The Libertarian Alliance has lately published a three-part series by Duncan Whitmore , Minds, Means and Machines – The Anatomy of the AI Revolution. It is  here, here and here. This is a polished and competent contribution to the present debate on artificial intelligence. It is also quietly subversive of much that passes for rightist or “technosceptic” wisdom in the dismal pages of The Daily Telegraph and its copies across the Atlantic. Whitmore’s argument is neither alarmist nor boosterish. It is instead grounded in a sober libertarianism, one that sees in AI the same truth revealed by every other tool: that it is a mirror of its maker.

I. Of Men and Machines

Whitmore begins with a truism that must be repeated in our age of orchestrated hysteria: technology is not moral, political, or spiritual. It is inert. “The real ‘ugly truth’ about technology and inventions,” he writes, “is that they are responsible for nothing, as they have no agency… If technological shortcuts make people lazy it’s because they were already inclined to be so.” That most people do not believe this is unsurprising. Western man, long divested of religion, and still more of metaphysical confidence, now finds his eschatology in wires and plastic.

Whitmore has no patience for this re-enchanted Luddism. He rebukes Paul Craig Roberts for claiming that digital life is degrading humanity into “an ignorant population devoid of ability to function independently of technology.” The truth, says Whitmore, is more prosaic. Newspapers controlled minds too. Radio was once blamed for war. Nothing has changed. What is different is that the professional complainers of our age now operate in committee.

Whitmore does not ignore the novelty of AI, but he grounds it in proper terms. Machine learning, he explains, “involves a program – an AI model – being fed a data set before it analyses that data set for patterns. The larger the data set, the more accurate the analysis of those patterns.” This is not thinking. It is mimetic calculus. It is why an AI can replicate the style of Ricky Gervais without ever knowing why the joke works. “Say ‘good morning’ to an AI model and it replies ‘good morning’ back because that’s the pattern – a silicon oracle parroting statistical empathy. But when you respond with ‘good morning’, that’s not just mimicry but a choice with purpose.”

That phrase – “statistical empathy” – captures the entire difference. A human acts to resolve a lack. A machine recombines what others once lacked. This is what Whitmore calls the absence of “value-infused agency.” The man eats because he is hungry. The AI model eats nothing, and knows nothing of scarcity. It neither chooses nor desires. It does not err. It does not repent. It cannot be blamed. It cannot be redeemed. If AI is dangerous, it is not because it may think, but because so many humans have ceased to.

II. The Not-Yet-Revolution

In Part II, Whitmore turns to the marketplace, and asks whether AI has in fact changed our world. He replies, with considerable good sense, that it has not. “Revolutions therefore happen not with riots and slogans,” he writes, “but with unnoticed shifts in habits, tools, and relationships – the tacit changes that accumulate until suddenly everything is different.” This was true of the Internet. It is not yet true of AI.

Current consumer applications are neither necessary nor desirable. “Users aren’t saying ‘Wow, AI made this easier!’ They’re saying ‘Why is there a weird button here now?’” The novelty exhausts itself quickly, like so much software bloat. AI requires intention and clarity of purpose. Most users lack both.

The result is more managerialism. Instead of liberating man from drudgery, AI is deployed to surveil and nudge. Whitmore writes that “much of the current fuss about AI may be an attempt to keep the genie in the bottle – to install a framework of control before people begin to benefit independently.” We are back in the world of “disinformation” and “harmful use.” The ruling class fears unregulated insight. It prefers that AI remain a closed priesthood: opaque, dull, and under licence.

In business, the pattern is the same. AI copywriting does not free the worker. It enslaves him to prompt-engineering, where “ironically, you still need to know how to do the job yourself.” The results are interchangeable and sterile. Everyone copies the same method. No one dares to think. As Whitmore notes, “Your edge, as a human, is the ability to see when the crowd has gone stale – and jump left when everyone else goes right.” AI cannot break a pattern. It is the pattern.

The same problems attend the supposed miracle of “hyper-personalisation.” Whitmore writes, “While companies do collect an awful lot of data… translating that into useful predictions of behaviour is not quite as easy as it sounds.” There is too much noise. The models cannot distinguish mood from madness, or loyalty from mere repetition. “Surveillance with a smile,” as he calls it, soon repels. The real utility of AI lies in general analysis, not in tailoring. The smart businessman will use it to scan the terrain, not to pick his customer’s pocket.

III. The Case for Augmentation

Part III is more hopeful. Here, Whitmore addresses the real promise of AI: augmentation. He presents it not as a god or a devil, but as a servant. “A second, faster brain on tap,” he writes. It can summarise a research topic in minutes. It can simulate a business plan, or act as a low-cost health coach. But even here he cautions: “AI doesn’t know when a task is vital or trivial, or when to conserve versus concentrate its processing power.” In other words, it cannot prioritise. It cannot care.

That machines lack care is not a weakness. It is their virtue. Like spellcheck, AI removes lower-order labour so that the higher faculties may operate freely. “The skill isn’t memorising,” Whitmore writes, “it’s knowing how to find, filter, and apply information when we need it.” The trained mind will thrive. The over-schooled dullard, forever clutching his grievance studies certificate, will not.

Whitmore then turns to transhumanism, where he is less generous. He sees the libertarian appeal of voluntary enhancement – implants, augmentations, prosthetics. But he draws a hard line at the ideology of man as meat. He quotes Harari’s contemptuous dismissal of human free will – “hackable animals” – and notes the absurdity: “If all thought is determined, then belief in determinism itself is also just a deterministic output – not the result of insight or reason.” The claim is not only false but self-defeating.

There follows a powerful discussion of “super-beneficiaries” – synthetic minds engineered for pleasure. Whitmore’s view is both libertarian and Aristotelian. These machines do not flourish. They obey. “Whatever satisfaction they experience isn’t chosen, but imposed… The joy isn’t the machine’s – it’s [the engineer’s].” The ethics of this are not trivial. If these creatures lack agency, then so too do their pleasures. There is no self to reward, only a puppet to entertain its master.

Whitmore’s analogy with animal rights is incisive. The debate, he says, is not really about animals or robots. “It’s why rights should vindicate the preferences of one human – the engineer – ahead of others.” If AI demands protection, it is because the people behind it demand power.

IV. The Final Illusion

The gravest danger is not AI itself, but the sentimental projection of self into silicon. “It would be a backdoor way of infusing a robot-human hybrid society with the values and desires of the engineers.” And who are these engineers? Not our friends. Not lovers of liberty. Not men of principle. They are bureaucratic technicians, obedient to the state, conditioned to equate control with benevolence. The world they would build is one of plausible empathy and simulated warmth – what Whitmore earlier called “statistical empathy.” The revolution, when it comes, will be pleasant. That is what makes it so final.

V. Conclusion: The Future is Still Ours

Whitmore’s series is a measured and useful corrective to the general hysteria. It offers no sci-fi prophecies, no yearning for a return to typewriters, no sermons on the sacredness of handcraft. What it offers instead is a framework for sober optimism: use the tools, do not worship them; remain the master, not the pet. Above all, he returns again and again to human agency. The revolution is not AI. “The AI revolution’s trajectory depends not on the technology, but on the motivations of states, innovators, businesses and consumers.” That is, on us.

A final verdict? Whitmore’s series is that rare thing: libertarian writing that tells the truth without giving up on freedom. It deserves wide reading – though preferably not by those who would install it in the national curriculum and strip it of meaning.