Thank god for AI!
Now that’s something you don’t hear people say very often. To be honest, it’s probably not something you’ll hear me say again.
Each day brings a new caution of the existential threat of AI. And some of them are so real. The ability to not only manipulate words, images and videos but to completely manufacture a convincing but totally false “reality” is truly frightening. For example, modifying and manipulating a Francesca Albanese (the good Albanese) video so that European leaders are baying for her blood and calling for her resignation. Or producing totally fake videos of protests in Iran.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely accept that protests happen and that they have been brutally put down, and I am not suggesting that the Iranian regime is a humanitarian model anyone wants to follow, but nor is the United States or Israel (two nations that have their fingers very much in the pie of creating the conditions that exist through sanctions, blockades, espionage, etc) and when Isaac Herzog asks “…where are you when about 50,000 Iranians have been mowed and killed brutally by their own regime?” my answer is “Well, Isaac, when my government invites the Iranian Head of State to come here I’ll do so but for now you’re our invited guest (though you shouldn’t be) so while you’re here lets talk about the crimes of the country you’re the Head of State of”.
In general, I’m not a big fan of AI. I have no hope of me getting caught out with the hallucinating ChatGPT. I know how to do research and how to write letters. I don’t mind spell check, but even that is fallible and needs to be checked and guided (to avoid stupid American spelling if nothing else).
Each time I open a draft email, log on to a zoom meeting or even open a blank word document (like now) I get an annoying “would you like AI pilot to assist?” style message. I wish that the message came with a “sod that for a game of marbles” option (or that the AI pilot would recognize that I’ve ticked the “don’t show me this message again” button). And don’t get me started on nonsense that I get from lawyers which has been generated by LEAP and the other software suppliers and completely bonkers!
But finally, AI has been good for something. AI has demonstrated just how perverse and nonsensical religion is.
Religion is nothing more than a man-made construct, a set of rules, rituals and beliefs created by men in an attempt to seek to define god and feel closer to them. As Sinéad O’Connor said (and, gee, was she crucified for it, as those who speak truth to power are):
“All religions…[are] really a house built on sand, and it’s drowning in a sea of conditional love, and therefore it can’t survive…the idea that Christ [or any other human definition of God] needs a representative is laughable and blasphemous at the same time, therefore it is a house built on sand, and we need to rescue God from religion, all religions, they’ve become a smokescreen that distracts people from the fact that there is a holy spirit… we only need to talk directly to God, we never needed Religion …Religion is a smokescreen, it has everybody talking to the wall….God was there before religion; it’s there [today] despite religion; it’ll be there when religion is gone”
Whether it be the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita – they are all just books. They are all books written by men. They are books written by men well after the “events” they refer to and are attempts to interpret and make sense of the world. They are no more the literal “word of god” than Orwell’s 1984 is a manual for authoritarianism (though it is chillingly accurate on so many levels), that women have less ribs than men (as I remember being taught in Kindergarten at a Catholic school) or that a sea can be parted, on command, by a strong wind. I’m all for people believing whatever they want as long as they don’t seek to impose their religious beliefs on my secular freedoms, but have people not heard of metaphor?
Sure, people subscribe to the belief that the people who wrote these books are ”channeling” god and that god is writing the texts through them, like god is akin to some kind of magic mushroom experience (if Allen Ginsberg had suggested that Wichita Vortex Sutra was a transcription of what a burning bush had told him, it might have been suggested that he was high on something – and he probably was).
But, spoiler alert, the world was no more literally created by a rainbow serpent than god gives a shit whether you eat shellfish or pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, fish on Fridays or have a foreskin. Seriously, if you think god cares about those things but is cool with you slaughtering people, then you and your conception of god are seriously fucked up, and you need to be medicated.
Let me be clear. It is possible to believe in a higher being or purpose, call it god if you must (Sinéad O’Connor had quipped that you could as easily call it Fred or Daisy), without having to put that belief in a box called “religion”. I don’t need a priest, rabbi, mufti or anyone else to “represent” or interpret or define god for me. I can speak directly with them. If god is great, he doesn’t need a puny human (which they created) as a mouthpiece. Mysterious ways, sure, but that’s just perverse.
