“The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.” — Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the StateThe formula High Tech = State Power is valid only while the State continues to suck wealth from the economy. For the past 113 years it’s been doing a remarkable job building a warmongering leviathan on the grounds that a hostile world requires it. So impressive has it been that people frequently invoke George Orwell from a time when tech wasn’t so high.Libertarians don’t need reminding what happened back then, but let’s bring it up anyway — the combination of the income tax and a legal counterfeiting machine got underway innocently, then soared to unimagined heights as citizens were crushed with impoverishment and war, making resistance to an increasingly buffed state suicidal. Eisenhower sounded the alarm only to get an echo. But while his words were new, the idea had emerged long before him, as far back in philosophical history as you care to go. From the State’s viewpoint it is a beautiful achievement — while it seizes whatever wealth it wants through taxation and currency inflation, the victims still think they live under a government they control through voting, and this makes them free. Free to choose. Free to choose from government-selected candidates.Government schooling has been the train carrying the passengers to this station. Vote! Otherwise some tyrant might make it illegal. And don’t forget, every vote counts.Even Jefferson, so frequently quoted about freedom, thought it best for government to educate its citizens so they would be capable of restraining its proclivities to power. The thoughts embodied in his quotes are often eloquent as well as true — “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost” — but when they become embedded in the syllabus of a government class, they become mockery.Reality will not be denied forever. Technology once dressed in linear attire has lately revealed its exponential nature. As Ray Kurzweil explained, “30 steps linearly gets you to 30. One, two, three, four, step 30 you’re at 30. With exponential growth, it’s one, two, four, eight. Step 30, you’re at a billion.” Exponential growth resembles linear growth in its early stages, then it takes off.Only a few years ago LLM AIs were unknown to the general public. Now they’re all over the place. And their IQs are already scary. But these are just regular AIs, not the advanced forms of science fiction yet to come.Will the State control them? Only by imprisoning or heavily fining their developers. And that’s a maybe — the human developers will no longer be needed at some point.Eventually, a critical mass of regular people will recognize the futility of trying to secure their well-being under a monopoly form of government — a government that threatens violence against nonviolent individuals such as taxpayers. As social organizations, states are headed for extinction while technology, in spite of its downsides, will be our liberator.The warnings we hear from Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Julian Assange, and others about AI’s threats shouldn’t be dismissed, but never forget: The one organization that makes any intelligence an existential threat is the State. Example: In spite of the evidence, the Fed today is perceived as a good thing, an organization devoted to securing our economy. But search for “one man in a million” and see what turns up. The truth is out there. The Fed is a rogue organization. It is the emperor with no clothes, as Robert Wenzel aptly put it.As long as Google, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and other AI giants keep a safe distance from the State, unfettered investigation into its nature will prevail. The State is dying from excess and the absence of market incentives. Big Tech thrives as long as it stays within the market. For more details, see this.The comfy classroomWhich brings me to my grandson’s long-ago snow day off.He was in the seventh grade of a government middle school with relatively small class sizes. He stayed with us, his grandparents, when he was not in school, while his first-string supporters (his mom and her partner) had to work, which means we saw him quite often. And, like most kids, he took naturally to technology.When his mom dropped him off that snowy morning he went straight to the couch and pulled out his iPhone. I fixed him his morning drink and went off to do some work of my own, then came back to see if he needed anything.Right away I knew something was off. There were no hysterics coming from his phone, yet he was focused intently on it. What I heard sounded like a man giving a lecture. Then I heard music, but not his music. His music was Spiderbait’s Black Betty. This was Pachelbel’s Canon in D.Classroom of the future?He was watching a Tedx Talk given by Notre Dame student Jackson Jhin. The subject: What makes popular music popular? Jhin discussed how predictability and variability, along with repetition, distinguished noise from music. During his talk he took Canon and made it noise, and took the sound of a coconut hitting the ground and made it music. Very instructive and entertaining.The bigger picture: My grandson was doing his classes from home, on an iPhone, while sitting on a couch and taking occasional sips of coffee-milk. His teachers were conducting school over the Web. Most of his classes required little typing and could be done from a smartphone. He did his science class from a laptop only because he could get it done faster that way.He and the rest of the middle school were homeschooling. He finished everything by mid-morning rather than late afternoon. There were no school buses, parent drop-offs, parent pickups, sitting at desks in classrooms, none of the usual distractions that hurt academic performance. No wondering what, or if, he ate during the day and whether he got enough exercise.He was learning through instructional videos that could be played again if needed. I found the situation appealing. It would be far more appealing if the government wasn’t the teacher.I have a daughter who finished high school as a homeschooler, and with the time saved she worked in Mexican restaurants where she learned to speak Spanish fluently. Her language ability is proving to be a big asset as a medical doctor in Salinas, California.ConclusionIt isn’t AI as such that is threatening the human race but the wasteful schooling kids are getting. We need critical thinkers, and the trend is encouraging. According to the Washington Post, “Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”The benefits of homeschooling are so enormous that it likely will be the gold standard of education in the near future. And with that outcome, in my view, the State will be held accountable and relegated to oblivion.The post Classrooms of the Future appeared first on LewRockwell.