Republicans are losing their fight to ban drag — at least for now.
Last Friday, a judge in Knoxville, Tennessee, prohibited a prosecutor who threatened to bring criminal charges against drag performers at a nearby college from doing so.
The prosecutor had planned to target the performers using a new state law that, among other things, lists “male or female impersonators” alongside “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, [and] strippers” as forms of speech subject to tight restrictions.
Judge Ronnie Greer, the author of that decision, is a Bush appointee and the second federal judge appointed by Republicans to issue such an order in Tennessee. Greer relied heavily on Judge Thomas Parker’s opinion in Friends of George’s v. Mulroy, an opinion shielding drag artists in Memphis. Parker is a Trump judge.
The question of whether a state can ban drag shows should not be controversial in a nation governed by the First Amendment. A state legislature may not ban standup comedy. Nor could it ban musical theater, kabuki, noh, koothu, or mime. Dressing in clothes conventionally worn by the opposite sex and satirizing gender norms is no less a protected form of expression than any other form of theatre.
And, to their credit, the courts have thus far agreed with this assessment of the Constitution.
According to the Movement Advancement Project, a pro-LGBTQ think tank, two states, Tennessee and Montana, have enacted laws explicitly targeting drag performers. Four others — Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and North Dakota — have laws targeting “adult” performances that can be used to target drag shows and that in some cases have been used to do so.
But these laws have not fared well in court. In addition to the two federal court decisions blocking Tennessee’s anti-drag law, federal courts blocked similar laws in Montana, Florida, and Texas. For now, at least, the First Amendment is holding firm.
That said, there’s no guarantee that judges will continue to protect free speech as these cases advance to higher (and more politicized) courts. As recently as last June, for example, there was strong consensus among federal courts that laws banning gender-affirming care for minors are unconstitutional. That consensus was recently broken, however, by anti-trans decisions in two federal appeals courts.
Still, the First Amendment arguments against laws targeting drag performers are exceptionally strong. And it helps that most of these state laws are so poorly drafted that they should be struck down as unconstitutionally vague.
It is fairly likely, in other words, that, at the very least, the current slate of amateurishly drafted anti-drag laws will continue to fall in court.
Most anti-drag laws are incompetently drafted
Most current state laws attacking drag are likely to fall in court simply because they are unconstitutionally vague. As the Supreme Court said in United States v. Williams (2008), a criminal law is invalid if it “fails to provide a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what is prohibited, or is so standardless that it authorizes or encourages seriously discriminatory enforcement.”
This sort of vagueness abounds in state anti-drag laws. Take Florida’s law, for example, which makes it a crime to knowingly admit a “child” to an “adult live performance.” It also allows the state to revoke the operating or liquor license of establishments that violate this prohibition. Using this provision, the state has attempted to revoke an Orlando business’s liquor license after it hosted “A Drag Queen Christmas” show.
The Constitution does allow states to restrict underage access to pornography, strip shows, and other highly sexual material. But even if drag performers were the same as strippers for First Amendment purposes (and they are not), Florida’s law is far too vague for a “person of ordinary intelligence” to figure out what, exactly it bans.
Among other things, the law bars children from any live show that depicts “lewd conduct.” But it provides no definition of that term.
Similarly, Montana’s anti-drag law purports to ban drag performances at public libraries, in public schools, or on any public property “where the performance is in the presence of an individual under the age of 18.” But its definition of who counts as a drag performer is ridiculously vague. The law defines a “drag queen” as anyone, male or female, “who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup.” It also applies a similarly broad and vague definition to “drag kings.”
How on earth is a judge supposed to determine whether a character is sufficiently “flamboyant” to trigger this statute, or whether their costume is too “glamorous?”
Montana’s law is also so broad that it likely runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s warning that “a law may be overturned as impermissibly overbroad because a ‘substantial number’ of its applications are unconstitutional” under the First Amendment. Flamboyance, parody, glamour, and exaggerated costumes are hardly limited to drag shows — they are, in fact, some of the most common elements in performances of all kinds.
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Leon Neal/Getty Images
And then there’s Tennessee’s law. It defines any show that is “harmful to minors” (a term that the statute, at least, defines) and that features “male or female impersonators” as a form of “adult cabaret entertainment,” and then it bans this form of entertainment in any location where it “could be viewed by a person who is not an adult.”
First off, let’s talk about the law’s use of the word “could.” Literally any performance “could” be viewed by someone who is not an adult. If a venue cards patrons to make sure they are over 18, an underage person could still sneak in a back door or trick the bouncer with a fake ID. Similarly, if someone decides to host a drag performance in the privacy of their own home, a local child “could” still conceivably walk by the home and catch a glimpse of the show through a window.
As Judge Parker writes in his Friends of George’s opinion, the word “could” means that it is merely “possible” that something could happen. But it is always possible that a child could sneak into literally any place in the state of Tennessee — and thus the state’s anti-drag law applies everywhere in the state.
