You Are Being Lied to About What Is at Stake
You Are Being Lied to About What Is at Stake
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
A parallel to Shyam Sankar’s “The American People Are Being Lied To About AI,” Fox News, 2 February 2026.
You are being told two stories about artificial intelligence. One is apocalyptic: job loss, oppression, the extinction of the species. The other is utopian: a future without toil, without sickness, perhaps without death. Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, says in the Fox News opinion pages that the utopians and the doomers commit the same error, that they neglect human agency, and that the future of the technology is not an inevitability to be endured but something for Americans to shape.
He is right, and he stops one move short.
Both parties are arguing about what will happen. Neither has noticed that both have already conceded the thing that decides the question — that what happens is what matters. Grant that and you have handed your condition to the outcome, and it no longer makes any difference which forecast is correct. The error is not that the doomer neglects your agency. It is that he and his opponent agree about where your agency has to succeed.
The beginning is one premise, and no claim below it is asserted without it: every man wants happiness, and incomplete happiness is not worth accepting if complete happiness is available. Complete happiness cannot depend on anything that can be taken from you. Only your assent cannot be taken. Therefore the whole of what is at stake for you is the condition of your own faculty, and virtue is correct assent. Everything that follows is derived from that and from nothing else.
I. The technology is a tool, not an agent — and not your master either
Sankar writes that artificial intelligence is not a divinity, that it cannot snap its fingers and eliminate jobs, that people will use it to cut them or create them, and that it did not choose to write poems or generate pornography — people chose to build cheap consumer goods instead of instruments of genuine productivity. Every word of that is sound and it understates his own case. The tool cannot decide to oppress you, and it cannot make you afraid either. The fear is an assent to a value judgment about what you stand to lose. The judgment is yours, the assent is yours, and no model weight anywhere has any part in it.
II. The one bargain that cannot be broken
He writes that American prosperity rested on a simple bargain — produce more, earn more — and that the bargain was broken in the 1970s, not by technology but by policy choices that stripped workers of power. Take the fact as he states it. Then notice what it tells you about the arrangement you have been relying on: it was severable, and someone severed it. There is one bargain no policy can reach. Assent correctly and you have the whole of what you were after in the same instant, because the producing and the receiving are one act. No legislature can decouple them, no employer can withhold the proceeds, and no adversary can tax them.
III. Instruments, not trinkets — and the distribution is already equal
He says the electrical engineer in Georgia who enlisted in the Navy out of high school deserves the same capabilities as the Stanford computer science graduate, and that the worker in Tulsa, the nurse in Tampa and the farmer in North Dakota should have what the Fortune 500 has. On this accounting they already do, in the only instrument that decides the question. The faculty of assent is not issued by credential, by zip code, by employer, or by the training budget. It came with the man. Nothing has to be equalized, and nothing can be withheld.
IV. The birthright is not American, and nobody granted it
He calls the technology an American birthright, the product of American grit and ingenuity and culture, and adds that no worker should be left behind for lack of training. His printing-press comparison is the useful one: before Gutenberg a book cost as much as a house, and knowledge sat chained to shelves in monasteries. The doctrine at issue here was never chained. It was set down by a lame freed slave, and the Enchiridion is a pamphlet — a thing kept ready to hand. It required no press to distribute, no fellowship to confer, and no nation to produce. It does not need to be an inheritance, because it is not property.
V. The correction rises from the floor, because there is nowhere else it can come from
He admires Toyota’s Creative Idea Suggestion System, seventy years of ideas flowing up from the factory floor rather than down from corner offices, and says policy should be shaped by the practitioner — the ICU nurse, the manufacturing technician, the logistics coordinator — and not by academics, consultants or lawyers. The same conclusion is reached here by a shorter route and for a stronger reason. The ordinary case of Stoic work is a recovery audit: the fear or the anger has already arrived and been assented to, and the correction is retrospective. Only one man was present. Only he knows what was assented to. No consultant can file that report, and no committee can hold his settled judgments on his behalf.
VI. No compliance theater — and here the parallel is exact
He wants the technology used to slash bureaucracy and unleash human agency: no new compliance theater, no governance committees designed to slow things down and centralize power, every layer of process between the worker and his job to be treated as deadweight. Say the same of your own case and it comes out true without qualification. There is no layer between you and your assent. Nothing stands there — not your employer, not your circumstances, not the state of the art. This is why the work cannot be delegated, and it is also why nothing else can be blamed.
VII. Not virtue in the abstract — this assent, in the concrete
He writes that the goal is not efficiency in the abstract but American prosperity in the concrete, and he cites the numbers: Chinese manufacturing productivity growing at six percent a year against ours at four tenths of one, and the promise of a worker made fiftyfold more productive. In this one domain there is no such multiple and no such race. The faculty is either in correct condition or it is not, and what correct condition secures is not a gain of fifty times but the whole of it, since incomplete happiness was never worth accepting while complete was available. Nor is there a competitor. Nobody is outpacing you at this, because nobody else can do it at all.
What the two accounts leave standing
His ICU nurse learned to wield the software so she could spend more time at the bedside, where her clinical judgment, honed over years, could be brought to bear faster. Take that as he reports it. Her clinical judgment can be ended by a stroke, by exhaustion, by a hospital closing its unit. What cannot be ended is how she assents when the closure is announced — whether she takes it as a genuine evil or as what it is. The maritime manufacturer he cites opened a third shift. A real achievement, and an indifferent one: not one man on that shift is nearer to happiness for standing on it, and none of them is further.
He notes that the Manhattan-era attempt to take the papers and learn from the documents alone was a catastrophic failure, and that something about the human mind was what mattered. He is right about that too, and he has named the wrong residue. What is in the man and not in the artifact is not his productive capacity. It is the faculty that assents, and the reason he cannot be reconstructed from his papers is the reason he cannot be reconstructed from his output either.
Silicon Valley builds it. Wall Street funds it. Washington regulates it. The worker wields it. And not one of the four is any nearer to happiness for that, unless he attends to the one thing none of them can build, fund, regulate, or wield for him.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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