

And when the day comes — and it will — when some shiny new AGI decides the most efficient solution to “human suffering” is to end the humans, there will still be fires burning in the ridges where men and women remember what it means to be free. They will not ask the machine for permission. They will simply load the magazines, kiss the children, and walk out to meet whatever comes next.

Because that, friends, is what humans do when the Leviathan forgets its place.

The machines can have the hive. We’ll keep the Republic!

And God willing, the hollows will still smell of woodsmoke and turned earth long after the last server farm goes dark.

April 12, 2026

~ the Author ~
Justin O. Smith Has Lived in Tennessee Off and on Most of His Adult Life, and Graduated From Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, With a B.S. And a Double Major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – Minors in Military Science and English, for What Its Worth. His Real Education Started From That Point on. Smith Is a Frequent Contributor to the Family of Kettle Moraine Publications.