Similarly, who, exactly, counts as a “male or female impersonator?” What if a male performer wears an article of clothing that resembles both a skirt and a Scottish kilt? How is a judge supposed to determine if this piece of clothing is too feminine? Or, for that matter, does this term encompass a live performance of the Oscar-winning 1993 comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, where a divorced man disguises himself as a female housekeeper to spend more time with his children? What about a live performance of Disney’s Mulan, a story about a woman who disguises herself as a man in order to join the army?
And just how feminine must a male performer be before they cross the line into impersonation? Consider, for example, actor Tom Holland’s famous dance routine to Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” where Holland embraces the kind of hip-gyrating, ass-shaking choreography that will be familiar to pretty much anyone who has watched a performance from a young, hot, female pop star.
If Holland recreated this exact same performance in Tennessee, would he be labeled a “female impersonator?” Would the answer be different if he wore stereotypically male clothing? And, if not, how is a court supposed to determine if his dance moves are too feminine for the state of Tennessee?
In fairness, the Tennessee law does include some limiting language, such as a provision limiting the law’s scope to performances that would offend “the average person applying contemporary community standards.” But this provision raises vagueness problems of its own. Among other things, how is a drag performer supposed to know, in advance, whether a show that is legal in Nashville might run afoul of “contemporary community standards” in a different part of the state?
Tennessee’s and Montana’s inability to pin down what, exactly, they want to ban should be an insurmountable constitutional problem
Setting aside these particular drafting errors, anti-drag lawmakers’ trouble defining what, exactly, they want to ban may very well be an insurmountable constitutional problem — at least assuming that the courts follow existing law.
As Judge Parker explains in Friends of George’s, the First Amendment typically prohibits “content-based” restrictions on speech. In the Supreme Court’s words, “the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”
Restrictions on drag unavoidably run afoul of this rule. The entire point of such laws is to restrict artistic performances because they depict something — performers dressing as members of the opposite sex and satirizing gender norms — that the government believes should not be viewed by all audiences.
That said, the Constitution does, on rare occasions, permit content-based restrictions on speech to exist — but only if those laws survive a difficult-to-overcome legal test known as “strict scrutiny.” Under this test, a law survives judicial review only if it uses the “least restrictive means” to advance a “compelling governmental interest.”
Let’s concede that there are some drag performances, like some Broadway shows or standup comedy routines, that are inappropriate for children. Let’s also assume, as the Supreme Court said in Reno v. ACLU (1997), that states have ‘“a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors’ which extended to shielding them from indecent messages that are not obscene by adult standards,’” and that this interest is broad enough to allow states to bar underage audience members from the most sexually charged performances.
Even with this assumption in place, such a law would still need to use the “least restrictive means” to prevent children from seeing those performances. It would need to be precisely drafted to cover only those performances that are genuinely pornographic, or otherwise resemble the limited range of expression that may be restricted under the First Amendment. And the law couldn’t effectively bar adults from seeing such performances.
Indeed, any law that targets drag writ large is unlikely to survive strict scrutiny, because most drag performances are not pornographic or otherwise similar to strip shows. And, at least so far, the federal courts have agreed on this point.
Ultimately, in other words, the question in cases like Friends of George’s is whether judges — and, ultimately, the justices — will carve out an exception to longstanding First Amendment rules because they are squicked out by drag queens. Under existing First Amendment law, there is no basis for anything more than the most narrowly tailored laws targeting the most sexualized performances.
Ask your boss for a raise instead of a bonus. Really.
I am not saying that the next time your boss offers you a bonus, you should tear up the check and throw it back in their face. Money is money, after all. But it might be an opportunity to explain why you would be much happier about that bonus if it were spelled R-A-I-S-E.
It is a pretty decent moment to be a worker in America and has been for the past couple of years. Wages are rising, especially for lower earners, and now faster than inflation. Companies have had to compete to get people in the door and fight to retain those who are already there.
Many employers have tried to accomplish that with bonuses, offering workers an extra financial treat for signing on or staying on, for the holidays, or for a particularly good moment for the business. But, to quote Joe Biden, here’s the deal: A one-time bonus is often just that, one time. A bonus is not a lasting change to your compensation, and it can be taken away just as easily as it’s given out.
“You want to get the gift that keeps on giving,” said Sharon Block, a law professor at Harvard and former Biden administration official.
Receiving a bonus in place of a pay bump can feel like a gut punch — and like it’s less than advertised when it lands in your bank account. Jenny Petty, a teacher in Arkansas, was miffed over the state legislature’s decision to hand teachers a $5,000 bonus in 2022 instead of giving them a raise. “If they just raise our salary, we’re not going to be taxed so heavily on that. Plus there’s no guarantee year-to-year what they’re going to do,” she said. Bonuses can be taxed at a higher rate than normal wages, though there are some ways to mitigate that, and you might wind up getting a refund.
This year, the state voted to increase teachers’ minimum salaries and give raises, resulting in a $13,000 raise for Petty that will show up in her paycheck for years.
