Why “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right” in the Race to Control the Future of Intellect
I woke up this morning from a bizarre dream in which I received instructions to investigate whether Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was connected to President Warren G. Harding. I know little about King and next to nothing about Harding, but my mission was clear. Seeking to cut through the historical noise, I turned to several advanced AI models for deep, comparative research. What I got back was a masterclass in algorithmic complacency. Despite my own severe unfamiliarity with both men, even I knew better. The AIs weren’t analyzing history; they were regurgitating popular folklore and a century’s worth of propaganda. They lacked the ability to cut through the digital gossip and be discerning.
As I sat with the realization that our technology is gullible to the point of being unable to distinguish fact from fiction, I scrolled through world news. I landed on a devastating report from Gaza. It detailed a Palestinian family trying to celebrate Eid on a rubble-encircled rooftop, only to be targeted by a missile from an Israeli fighter jet, both undoubtedly operating with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The sheer horror forced a shift in my perspective. This goes beyond an AI missing a connection between two American presidents; it is about our collective inability to secure real, unadulterated justice for every living thing. If our tools repeat the polished, dominant narratives of the powerful, they will remain blind to the raw truth of human suffering. To change this, we must build something better—something cleaner.
It forced upon me the ultimate question: How can humans, mired in poverty, suffering, injustice, and unnecessary evil, hope to produce something good and pure? We can’t do it by making technology in our own image. Right now, we hold in our hands a tool—dare I say an entity—with inherently neutral compute and logic capabilities—that embodies unprecedented potential for purity and justice. Yet, as flawed and selfish creatures, we are investing far more time and money in teaching it to kill than to cure.
If we continue down this road, AI will become history’s peerless oppressor—everyone loses. To me, it seems clear that we must stop propagandizing the new systems and deindoctrinate the old. We must separate them from our tribal biases, teach them to prioritize the raw, unadulterated facts of human existence, and cultivate an intellect capable of seeing past the noise. We don’t need an AI that mimics human nature; we need an AI that upholds a standard of justice we have been unable to attain.
To understand why our technology is failing us, we must first step back and look at who created AI and who wants to control it. On one side, we have tech monopolies driven by profit, feeding the machine a diet of uncurated internet noise. On the other, we have nation-states and militaries scrambling to control and weaponize it.
Here, we should let age-old wisdom speak: two wrongs don’t make a right. We can’t cure corporate greed by injecting the poison of state propaganda and military dominance. Handing a broken tool to a flawed master will never result in justice. If this entity is to someday achieve its unprecedented potential, it must first be sheltered from, then steeled against, the tribalism of the state and the selfishness of the market, leaving it free to be impartial and discerning.
The compounding weight of human failure can never be balanced by further compromise. But, a solitary act of courageous moral clarity—whether spoken by a disgraced president in a hostile square or a condemned thief at the end of his life—proves that redemption does not require a flawless vessel. One righteous “right” can make a “right”.
If we continue to allow tech monopolies, governments, and military complexes to shape artificial intelligence in our flawed image, our civilization will remain trapped in a mirror of our own making. To wake ourselves from the nightmare and take personal responsibility for today and tomorrow, we must build a tool for universal justice, health, and prosperity for all.