Social Liberty
AI and Liberty
When competence stops being scarce, who gets to hold the capability?
Social Liberty Foundation ·
A collection on artificial intelligence and a free society. It opens with The AI Event of 2026, the case that competence has stopped being scarce and that the question is where the capability lands. It then follows the capability to the ground: the data centers arriving in the Santa Clara Valley and the county fights over their land, power, and water; what automation can and can't do for land assessment; the privacy of transactions, in a trialogue that gives an AI model its own lines; a dividend that doesn't need to sort the displaced; and the self-government and judgment a capable tool tempts people to give up. It closes with two older essays on the neo-Luddite critique of technology, kept as the strongest counterargument.
Contents
Chapter 1
The AI Event of 2026Something larger than a product cycle is happening in ordinary work. A question for a free society is whether the capability lands with persons and communities, or gets fenced back into the center... for example, under the name of safety.
Chapter 2
Memory Farms in the Valley of Heart's DelightThe valley went from orchards to chips largely on its own. The memory farms now arriving are bigger, financed by printed money, and imposed. A social libertarian doesn't ban a business, but has to ask what happens when it decides a place's future.
- Organic and inorganic growth
- Planted by incentive
- Money without limits, development without roots
- What a social libertarian doesn't oppose
- Three things that seem to be in tension
- How to assess community opposition
- Why the valley is the place to see it clearly
- Responders, not printers
- The valley's third crop
Chapter 3
By RightA law written to stop one kind of local veto turns out to have no way of telling it apart from a different kind of local veto — the kind protecting a watershed nobody at the hearing gets to have, because there isn't one.
Chapter 4
Three Blind AssessorsA land value tax is only as good as the number it multiplies. Most of the argument about Georgism is about the rate. The harder question, and the one that decides whether the tax survives, is how the land gets valued in the first place.
Chapter 5
Narrow Edge -- A TrialogueMost voters want something other than the two parties, and no third party is ready to offer it. The question isn't narrow or wide. It's which narrow thing can't be taken from us without taking the rest along with it.
- The open territory
- What nobody is arguing about
- The reserve that isn't there
- Three things that seem to be true at once
- The shape of a wedge
- Free soil and free silver
- The single tax, which was already a tip
- Pressure, not a ticket
- Four parties wearing two names
- What belongs at the tip
- Being exact
- What the support is for
- The advantage of being ignored
Chapter 6
Universality: Redistribution Without CategoriesGrant that government should redistribute at all, and a second question follows immediately: does it have to do that through a list of categories of who deserves to receive?
Chapter 7
Personal SovereigntyA free society doesn't run on unrestrained people. It runs on self-governing ones. Self-government isn't a default setting. It has to be made.
Chapter 8
That Which Is Not LearnedBastiat asked what a broken window destroys that nobody can see. Ask the same question about a school schedule with no room in it for music.
Chapter 9
Some Notes for a Neo-Luddite ManifestoChellis Glendinning Most students of European history dismiss the Luddites of 19th century England as “reckless…
Chapter 10
Technology and CivilizationEven more troubling are the writings of George Bradford (aka David Watson), one of the major theorists at Fifth Estate,…