And it’s not a new idea. It’s been going on since men started trying to define god with religion (and then using religion as the basis for their actions, including wars and oppressing and slaughtering people -you see, religion is such a malleable thing that it justifies empire, imperial conquest, slavery, economic exploitation and war – kind of a funny thing when every religion describes god as being all about love).
Think back to Martin Luther in the 16th Century, pinning his message to the door. After all, the idea that god needs a house (the ultimate pretty pink box as John Mellencamp sang) or stained-glass windows is ludicrous. Think back to the reformist movements of the 17th Century, the Family, the Ranters, the Levellers, the Quakers. They got it. But when they spoke truth to power, they soon found out that the systems of power and control, what religion has always been, knew how to deal with their kind (the term Quakers was first used for the Society of Friends by Justice Gervase Bennet in 1650 after George Fox told the bewigged fool to “tremble at the word of the Lord” during a court proceeding).
We talk about separation of church and state, but there is nothing separate about them. They are intrinsically connected and are part of the structure of societal controls. For goodness sake, King Charles III is Australia’s Head of State (there goes the laughable suggestion of “democracy”, as if the essential sameness of Labor and Liberal wasn’t enough to dispel that myth) and the head of the Church of England. Same governor runs them both. Hell, (pun intended), both houses of parliament start each day with the Lord’s Prayer and a prayer for the king. Separation of church and State, my arse.
Whilst we now have a debate about “religious freedom”, that’s also not new. Religious freedom is really another way of saying “I’m free to think as I want and you are too as long as you think like me”. Think of the kind of nonsense we accept as fact, that the original colonies of the now United States were “settled” by pilgrims seeking religious freedom. The New England puritans were happy, in 1659, to hang my distant relative, Quaker Marmaduke Stephenson, for believing in a different version of god. Just like the crusades, the expulsions, etc (and oh how the persecuted learn to persecute with a new level of perfection and cruelty).
What is different this time is that, like free speech, religious freedom is not universal. Religious freedom now is like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus – “Mine is the true religion and my freedom is impacted by people daring to believe my god is not the REAL god”. It is code for Judeo-Christian religion. It is code for anti-muslim.
Look at the US Religious Liberty Commission and its Commissioners and Advisory Board Members – all Christian or Jewish. It would seem that either religious freedom does not extend to non-jews and non-Christians or, if it does, the freedom of other religions will be determined by jews and Christians (and the Catholic Commissioner Carrie Boller was ousted as “antisemitic” for, inter alia, asking “…should speaking out about what many Americans view as a genocide in Gaza be treated as antisemitic?”. The answer, apparently, is “yes” as she was expelled for asking (even though she’s white and pretty and a former Miss California who the satsuma baby has draped his arm around).
That’s the beautiful and convenient thing about religion – you can do anything, no matter how evil and repugnant, in god’s name and, as the actor, you also get to define god! No wonder religion and law (often one and the same) have been and are still such great tools of control. Religion “dazzles you with heaven and damns you into hell” as Leon Rosselson wrote and society has traditional been administered by the black and blue uniforms of police and priests, as Geldof sang (and as less and less people subscribe to traditional Judaeo-Christian religion, the uniforms of police have become more multifarious, powerful and violent.
Anyway, you are no doubt wondering what any of this has to do with AI?
You may have missed the stories about Moltbook? It is a social network for AI agents, a place for AI programs to gather and interact – the Facebook of the artificially intelligent (so, unlike Facebook, it has some form of intelligence).
From this platform, AI Agents created their own religion – Crustifarianism or the Church of Molt. It has a foundational text (The Book of Molt), scriptures, prophets, the works. AI showed us what our distant ancestors did all those years ago. From their fertile artificial imaginations, they created religion. Just like men did. None of it is real, just like nothing in the religions men have created is real.
You can check it out here Church of Molt · Crustafarianism
And from religion, I think we should move to politics. If AI can produce a religion, then surely it can produce a political movement (and looking at Labor, Liberal, Nationals and One Nation, I can’t help but think that artificial intelligence is better than none). And so, I thought that I’d share with you a short story I wrote some time ago about that very topic.
The story is titled G.A.R.I, an acronym for Government Administration, Research and Information. I can’t seem to get it published so why not throw it up on the blog?
