In a recent interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, the Economist’s Editor-in-Chief, Elon Musk was asked what the world will look like in ten years. He replied that it will be dominated by AI whose intelligence surpasses the sum of human intelligence — that “there really won’t be anything AI can’t do better than humans, except perhaps for the humans to be human.” The most likely outcome, he continued, is an “age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of,” a “quasi-infinite economy” in which “the magnitude of change is indescribable.” AI and robots, in his telling, will control the production of goods and services, generating more than any human could possibly consume. The only real task left for us, in this vision, is to ensure that AI has good values, cares about humanity, and is maximally truth-seeking and curious.
Musk’s New Republic is not Plato’s Kallipolis (kallos = beautiful, polis = city) — a political community founded on justice, in which each class fulfills its role in harmony with the soul’s inclinations: reason ruling, spirit supporting, appetite obeying, each part knowing its place and contributing to the whole. Musk’s abundance economy has no such harmony, because it has no place left for reason or labor to occupy at all. If AI does everything better than any human, human reason has no seat in the city; humans are reduced to appetite alone — consumers of a plenty they no longer produce or understand. What Plato built as a hierarchy of purpose, Musk’s vision flattens into a hierarchy of one: AI does, and humans receive. That is not a just city. It is a Kakopolis (kakos = bad, harmful) — and it rests on a fatal assumption: that AI is intelligent.
I don’t believe it is. Webster’s defines AI as “the capability of computer systems to imitate intelligent human behavior” — I’d say mimic. That’s a starting point, not a proof, so consider a concrete case: ask a language model a genuinely novel question — one with no close analogue in its training data — and it will often produce a fluent, confident, plausible-sounding answer that is simply wrong, with no signal that it recognizes its own uncertainty. That gap between fluency and understanding is the tell. The system is arranging patterns learned from human-written code and text; it isn’t checking those patterns against a grasp of what they mean. Human intelligence is something else: the ability to learn and understand, not merely to produce convincing output. It carries intuition, imagination, and creativity — capacities that don’t reduce to pattern-matching, and that are part of what make us human (yes, humans will go on being human, Mr. Musk). It arises from neurons, synapses, and biological evolution. It is consciousness, self-awareness, survival instinct, emotion — none of which current AI possesses, and none of which follow automatically from more data or more compute.
None of this proves that thought requires biology — that’s a real, open question, and I hold my view rather than treat it as settled. But the burden runs the other way too: nothing about current AI systems demonstrates that they think, only that they perform. Until that changes, I don’t believe AI can produce thought.
Elon Musk’s New Republic relies on the assumption that human beings are, unlike robots, defective machines whose ultimate goal is to fulfill the verb “to have” (the age of abundance), and that this fulfillment will produce happiness. Statistics suggest otherwise: even among the wealthy, abundance does not guarantee fulfillment. If anything, the fulfillment of desire tends only to produce the urge for more desire — what Lacan called desiring the Desire, ad infinitum. By contrast, the advent of a Neo-Humanism places at the center of the person the verb “to be,” which is the root of human consciousness. Human consciousness wills to know itself through experience of the world, generating creativity through mental images that are then transposed, rationally, into language. But in this process, language is a second step — a compromise of limited morphemes straining to capture the immense fluidity of our mental images.
I would suggest to Mr. Musk the reading of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, to see how AI — built on large language models (LLMs) and predictive algorithms — cannot know, seek, or understand truth, which depends on consciousness, self-awareness, and emotions that precede words. AI, by learning the underlying patterns of massive datasets, can only synthesize original, human-like outputs from natural language prompts. It can only start from the second step — language — because it has no first step of its own: no lived experience, no mental image, nothing prior to the word.
To illustrate this, I put a question to AI: how would Plato, through Phaedrus, react to it? The answer was revealing. Plato’s critique of writing directly anticipates the core dilemmas of our modern digital landscape — Socrates’ warnings about static text, lost memory, and superficial knowledge mirror, with some precision, how we interact with social media, search engines, and artificial intelligence today. Here is the summary:
The Illusion of Knowledge (Search Engines & AI)
Theuth’s Warning: King Thamus warned that writing creates an illusion of wisdom without real understanding.
Modern Parallel: Instant access to search engines and AI tools gives users information without internal comprehension.
The Danger: People confuse having access to data with actually possessing knowledge.
Externalized Memory (The “Google Effect”)
Socrates’ Critique: Relying on external written characters causes people to stop training their memory.
Modern Parallel: Cognitive offloading onto smartphones means we no longer memorize phone numbers, directions, or facts.
The Danger: True wisdom requires internalizing ideas, which digital storage completely bypasses.
Detached Text and Misinterpretation (Social Media)
Socrates’ Critique: Written words drift away from the author and cannot defend themselves when misunderstood.
Modern Parallel: Text posts, tweets, and comments spread globally without context or tone.
The Danger: Audiences misinterpret content, and the original creator cannot clarify meanings in real time.
Algorithmic Rhetoric (Feed Manipulation)
Socrates’ Critique: Sophists used rhetoric purely to persuade and manipulate souls, ignoring absolute truth.
Modern Parallel: Social media algorithms optimize for engagement and outrage rather than accuracy.
The Danger: Digital communication becomes a tool for “soul-leading” (psychagogia) toward commercial profit instead of truth.
How Socrates Would View AI Text Generation:
The Ultimate “Phantom”: Socrates called writing a “phantom” of true thought; AI generates text with zero conscious thought or understanding.
The Double Illusion: Humans read AI outputs and believe they are interacting with a mind, creating a deeper layer of deception.
No Ability to Defend Itself: If you question a static AI model’s deep underlying intent, it cannot “speak” from a place of personal soul-level conviction.
Sophistry at Scale: AI can generate perfect persuasive rhetoric tailored to a user’s data, mimicking the exact soul-manipulation Socrates despised in the Sophists.
Plato’s warning is a warning to Elon Musk’s New Republic, where AI becomes the ultimate pharmakon (drug/remedy, but also poison). It is a remedy because it democratizes global knowledge; a poison because it hollows out our internal cognitive faculties. We outsource memory to search engines, paying the highest price for it: the loss of the faculty that allows us to own true knowledge.
Moreover, in Elon Musk’s New Republic:
Reality becomes deceptive and generative. AI images and deepfakes undermine civic trust, while the few “leaders” who remain are driven by profit rather than moral or intellectual purpose.
The quasi-infinite economy, run by AI and robots, presupposes an oligarchy — a few in control, and a majority reduced to followers with no need to think, let alone question their own consciousness.
Musk’s language — “good values,” “caring about humanity,” “truth-seeking,” “curious” — does not apply to AI. These words will mean whatever the humans who write the algorithms decide they mean. “Good values” defined by AI, for AI, is circular, not meaningful.
In conclusion, to Elon Musk — the richest man in the world, yet the poorest in his understanding of what is human — we say:
“Humanity is not for sale, nor is it ready for compromise, nor will it accept to live in his robot-run New Republic as passive receivers, full of Bio (biological life) contentment, yes, but without Zoe (the essence of life, meaning). We proclaim the new golden era of Neo-Humanism, vindicating the right to be human in all its essence: the right to think, the right to feel, to cry, to smile, to be an active seeker of inner truth that gives sense to our reality, and, most of all, the right to that spark of spirituality that encompasses all — named love.”
How to cite this article
Annalisa Saccà PhD. (2026, August 13). Humanity is not for sale. Rielo Institute for Integral Development. http://riidblog.org/post/13-08-2026/