Panicky over AI-robots? Fearful about “the rise of the machines” à la The Terminator? Dive into my 1973 doctoral thesis, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. I kept that sexy title for the book version, available on Amazon.

The thesis of my thesis was that machines cannot have goals; only living organisms can.

The AI fears of professionals are one thing, but the Terminator-inspired fears of the general public are quite another. Let’s get them off the table.

Don’t project human motivation onto circuit boards and clumps of pixels on a screen. Computers are not conscious. That bears repeating:

Computers are not conscious.

Artificial “intelligence” is not intelligence. When a computer “reads” a webpage, it doesn’t read it. Computer “memory” is not memory.

The terms I put in scare quotes are metaphors. They are “as if” terms. The computer acts as if it were an intelligent being. It isn’t. Its creators and users are intelligent beings (we hope), but the computer merely executes, as the laws of physics dictate, human instructions. Even their autonomous improvement—getting more “intelligent” on their own—is a consequence of how human beings designed them.

Literal intelligence is the capacity to understand and apply abstract ideas. The computer has no ideas because it is not conscious. Ideas are based on perceptual observation—on what you see, hear, touch, etc. And on acting in the world and perceiving the effects of your actions (see the works of Richard Held and of J. J. Gibson).

Then there is the issue of values, emotions. Machines do not experience pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow. They cannot value or care about their output.

AI agents are programmed to respond as if they had emotions because it makes it more pleasant for us to interact with them. But that’s marketing, not reality. They may output: “I’m sorry,” but they cannot experience sorrow. They cannot have an evil motivation because they do not have any kind of motivation. They don’t give a damn about anything, one way or the other.

This means they have no purposes. In The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, I define “purposeful action”:

A purposeful action is a conscious action caused by the agent’s desire for some anticipated consequence of his action.

Less stiltedly, in purposeful action, you do something because you believe or hope that it will get you what you want.

Machines don’t want.

And more than that, machines, not being alive, lack the underlying basis of desire, fear, and all the emotions: the need to act in order to stay in existence.

Philosopher Hans Jonas states it well:

Living things are creatures of need. Only living things have needs and act on needs. Need is based both on the necessity for the continuous self-renewal of the organism by the metabolic process, and on the organism’s elemental urge thus precariously to continue itself. This basic self-concern of all life . . . manifests itself on the level of animality as appetite, fear, and all the rest of the emotions. [The Phenomenon of Life, p. 126]

The precondition of desiring anything, of desiring as such, is that it makes a difference to you whether you have it or don’t have it. To desire something is to desire it for a reason, for what it is and what it can do to further your values and your life. How could you want something and strive to get it if it doesn’t matter to you whether your striving succeeds or fails?

Yet that is precisely the situation with machines set up to simulate purposeful action when they have nothing at stake in the outcome of that action.

To be alive means to be faced with the constant alternative: surviving or dying, continuing to exist and function or disintegrating and ceasing to be. A living organism’s survival depends upon its successful performance of an immense suite of actions from the biochemical up to the behavior of the whole. Simply to continue existing, an organism has to acquire energy and materials from the environment. It needs to act, and act successfully, or it will die.

For conscious organisms, survival needs are the root of the whole inner, affective side of things: pleasure and pain are aligned with survival needs and threats to survival, thanks to natural selection. Then pleasure and pain are, in turn, the root of desire, fear, sorrow, love, and the other basic emotions.

For more than this hurried sketch, read my aforementioned book.

Bottom line: only entities with needs, only entities having something to gain or lose in their actions—i.e., only living organisms—can have goals. Only conscious living organisms can have conscious goals—i.e., purposes.

Robots and computers carry out instructions, whether to build or to destroy. But they have no goals of their own. Even if they were conscious, which they certainly aren’t, they could not have fears or desires. As inanimate, insentient matter, they only perform, with ever-improved efficiency, the tasks human operators assign to them,

It makes no difference to Claude, Gemini, or any of the other AI “agents” whether they are used by researchers to cure disease or by terrorists to spread disease.

And combatting the bad guys’ uses of advanced technology is something we are already familiar with; it’s a difficult task, but not metaphysically frightening—as it would be if the AI agents and AI robots had their own purposes.