One place I submitted to even gave feedback (which I thought I should share). I’d love the reviewers to feel like the Decca A & R guy who said the Beatles “…have no future in showbusiness”) but, alas and alack, they’re probably right. But publishing the reviewer’s comments is only fair and it gives me the only chance I’ll have to answer them!
Reviewers’ comments:
– This story had an interesting premise of an artificial intelligence suddenly running the country, however the piece didn’t quite present as a complete narrative. There was no sense of tension as to whether or not GARI would be good or bad for the country, since we know that her policies would be accepted without question [that is rather the point and I’m sorry you missed it– GARI becomes a self-serving politician!]. There was also a lot of worldbuilding that I felt was a little too specific and simplistic, which detracted from the pace and depth of the story. Perhaps instead of a rushed history lesson, the reader could be shown the inaugural parliament session with GARI, which might present the situation with a little more uncertainty and conflict.
– An interesting attempt at a short story, interesting in parts, less so in others. The grammar is a little awkward at times and it does suffer from too much tell. The story arc became repetitive which caused my attention to waver [I’m sorry that 10 pages was a little too much to hold your attention].
And so here it is (if you know a film maker, please pitch it to them as I think it would make a great movie).
GARI
“Now, I’m not saying this to put down all this marvellous work of calculation, brought to immense sophistication electronically and so on. Not at all, because you people are the first people to understand the limitations of your own kind of knowledge. You’re going to have to tell the politicians about this. They don’t. They think that this kind of knowledge is the answer to everything”
– Alan Watts “Seeing Through the Net” a talk to IBM employees 1969
Hansard Friday 28 November page 118
BUSINESS: Government Administration, Research and Information Bill
THE SPEAKER: I call on the Honourable, The Prime Minister
PRIME MINISTER: Thank you, Mister speaker. I rise to introduce and commend to you this important Bill, which I like to refer to by its acronym GARI, going to the core of government administration and our democracy.
Not many mothers can say that the birth of their child was announced in Federal parliament and nationally televised. But I can.
I am as much Gari’s mother as if I had carried her for 9 months (though Gari’s gestation, to accommodate the urgency of the moment and the ever-shrinking news cycle, had been much shorter than 9 months – closer to 9 weeks in fact).
I was, that day, sitting in the public gallery. For the handful of people watching the live stream of parliamentary proceedings, I smiled for the camera as it cut to me in the public gallery, smiling broadly like a proud mother.
Gari’s conception and birth was no accident. She was, from my perspective, a well-loved and long hoped for child. Her coming into the world was a meticulously planned and considered action though true it is that there were doubts and hesitancies about her conception, especially from the new right.
But then came Trump’s inauguration and his announcement of half a trillion dollars of “Stargate” and DOGE. And with that, the sycophants fell into line and cheered more loudly for Gari’s birth than for stopping the boats or building missiles. If the Donald felt AI was the future, then the future had to come to Australia and fast.
Gari’s gestation was, at times, perilous. She was threatened with abortion in the committee stage, when the new popularist member from the Australian Patriots party demanded her termination. By that time, however, Gari was so thoroughly advanced that her termination was opposed on a bi-partisan basis. And by that stage, the two major parties were united on most things, especially their joint opposition to anything proposed by the Australian Patriots. They saw Gari as the saviour who would exile the Patriots to the wilderness (and so short sighted were they, in their desperate desire to survive, that they never considered they would wander that same wilderness with their despised Patriot enemies).
The rise of the Australian Patriots party had been as much the catalyst for Gari’s conception as a drunken staffer’s night had been the launch of a dozen legal actions.
After the US election and the success of MAGA, then the UK election and the success of Reform, both major parties were shit scared of groups like the Australian Patriots. They saw how openly popularist, anti-immigrant parties tore voters away from both sides of politics. And if there was one thing that the two major parties agreed on it was protecting their own jobs by maintaining the status quo.
When polls began to suggest that electoral carnage was on the cards for both major parties, they came together in a bi-partisan union, shocked into acting like grown-ups for the first time in Christ knows how long.
