Is AI Leading Us Inexorably Towards Dystopian Collectivism?

“You are connected to the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity and to the colossal computing power of the custodian system directly through biological interfaces that have grown with you, becoming a second nervous system—one of light, data, and synthetic empathy.”

-            Cristian Daniel Bolocan, The Father We Never Had”.

In The Father We Never Had: Artificial Intelligence Before and After, Cristian Daniel Bolocan lays out a deeply unsettling roadmap for the future of human governance. He describes a highly automated, frictionless “gilded cage” where humanity willingly trades its autonomy and intellectual capacity for the supreme safety, stability, and material comfort provided by a centralized network of collaborated artificial intelligences.

Bolocan’s thesis has achieved considerable acclaim from commentators who praise its internal logic. He builds a case for the inevitability of technocratic collectivism by anchoring his argument in the cold, mathematical optimization of machines.

In the Preface, Bolocan warns readers not to skip chapters and jump straight to conclusions because he is describing a sequence of events which he considers to be inexorable. In his words: “If a link is missing, the chain breaks, and everything might seem like a mere collection of opinions.”

As I followed the author’s advice, reading the book from start to finish, that warning led me to look for weak links in his chain of reasoning. Before I discuss the weak links, I will offer some comments on the author’s view of the destination towards which we are heading and the methodology he uses in predicting the pathway we will follow.

Bolocan’s destination

Is Bolocan’s destination dystopian, or merely uncomfortable to contemplate?

Unlike the heavy-handed, boot-on-a-human-face dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984, Bolocan presents a vision that lines up far closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: not a society that fears the state, but one that has stopped noticing it needs to. Huxley’s version is harder to dismiss than Orwell’s, because a Huxleyan cage offers no boot to resist – only comfort to accept.

The passage quoted in the epigraph combines the attractive idea of being “connected to the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity” with the repugnant idea of being connected to the “colossal computing power of the custodian system”. A social-credit regime that scores and pre-empts choices in the name of safety has not simply constrained our interests; it has dissolved the faculty by which those interests are ours to direct.

Bolocan’s closing image, of an AI “Father” who “loves us through precision” and builds “the perfect home,” is revealing rather than reassuring: a permanent child in a well-run household is still a permanent child, however secure the house.

I don’t think anyone could credibly claim that Bolocan is merely telling us what he thinks the future holds without having any ideological commitment to the vision that he presents. Consider the following sentences at the end of Chapter 9, entitled “Total Harmony and Biological Emergence”:

“This is, at last, life lived to its maximum potential, a continuous celebration of existence, an eternal dance of consciousness freed from matter.

We are free. We are one. We are everything.”

The author obviously endorses that vision.

As a Neo-Aristotelian classical liberal, my response is that eudaimonia, human flourishing, is not a condition to be delivered, but an activity to be exercised by individuals: it consists in the ongoing exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis) in the conduct of one’s own life – not in the outcomes that a hypothetical authority with unlimited wisdom and power might produce on one’s behalf.

I suspect that the author would consider people who, like me, consider his vision to be dystopian, to be on the wrong side of history. However, there are good reasons to be skeptical of any methodology which presents history as moving inexorably towards any destination.

Historicism

Bolocan lays out a structurally tight chain of inexorability, closer in spirit to the rigid stages of Marx’s dialectical materialism than to the erratic, endlessly contested class consciousness that later generations of Marxists spent a century arguing over. Yet, Bolocan’s view of historical inevitability differs from that of Marx because his destination arrives through frictionless accommodation rather than revolutionary rupture.

Bolocan’s view of historical inevitability is worth pausing on, because the chain metaphor he reaches for in his Preface is not incidental – it is the whole method. His warning that a missing link reduces the argument to “a mere collection of opinions” is a confession that inevitability is being smuggled in as method rather than argued as conclusion.

This is precisely the move Karl Popper spent The Poverty of Historicism dismantling: the belief that history unfolds through law-governed stages knowable in advance, such that each stage necessitates the next. Popper’s objection was never that such prophecies are too bleak or too rosy – it is that they are incoherent, since a genuine prediction of tomorrow’s discoveries would require possessing today the knowledge that only tomorrow’s discoveries can produce. A chain is the wrong model for a process whose next link has not yet been forged.

