I like AI, but it definitely isn't ready for something so important as governance.
Which is why it is perfect for DOGEbags: They want to break everything, and just say the AI is at fault. Odds are that they will blame gay furry hackers for trying to ruin everything.
Musk's various ponzi schemes, up to the Artemis-killing SpaceX fiasco, were coming due. Trump provided the opportunity for him to pivot into government, by replacing it with his AI, gps with starlink, air traffic control with whatever he comes up with, etc etc etc, making himself even more too big to fail. The US government the latest offering on the ponzi|pyramid. Trump's ideology aligning with Musk's own true beliefs is a bonus.
It will severely weaken the US in direct measurable short and long-term ways, to the point it is a real disaster for the US. Those to blame are all those that never called him out throughout his rise. Not to mention those governments (Republican and Democrat) who fed him public money throughout the entire period.
Edit - Bezos's The Washington Post is apparently supporting him now. No surprise, they want an oligarchy. The Democrats are moving rightward, they are more or less happy with it too.
I guess it is some version of the land of the free home of the brave, but maybe it is the freedom to do what you want if you're rich, and have been brave enough to brazenly take everything and exploit everyone.
I will be the first to lean into the fact that over the next 5 years, workflow in every company will change dramatically. It's going to be like the shift from no one having email, to everyone doing business by email.
But you know what's a bad idea? Rawdogging that change in real time, on spec, with your human workflow staff out in the street, and your staff are politically-appointed children, all while things like critical infrastructure, healthcare, nukes, air traffic, and the military are your "in production" assets that might go down. All to try and be the guy that shoves his AI in the gap.
All governments moved to email slowly because, among other reasons, email is inherently insecure. Email use by governments, records laws, and encryption standards progressed together. None of those types of knock-ons are considered here.
Looks like Musk is using the Japanize "drying river"-model that's like starter lever shit in economics. Doing that on a society level is insanely stupid.
He seems to go on these benders, that probably involve copious amounts of uppers, where he get these bright ideas. The fact that someone like that has control over our whole government and economy is scary.
That's because he and his kind believe government is useless and can just be broken without losing anything important. From their point of view, government is just a thing that takes money from them and spends it on people who don't deserve to live because they're not asshole billionaire techbros. And it makes poor people's lives slightly less unpleasant by giving them money and services, which billionaires don't like because it makes the poor less desperate and exploitable.
That's because he and his kind believe government is useless and can just be broken without losing anything important.
kinda like racks of servers that keep a social media site used by 100s of millions of users? the ones muskrat just yanked willy-nilly out of a data center and loaded onto uhauls? it took weeks for twitter to repair that damage.
The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.
I am bullish on AI in the long run.
I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.
I also don't think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn't just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn't work -- and some of those were really bad at first -- and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.
Yeah, but you and much of the business world have intelligence and strategy. Elon is the guy who thinks he can just pay some Chinese gamer to play a game for him, then pretend he did it himself; that's his version of "brilliant strategist."
It's no wonder he can't figure out how to automate anything safely or correctly, because he doesn't actually understand how to do anything himself, and he can't just pay some Chinese rando to do it for him.
I worked as a consultant for a long time. I learned that anyone who starts a question with "Why don't we just..." generally doesn't understand the problem.
You generally won't understand another person (and adversary especially) if you don't see how their actions perfectly make sense for them, and without conspiracies.
So - there is one matching variant, that Musk sincerely hates bureaucratic kinds of power, but not proprietary kinds of power. Replacing a bureaucrat with (some imagined good) AI in another assumption would be replacing a mediocre human with inherent lust for power with an unreliable automaton, but without lust for power. The good part here is that humans are unreliable too and working bureaucracies compensate for that.
The bad part is that for every failure a person should be responsible proportionally to their input. I'm not sure they'll do that, or I'm sure they won't.