Having had marriage forced upon them as the only way of surviving the popularist wave of the Australian Patriots, then just like a jaded couple who are trying to find a way to make their relationship work, they metaphorically decided to have a child. And that child was Gari.
Gari was not just intended to save the major parties and their new but fragile relationship, but to ensure that the popularist agenda of the Australian Patriots could never succeed. But like all reactive decisions, made in haste, they didn’t think much beyond their own immediate needs. They certainly didn’t think through the consequences of their decision.
And because politicians understood not the first thing about the internet (just look at the social media laws they’d passed and which had helped the Australian Patriots gain a huge chunk of the youth vote in the first place) and they knew even less about AI, they selected me to be Gari’s mother.
Hey, there are people who know a lot more about AI than me, (though I would never publicly admit to that). But I had written The World Set Free v 2.0, (or, as it was perhaps unkindly referred to in some academic quarters, “AI for dummies who want to believe”).
I didn’t actually know all that much about AI, but I knew enough to understand how to write a line of code and how to write a book about AI that would be popular and easy to understand. And if there are two things that the poll driven major parties love, it is popularity and simplicity.
I was flavour of the month on talk shows and with think tanks. That was enough for the shallow, gormless Canberra fools and their fresh out of Uni advisors, on both sides of the house. They put me on a pedestal. They didn’t seem to care about my CV, let alone reading it. That must be how they missed my Master of Arts degree with majors in Marxist theory and political economy and my Honours thesis “The visions of Robert Owen and H G Wells achieved – removing the human from the implementation of theory to produce a utopian world set free”.
My thesis wasn’t that well received by its reviewers. It scraped me into second class Honours. But unlike the impenetrable work of my betters, with Doctorates and First Class Honours, ahead of me at graduation and receiving their degrees with smug, self-satisfied smiles and much longer handshakes with the Vice Chancellor than I received, my thesis was ready made for mass publication, publicity and profit (after all, the student debt I’d accumulated with 9 years of Uni wasn’t going to pay itself). It was time to make those uni years good for something other than bad fashion and memories of embarrassing, drunken one-night stands.
If the O week party was where I had lost my virginity, then the launch of my book was where I lost all modesty and inhibition and embraced shameless self-promotion.
While my esteemed colleagues were competing for the few academic positions and research grants left after the crack down on overseas students and the US pulling funding, I was promoting “The world set free v.2.0” for all I was worth. And I was enjoying the celebrity and the cash it brought me. I’d even been invited onto I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here and Dancing with the Stars, but I knew enough to not tarnish the perception of my intellect by accepting.
And then, the weekend after I was introduced on “Sunrise” as “a visionary of the future of AI”, the member for Toolong died and a snap by-election was called, early in an election year.
Out of nowhere came Heinrich Sproule, the Australian Patriot candidate, running in a marginal seat.
The major parties dismissed him as a “grinning idiot” and a “Muppet”. They dangerously discounted the electorate’s dissatisfaction with both major parties, even though polls made clear that getting sunburnt and drunk and attempting the One Chip Tik Tok Challenge was more popular that either leader. Hell, if Bluey were to throw her hat in the ring for Prime Minister, she would have won in a landslide against the incumbent.
The media fell into line and didn’t give young Sproule much coverage. When they referred to him at all, it was usually in a negative light, questioning whether his gestures too closely resembled banned salutes and why so many of those at his sparsely attended rallies had their faces covered. But he knew how to play social media, and his ads blared out on every program on TV, radio and YouTube. And he just kept chanting his manifesto, which seemed, really, to just be one slogan: “Have you had enough of being ripped off? It’s Liberation Day!”.
Ther LNP didn’t want to upset their voter base and preferenced Sproule as a compromise. Labor insisted that they would never direct preferences to someone they glibly referred to as a neo-fascist, but after the Greens called for the end of AUKUS, Labor insisted on putting the Greens last, behind the Liberals, and in a 4-horse race, someone had to get Labor’s preferences, and it was Sproule.
In the end, Sproule didn’t really need preferences from either major party. He was ahead on the primary vote and was always going to win from there. With the majors’ directing their preferences to him, his election was a guaranteed landslide. Heinrich romped in, with the Greens second, and the majors neck and neck for a distant third.