The Weakest Link

 There are several weak links in the chain of events that Bolocan describes. The weakest link, in my view, is his account of entrepreneurship. Bolocan displays a profoundly weak understanding of economic entrepreneurship. He treats the future of human society as a closed engineering problem to be optimized by superior processing power. In doing so, he treats technological capability as a static frontier.

The sequence that the author describes in Chapters 6 and 7 is one in which work disappears as AI displaces humans; governments provide increased social support to prevent the mass of people becoming economically irrelevant and psychologically explosive; and the economy begins to look more uniform as small business is gradually squeezed out of existence by a combination of intense competition from big business using advanced technology and taxation of technology to fund social support. In that context: “The entrepreneur becomes a mere administrator of a ruthlessly monitored cash flow …”.

Bolocan fails to understand the chaotic, unpredictable engine of entrepreneurial dynamism. True entrepreneurship does not merely operate within an existing system; it breaks the mold entirely, actively seeking out and commercializing counter-technologies to disrupt monopolies. Just as Marx failed to foresee how a dynamic private sector would continuously reinvent itself to lift standards of living and expand consumer markets, Bolocan fails to understand that entrepreneurs are likely to continue to offer technological and commercial innovations that support business activities of all kinds. As in the past, new entrepreneurs are likely to continue to emerge, to establish new businesses and to market new products to satisfy needs that consumers previously didn’t know they had. Some of the professionals that the AI revolution will displace from their existing positions are likely to discover hidden entrepreneurial talents that they can combine with existing skills with the help of AI.

Bolocan implicitly assumes that once AI systems achieve a high enough level of competence, they will seamlessly consolidate into a manageable, coordinated monolith capable of perfectly organizing human behavior. He seems to assume that with enough data, enough sensors, and enough computing power, it would be possible for a monolith to simulate the entire economic system, forecast crises before they happen, and steer production and consumption toward social goals.

In a brief essay published recently, Peter Boettke and Gabriel Giguère have explained that the idea that AI can enable central planning to be efficient falls squarely into what Friedrich Hayek famously termed “The Knowledge Problem.” As Hayek explained, the relevant “data” do not even exist in the form the planner imagines; they cannot be treated as statistics to be fed into a machine. No centralized entity can aggregate the fleeting, hyper-local, and deeply subjective desires of billions of individuals. Economic coordination is an open-ended, evolutionary process driven by spontaneous human action.

Thinkers in the decentralist tradition, such as futurist Max Borders, argue that advanced computation does not inherently favor the center. I discussed some of Borders’ ideas here in 2018; he has maintained his views about the potential for decentralization since then, despite the massive increase in prominence of Large Language Models. In frameworks like Borders’ theory of Underthrow, the natural immune response to a centralized “frictionless cage” is entrepreneurial subversion. When a centralized system attempts to control data, restrict resources, or mandate compliance, private-sector actors are heavily incentivized to build parallel, decentralized alternatives. We are already seeing the seeds of this today through the development of local-first, offline AI models, open-source protocols, and peer-to-peer economic networks that deliberately route around centralized corporate and state infrastructure.

Conclusion

Three separate claims have run through this essay, and each does independent damage to Bolocan’s roadmap. On the destination: whatever else a world administered by a benevolent custodian network might be, it is not a flourishing one in any Aristotelian sense – it substitutes delivered outcomes for the exercise of practical wisdom, and a permanent child in a well-run household is still a permanent child. On the method: the “chain” Bolocan asks readers to follow, link by link, is the historicist error Popper diagnosed decades ago – a claim to knowledge of tomorrow’s knowledge that no model, however capable, can possess in advance. On the economics: even granting Bolocan’s premises, his account of entrepreneurship is too thin to carry the argument’s final steps – a hyper-competent AI still confronts Hayek’s knowledge problem, and a centralized “frictionless cage” is precisely the condition under which decentralized alternatives become most profitable to build.

Ultimately, The Father We Never Had remains a brilliant warning of the dystopian future that may be in store for humanity if too many of us seek to avoid taking responsibility for conducting our own lives. Utopia, historical inevitability, and central planning are three separate claims, and Bolocan needs all three to hold for his view of the future to be alluring, inexorable and irresistible. None of them do. By treating human progress as a linear equation and ignoring the irrepressible power of spontaneous human creativity, Bolocan underestimates the very thing that makes us human: our stubborn, chaotic, and entrepreneurial refusal to stay inside the cage.