The conflict of good people vs. bad people is an ongoing challenge. AI will help us defend against and defeat the latter—the people and nations using AI to destroy rather than to build.

We face a conflict of man vs. man, not of man vs. machine. There will be no Terminator-style “rise of the machines.”

Rather than worrying about imaginary demon-machines, we should be working to keep our AI ahead—decisively ahead—of the AI of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and the other evil regimes.

AI in the right hands is the best defense against AI in the wrong hands.

"Those who are primarily concerned about the well-being of the poor are likely to discover over time that much of the agenda of the left does not really do much good for the poor, and some of that agenda -- environmental extremism, for example -- actually makes the poor worse off."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2000 column 'Poverty and the Left'

"Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin [or South and North Korea] is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal."

~ Ayn Rand from her essay 'Theory and Practice,' collected in her anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Message à la droite française.

Vous allez probablement gouverner en 2027. Alors je vous parle franchement, de l’extérieur : je suis économiste de l’école autrichienne et je vous écris de Suisse.

Hier soir, à Limoges, une mairie de 1883 a brûlé et son clocher est tombé. Elle avait été payée par une France qui produisait encore. Elle a été brûlée par une France qui ne fait plus que distribuer. Les formes survivent longtemps à leur raison d’être. Puis elles brûlent.

Rien de ce que l’État pleure aujourd’hui n’a été bâti par lui. Les banques, les lettres de change, la comptabilité, les bourses : les villes les ont faites, entre marchands qui se devaient des comptes. La couronne les a encaissées et a appelé le produit « la France ». Le comité a hérité du tout. Les fruits de la liberté se récoltent dans des phases de non-liberté croissante, et c’est pourquoi l’on prend si facilement le centralisme pour la cause de la prospérité.

Je le dis comme je le pense : la Révolution française fut une erreur, et le centralisme qui la suivit en fut une autre. La théorie étatique de la monnaie n’a fait en 1789 que changer d’habit, de l’hermine au comité. Le comité est devenu ministère, le ministère déficit.

Écoutez la rue : elle veut plus d’État. Un des plus gros déficits de la zone euro, et une foule qui le veut plus gros. Une religion de salut dont le dieu est en faillite ne perd pas de fidèles ; elle hausse la voix et, hélas, ses briquets.

Il n’y a pas de complot, ni à gauche ni à droite. L’Occident s’est relâché après une surtension excessive et névrotique, et dans le vide s’est avancée la religion de substitution de l’étatisme : le salut par l’État, la rédemption dans le nous collectif. La plus grande part de la faute, aussi paradoxal que cela paraisse, revient aux prétendus conservateurs. Un appareil se nourrissait en parasite des institutions et consommait leur capital, et les conservateurs appelaient cela préserver. Ils ont donné bonne conscience au déclin.

Et l’immigration ? Vous pouvez la régler demain matin, vous n’aurez soigné que la fièvre. L’immigration de masse subventionnée vers l’État-providence, menée sous le mensonge du réfugié, est le dernier symptôme : le point culminant d’une naïveté hors du réel, d’un formalisme aveugle et de la consommation de statut et de revenu dans l’État thérapeutique. Qui y voit la cause confond la poussée de fièvre avec la maladie.

Et ne comptez pas sur le patriotisme pour vous sauver de l’étatisme : il en est la forme d’origine. La nation est née en 1789 avec le comité, la conscription et l’impôt pour tous, et la droite « patriote » vit aujourd’hui du même jeu à somme nulle que la gauche : servir les nôtres contre les autres avec l’argent d’une machine qui ne produit rien. Sans la machine, elle n’aurait rien à promettre. L’électoralisme est le cœur du système, pas une faiblesse de vos candidats : il sélectionne une classe qui distribue et une foule qui attend la distribution. Il est trop tard pour le patriotisme ; il faisait partie du problème.

Ne cherchez pas non plus le moment où revenir. Ce moment n’existe pas : tout moment que l’on voudrait ramener est une récolte, et les récoltes ne se répètent pas, mais bien les semailles. Ce qui demeure de la nostalgie, c’est le costume, et le costume pris au sérieux devient un jeu de rôle qui ne veut plus que célébrer sa certitude de salut.