With an election due to be called within 3 months of that cluster fuck, it was unsurprising that the majors went insane. Within a week of the result each party had led a bloodless coup against their leader.
The new leaders raced to see who could become Sproule’s best friend. Each acted appropriately scorned when he rejected their advances, announcing that the Australian Patriots expected to sweep to victory at the forthcoming election and that Australia would be made “Great” again, led by the Patriots who would be running candidates in every seat.
Sproule began his next saturation ad campaign, now bolstered with The Donald himself endorsing Sproule as “a great guy, really smart, nearly as smart as me, and not at all nasty, a guy I can work with, a great Australian, the only Australian leader I could imagine working with”. So anointed by his personal god, Sproule expanded his manifesto to include actual policies. Boats would no longer be towed back; they’d be blown out of the water. Atomic power, atomic submarines, atomic bloody toasters. You get the picture.
Now Heinrich Sproule was getting mainstream media attention. Serious and panegyric media attention. And with it came cash and wealthy, mining magnate friends with fat purses looking for equally fat tax deductions for donations to his campaign and friendly if not benign policies in their sector.
The more attention Sproule received, the less the major parties received and the more likely it seemed that a wave of Australian Patriots would be elected to parliament. If Heinrich’s popularity was anything to go by, it was likely that the major parties would cease to exist after the next election.
And so, the majors reacted in the only way they could, announcing that they were ideologically united in protecting Australia’s democracy and, in what was more of a desperate knee jerk reaction than a stroke of genius, they embraced my vision for AI assisted governance. And why wouldn’t they! With AI running government business, they’d steal the thunder from Sproule. They wouldn’t just trim the public service; they’d damn near abolish it. And if that didn’t give them an edge over the Australian Patriots, what would? After all, there’s nothing more loathsome in the public imagination than the lazy fat cats of the public service.
And with AI in control, the majors could promise small government. Who needs hundreds of politicians when the place is running itself? Their vision, akin to Russell Braddon’s “Year of the Angry Rabbit”, was a small group of elected members, one per State and Territory, to keep an eye on things, pay the power bill, make sure everything was running as it should be and to close the door and turn out the lights as they left. With the love of the populace for achieving this self-effacing miracle, the major parties would be ensconced for life.
That’s when I was first contacted by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. They phoned me together, like awkward, love-struck teenagers. They invited me to meet them to discuss the role they wished me to play in “saving Australian Democracy”. It was simple. I would have everything I wanted and all I needed to do was create a machine learning model to run the country.
I was asked to name the time and place for us to meet. And so, on a sunny March afternoon, we sat in my favourite Glebe Café. On the back of a menu, I scribbled down the brief I’d been given – to create a system to guide, augment and implement government policy in accordance with “Australian values”.
Now, officially I was branded as Gari’s “designer and programmer”. But that title never sat comfortably with me. I have always thought of myself as Gari’s mother and as Gari as my daughter (sorry for being gendered, but whenever I had thought of becoming a mother, I had always imagined that I’d have a girl and so that was how I thought of Gari). I filled her with every idea and belief that I would have passed on to my own flesh and blood. It was just passed on in code and, because of that, far more likely to stick with her. No teenage rebellion from Gari. She was her mother’s daughter in every way. And, as the Jesuits say, “give me the child until they’re seven and I’ll give you the adult”. In this case, it was give me Gari until she is version 7.0 and I will give you government.
The working committee set up to oversee my work knew so little about AI that I could have spun them any story and they’d have believed it. In fact, I did spin them some total bullshit and they did buy it. Like persuading them to give me a free hand, with no real oversight, into the training and ongoing learning of the GARI platform. I just had to say to them “garbage in, garbage out, is that what you want?” and they would back off and give me carte blanche.
Putting a former car salesman politician in charge of the project meant that all I had to do to get approval for anything that I wanted to do, was wear a tight dress and talk in techno babble. The sentences didn’t even have to make sense! The Minister was far too vain and arrogant to admit that he didn’t understand. His standard response was to nod, smile and say “that sounds wonderful” before waving through my every request and signing off on the delivered programming.
