The All-Seeing State Is Coming

The Constitution is our firewall.

Judd Dunning | October 8, 2026

“Knowledge itself is power,” Francis Bacon observed. James Madison warned that “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.” Lord Acton gave us the darker truth that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Montesquieu understood the answer: power must check power. None could have imagined artificial intelligence, smart cities, connected cars, facial recognition, or machines processing more information in seconds than governments once handled in years. Fortunately, they understood something more important: human nature.

If knowledge is power, then near-total knowledge is near-total power. This belongs at the center of America’s artificial intelligence debate. The greatest political danger may not be a machine becoming conscious and taking control of mankind. A more immediate danger comes when immense knowledge is married to immense government power in a culture already weakened by moral relativism. Government could learn more about ordinary citizens than any ruler or intelligence service in history.

There are reasons to be bullish on AI. Our military and doctors should use it. American business should dominate it, and entrepreneurs should make fortunes building it. Jerry Kaplan calls it one of the most important inventions in human history while warning that powerful systems cannot simply police themselves.

Yet Francis Fukuyama, from another direction, worries about agentic AI systems delegated real tasks and authority.

That tension is captured perfectly in Jerry Kaplan’s “Why AI Won’t Kill Us All” and Francis Fukuyama’s “Why I Changed My Mind About AI Risk.” Kaplan rejects much of the existential hysteria surrounding AI, while Fukuyama has become increasingly concerned about agentic systems and the dangers of over-delegating human authority. Their disagreement is important, but so is where they meet: AI is too powerful to be left without serious human judgment, accountability, and control.

Conservatism........

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