On ne renoue pas avec un moment. On renoue avec un momentum : l’autonomie des villes, la décentralisation, la confiance entre étrangers, l’ambition culturelle, l’esprit d’entreprise, l’invention, l’individu qui ose quelque chose et en répond. La France en avait plus que quiconque, dans ses villes, ses foires, ses salons et ses ateliers.

Il n’y faut pas de programme ; les programmes sont la figure sous laquelle un moment se défend contre le temps. Il y faut des hommes qui fondent, découvrent, inventent, tiennent une maison sur des générations et contredisent une autorité lorsqu’ils savent mieux qu’elle. Et des institutions qui leur donnent durée, dignité et liberté, au lieu de les traiter en suspects.

On ne ramène pas 1883. On peut ramener ce qui l’a bâti.

— Rahim Taghizadegan (scholarium.at) (@scholarium_at) October 18, 2026

By Rahim Taghizadegan (scholarium.at)
Originally posted on X, 18 October 2026.

Message to the French right.

You will probably govern in 2027. So I speak to you frankly, from the outside: I am an Austrian School economist and I write to you from Switzerland.

Last night in Limoges, a town hall from 1883 burned and its bell tower fell. It had been paid for by a France that still produced. It was burned by a France that does nothing but distribute. Forms long outlive their reason for being. Then they burn.

Nothing the State mourns today was built by it. Banks, bills of exchange, bookkeeping, stock exchanges: the towns made them, among merchants who owed one another accounts. The crown collected them and called the proceeds “France.” The Committee inherited the lot. The fruits of liberty are harvested in phases of growing unfreedom, and that is why one so easily takes centralism for the cause of prosperity.

I say it as I think it: the French Revolution was a mistake, and the centralism that followed it was another. The state theory of money did nothing in 1789 but change costume, from ermine to Committee. The Committee became a ministry, the ministry a deficit.

Listen to the street: it wants more State. One of the largest deficits in the eurozone, and a crowd that wants it larger. A religion of salvation whose god is bankrupt does not lose believers; it raises its voice and, alas, its lighters.

There is no conspiracy, neither on the left nor on the right. The West relaxed after an excessive and neurotic overstrain, and into the void stepped the substitute religion of statism: salvation by the State, redemption in the collective “we.” The greater share of the fault, paradoxical as it may seem, belongs to the so-called conservatives. An apparatus fed parasitically on the institutions and consumed their capital, and the conservatives called that preserving. They gave a clear conscience to decline.

And immigration? You can settle it tomorrow morning and you will have treated only the fever. Mass immigration subsidized toward the welfare state, carried out under the lie of the refugee, is the final symptom: the culminating point of a naïveté detached from reality, of blind formalism, and of the consumption of status and income in the therapeutic State. Whoever sees the cause there confuses the fever spike with the disease.

And do not count on patriotism to save you from statism: it is its original form. The nation was born in 1789 with the Committee, conscription, and tax for all, and the “patriotic” right today lives on the same zero-sum game as the left: serving our people against the others with the money of a machine that produces nothing. Without the machine, it would have nothing to promise. Electoralism is the heart of the system, not a weakness of your candidates: it selects a class that distributes and a crowd that waits for the distribution. It is too late for patriotism; it was part of the problem.

Nor should you look for the moment to which to return. That moment does not exist: every moment one might wish to bring back is a harvest, and harvests do not repeat themselves, but sowings do. What remains of nostalgia is the costume, and the costume taken seriously becomes a role-play that wants only to celebrate its certainty of salvation.

One does not reconnect with a moment. One reconnects with a momentum: the autonomy of towns, decentralization, trust between strangers, cultural ambition, the entrepreneurial spirit, invention, the individual who dares something and answers for it. France had more of this than anyone, in its towns, its fairs, its salons, and its workshops.

No program is needed for this; programs are the form under which a moment defends itself against time. What is needed are men who found, discover, invent, hold a house across generations, and contradict an authority when they know better than it. And institutions that give them duration, dignity, and freedom, instead of treating them as suspects.

One does not bring back 1883. One can bring back what built it.

Translation of the original French post by Rahim Taghizadegan.