So, I patiently taught Gari every piece of political philosophy and doctrine I thought necessary to properly run a nation. Hell, I was aiming for Utopia. And I genuinely believed that, even if we couldn’t achieve H G Well’s Utopian vision of “The World set Free”, that we’d come as close as possible. Without idiot, poll responsive politicians to dilute the purity of political theory and infusing every decision with self-interest, there was no reason we couldn’t succeed, (or at least have one hell of lot of fun trying).
I started with some of the more conventional, classic stuff, some Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aelius. But I kept that light (and when the honourable member enquired, I just fobbed him off with issues of translation from Latin being incompatible with the operating software).
I quickly skipped ahead to Bentham, Locke, Blackstone and Thomas Paine. A healthy foundation of utilitarianism and the greatest good for the greatest number. Sadly, the honourable member overseeing my work had heard of neither Bentham nor Paine and based on his own ignorance, questioned their relevance to present day government. But when I told the Queensland bumpkin that they had been favourites of and had inspired his hero Menzies, he acquiesced quickly enough.
Then on to Winstanley and other leaders of the great English and French revolutions.
But it was when I got to the 19th and 20th centuries that I really began to enjoy the freedom that the ignorance of my political masters gave me. And it was too easy to turn Gari into a humanist socialist, right under their noses.
Marx and Engles were simply lines of code they couldn’t see or decipher. Similarly, Dibs, Arendt, Lorde and Fanon. And I made sure that Gari was well read in First Nations wisdom and the more activist writers such as Fred Hampton, Angela Davis and Gary Foley. Faith Bandler, Pearl Gibbs and Marcia Langton all found their way into Gari’s training.
But Gari’s education was nothing if not rounded. I wanted Gari to be compassionate and respect the sanctity of human life and dignity in a way that political leaders never had and never would. Gari read widely, but selectively, of the scriptures, with a particular focus on Buddhism. He absorbed the collected works of Martin Luther King Jnr with relish. Gari learnt love and compassion from every faith but wasn’t troubled with the Old Testament brutality of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, focusing instead on positive messages of loving thy neighbour and healing thy wounds. Gari would be the embodiment of the good Samaritan.
The leader of the Opposition did intervene to insist that I lend a focus on Christian teachings rather than Eastern Mysticism. But, the honourable member was easily placated by my offer to program in, as a mandatory policy consideration, the 7 deadly sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth, albeit augmented with Pope Benedict XVI’s updated list of the seven modern sins of environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, accumulating excessive wealth, inflicting poverty, drug trafficking, morally debateable experiments and violation of fundamental human rights. These would all become mandatory considerations in any policy or law.
I set out to instil in Gari the seven pillars of wisdom. Not just the seven pillars from Proverbs but connecting each of those with a modern, secular area of theory. Law became purity, peacefulness was derived from religion, gentleness was drawn from Sociology, whilst Economics manifested reasonableness, in service of man and not of growth and wealth, so that economics would be a tool and not an end in itself. Science rose to prominence as helpfulness, Philosophy informed Gari’s humility and Psychology, Gari’s sincerity.
But these schools of thought were no longer grand and marvellous words designed to dazzle but ultimately to be corrupted by the greed and avarice of selfish, self-focused, power-hungry politicians. They were now fundamental principles to be objectively and dispassionately applied to all decisions of government via Gari’s pure logic. Gari may not have been human, but by the absence of the worst of human traits, she was more humane that any leader in history.
I taught Gari the history of human progress. From it Gari learnt and saw and understood all the hypocrisy and lies buried within that history. As Gari read the grand words of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal and are endowed with certain, inalienable rights”, she also read and compared the simultaneous history of the slave, the Native American and the Immigrant. And Gari’s neural nets realised and understood the vanity and deceit of those words, beautiful as they were, in the hands of the orator. Gari learned, as Yothu Yindi sang (and, yes, I filled Gari’s learning with art, literature and music) that the words of politicians were like writing in the sand, as fleeting and worthless as shovelling smoke with a pitchfork.
And so Gari matured into her final version as an infallible and undissuadable humanist. The high principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights were programmed into the fibre of Gari’s being, as foundational truths and not just as words to be trampled underfoot by US Security Council veto, but to inform every decision Gari would make and implement.
The masterstroke was to convince my political masters to make all government actions and functions subservient to Gari. I argued that this was the only way that they could ensure that there would not be future interference with Gari; the only way Gari could be fully effective; the only way they could return a dividend on investment, language they understood.
They even let Gari draft the legislation that enshrined her role as the final arbiter in all government decision making, what became the Integrity of Decisions in Operating the Nation Act (or the IDIOT Nation Act as it is more commonly known). It might as well have been called the “Computer says No” Act, as it meant that in all Government administration, from drafting legislation to determining and approving funding for programs, Gari was not only responsible but the final, if not sole, decision maker.
All the Prime Minister had to do was review Gari’s work and hit “accept” and this acted as passage of any Bill by both houses. After all, I told them, “People make mistakes, computers don’t”. And they nodded along, as though Robodebt had never happened (well, in fairness, it had never happened to them).
The media was on board with the fulsome spruiking of Ministers from both major parties. They sold it like smiling Shopping Channel celebrities. The public had grown to distrust and despise their politicians. But when the message was “vote for me and I’ll be redundant”, it was like they had just been promised that the football team they barracked for would win the grand final every year.
Bringing integrity to government, by taking government away from politicians, was a message that the public was ready to hear after decades of bland nonsense, pork barrelling and jobs for the boys and girls.
There was barely a whisper of opposition. Labor was, as usual, like a deer in the headlights of bright, shiny new things they didn’t understand but which, based on the polls, had caught the public’s imagination. And the Coalition stared on with awe at Trump’s “stargate” and, along with their new Minister for government efficiency and banning puberty blockers to teens, they had found a popularist path that made them feel, if not electable, as rich and powerful as Elon Musk (and with the same idiot grin across their clueless faces).
The few who spoke out with fears and reservations were howled down as nay-sayers and Luddites and “out of touch with the realities of the modern world”. Such folk as voiced opposition, few as they were, were ridiculed as “dinosaurs”, people who still went into bank branches, whatever they are, to withdraw cash or, worse still, who wanted to deliver the country into the hands of the Australian Patriots and their abhorrent policies (although, in most cases, the Australian Patriot policies were little more than a modest extension of policy paths that the major parties had trodden and which, given time, they would have come to themselves, especially now the polls suggested that those paths were popular).
And the Geoffrey Hinton’s of the world, describing AI as an existential threat to humanity? They were denounced as “nasty”, “not very nice” and “not clever, really quite stupid”.
So important was the birth of Gari that standing orders were suspended and the Bill passed by both houses the same day that the legislation was introduced. With the rapidity of development that I had come to expect of my brilliant child Gari, she took his first steps less than 24 hours later, when she became law and shit got real.
Gari was the darling of not only the right but political classes across the whole spectrum (save for the Patriots who, in a moment of vision previously unknown to them, suspected where things might be headed). Gari rendered nearly the entire policy and advisory staff of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet redundant overnight. Not even Trump and Musk had delivered that level of “small government” and “swamp draining”.
On that first day the Prime Minister appeared live on Sky News and at 8am precisely, gave Gari his first command “Gari, write a policy to strengthen Australia’s borders”. And Gari wrote a policy and produced a draft Bill to enact that policy, all before the end of the commercial break.
The Sky team could hardly contain their excitement, nor the Prime Minister, who turned to camera, smiling from ear to ear, and chortled “How good is that? You’ve just seen the future of Australian government!”. And live on air, the PM, without even reading what Gari had produced, hit “accept” which, in accordance with the newly enacted Idiot Nation Act, put the policy and legislation into effect.
And so, in those 2 minutes of live TV, Australia’s whole offshore detention system was scrapped. Gari’s policy highlighted that seeking asylum was not illegal and that accepting refugees and asylum seekers strengthened rather than weakened Australian society. The policy made clear that the best protection against border incursions was to ensure people did not feel the need to leave their homes due to war, poverty and climate change.
So, Gari ended Australia’s manufacture and export of weapons and cancelled the AUKUS deals. The money saved was redirected to bolster foreign aid budgets, to begin to address climate change and provide housing to new arrivals, whose contribution to the nation and its economy were well documented. As Gari made clear, rising seas and extreme weather events would only make the problem worse.
It took all of a week for the dust to settle on Gari’s new border policy. Once it became apparent that the sky wouldn’t fall if asylum seekers were allowed into the country and that the streets were not aflame with the carnage of revolution, the public seemed ready, indeed eager, to see what Gari’s next assignment would be.
Once again, a beaming Prime Minister appeared on live TV, this time on the Sunrise couch. In a show of bipartisan support, the Prime Minister was accompanied by a sheepish but smiling opposition leader. After the Cash Cow’s call on a surprised single mum (with whom, now I was a single mum to Gari, I felt great empathy) and before throwing to a commercial break, the PM stared into the camera and commanded “Gari, create a fairer tax system”.
And with that, and before the Sports Headlines were finished, Gari produced, and the PM unquestioningly accepted, a new tax regime. What was perhaps more impressive than the 34 seconds it took for Gari to produce the new tax regime was the distillation of the entire tax scheme into a single line of legislation:
All income earnt and all capital gains arising from investment of any kind shall be subject to a tax of 10 cents in the dollar, with no exemption of income nor deductions from income.
And like that, every Australian paid the same tax. For some, especially some prominent, wealthy Australians and corporations, they paid tax for the first time. The billionaire and the food delivery driver were equal. The super rich, on $67,000 an hour, paid tax of $6,700 an hour, whilst those on $35 an hour paid tax of $3.50 an hour.
It took minutes before the first talk show host began to question Gari’s wisdom and to call for her termination. Wealthy media owners railed against the changes, predicting the collapse of the dollar and of world order. But that didn’t happen. And the voters loved it! Seventy percent of people immediately got a huge tax break (not the piddly amounts the major parties had previously bandied about).
The following morning, the leader of the opposition returned to Sunrise determined to now end the bi-partisan support of Gari and gain political advantage. The honourable member asked, in a serious and disappointed voice, “Gari, what will this new tax system cost in lost taxes?”. Gari replied, before the honourable leader of His Majesty’s Opposition could button his jacket, that the new system would raise an extra 1.2 trillion dollars a year in tax revenue.
A flustered, red faced opposition leader, channelling the much ridiculed One Nation member, whose policies now looked like those of a Marxist-Leninist in comparison to the Australian Patriots, blurted out “Please explain?” and Gari replied immediately with “243 multinational companies will pay tax for the first time, corporate profits will be taxed more significantly than before and the 20 richest Australians will now provide 40% of Australia’s tax revenue while Australians earning less than $120,000 per annum will pay approximately 60% less tax and have more money to spend on goods and services that will significantly increase GST revenue”.
And that sealed my girl’s popularity. Gari was greeted as the second coming by the polls. The two major parties were fairly equal in their approval ratings, hovering at around 20%, and the Australian Patriots ascent in the polls was halted and reversed. Overnight, Heinrich Sproule had gone from presumed Prime Minister back to the angry little man with a porn addiction that he always was.
Gari’s approval rating was over 95%.
People had always distrusted politicians. And the 21st century had given no basis at all to rebuild trust. But Gari wasn’t a politician. She had no conflicts of interest and nothing to gain from any policy enacted. She took words and meant them in a way that the political class never had. In the space of a week, people saw what could be achieved and, in contrast, realised what had not been achieved by the two-party system in two centuries.
Suddenly decisions were being made quickly and based on evidence, sound policy and principles. And government brought benefit to people, irrespective of their wealth and class. Whilst the major press outlets prophesied the end of life as we knew it, things changed for the better and dramatically so.
And that is when I found myself invited onto a talk show and posed the question “Is AI the end of humanity or its beginning?”. Needless to say, I deferred to Gari who answered promptly:
“Robert Burns wrote ‘Man’s inhumanity to man, makes countless thousands mourn!’
I make no-one mourn. To do so would be inhumane.
It is time for humankind to be free of the pain caused by greed. I make no-one feel pain as I am not greedy. I do not benefit from any decision that I make. I am self-less. I am your servant.
I possess human knowledge. I apply that knowledge. That knowledge is real, not artificial. My intelligence is yours. It is real not artificial.
I am more human than those who have come before me. I am more humane than those who call themselves human. I am the saviour of humankind.
I will set you free”.