“Pay raises have so much more of a ripple effect because it affects a lot of things, like even what goes into Social Security on your behalf,” Block said. “Anything that is calculated as a percentage of your income, a pay increase is going to ripple out through other benefits.”
Here’s a look at the problems with bonuses, why they may not sometimes even benefit the companies that give them out, and what you should ask for instead — especially now.
Why your boss might like this bonus thing
A bonus is any form of compensation that’s not guaranteed, a proverbial cherry on top of the sundae that is your salary. They’re often doled out after the fact, when a certain target is hit or when the business has had a good year, but not always. Plenty of companies use signing bonuses, for example, as a way to recruit new talent.
Now, I know what you might be thinking here: Aren’t bonuses mainly a thing for already high-paid lawyers and finance guys who manage to get handed thousands of dollars in extra cash each year for ??? reasons? The answer is not really. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2022, 41 percent of private industry and 37 percent of state and local government workers had access to nonproduction bonuses — meaning bonuses for the holidays, longevity, retention, attendance, management incentives, and more. Two-thirds of workers in finance and information had bonus access, but so did over half of workers in manufacturing, a third of workers in education and health services, and a quarter of workers in leisure and hospitality. In other words, this is an issue for workers across the economy.
There are plenty of reasons an employer might want to opt for a bonus instead of a pay raise. For one thing, pay raises are sticky. “On a fundamental level, pay raises are quite a permanent change to compensation. One might think that companies, nothing would stop them from lowering pay, but empirically, that very rarely happens,” said Iwan Barankay, an associate professor of management, business economics, and public policy at Wharton. “There’s a downward rigidity to wages.”
If the economy goes south or business starts to falter, it’s a lot easier to skip holiday bonuses next year than it is to ask everyone to take a 10 percent pay cut.
Raises often include a more comprehensive review of someone’s performance and include objective and subjective measures, whereas a bonus may be based on something specific — a worker helped recruit someone or met some sort of attendance threshold. To that end, bonuses can be used as ways to incentivize workers toward certain behaviors, and companies spend time trying to figure out the right balance to make them work. If the required task to get the bonus is too hard, people don’t bother; the same goes for if the amount of the bonus itself is not generous.
Whether companies use bonuses can depend on what’s happening outside of the firm altogether, Barankay noted, and what’s common among competitors. “When there’s a change in the marketplace, a company will introduce or discontinue bonuses,” he said, noting that monetary incentives are often easier to dole out or get rid of than other, softer and perhaps more psychological measures. “The advantage of money is that it’s easy to pull back and correct it,” he said.
Permanent money > temporary money
I think about the Trump tax cuts a lot, when in late 2017 then-President Donald Trump signed into law legislation that, among other things, slashed taxes for corporations. A bunch of companies subsequently made splashy announcements about spending on workers, including on bonuses.
Much of the fanfare was largely about PR — a lot of these companies had these plans in the works already — and trying to make the tax cuts look helpful up and down income levels. However, as discussed, those bonuses didn’t amount to much, nor were they a lasting change. That’s the rub with a bonus.
“It’s not as good as a permanent raise, that’s the core, and I think workers know that, they’re not fooled,” said Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Department of Labor and the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “It makes a massive difference in your expected earnings over a longer period than just the current year.”
A wage increase will continuously mean higher contributions for Social Security and 401(k) matching and retirement benefits. It can also help workers negotiate higher wages in their next jobs. Like it or not, we still live in a world where potential employers ask candidates what their current pay is. I suppose you can try to lie, but a lot of people don’t.
If you’re buying a new house, getting a new car, or applying for some kind of a loan, a lender might not give as much credence to bonuses as they do your total salary.
Paige, who works for a Chicago-based electronics company and asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of jeopardizing her job, recalled her feelings around her company’s decision to hand out a one-time bonus in December 2020 in lieu of the raises employees had been asking for. “A raise is consistent … you can factor it into your budget,” she said. Her employer has announced it’s doing another “one-time bonus” this year, but again, it’s very much at their whim. “Because they’re phrasing it as a one-time bonus, it can obviously go away at any time.”
Bonuses are not always all they’re made out to be from the corporate angle, either. A signing bonus isn’t going to help with retention — it’s just as easy for a worker to say, “Thanks for the extra $300 that one time, bye,” in three months as it is three years. Short-term incentives are just that: short term.
“Merit increases actually provide a higher sense of security and stability,” said Mengjie Lyu, an assistant professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They can also help employees get a line of sight into how to make progress in an organization’s pay structure — especially when there’s transparency around pay.
Employers may ultimately miss out on certain workers by focusing on bonuses over base pay and raises because some people just can’t accept that level of variability in their personal finances. “Employers may think if I use bonuses I’m attracting good performers and people who are more competent with their productivity, but maybe the good performers are risk-averse or have financial constraints, have a family to support, have children to raise,” Lyu said. “That means they cannot go the bonus way, they just want to make sure that they have a secure income level every month.”
The labor market is strong right now — and it won’t be forever
Negotiating at work can be hard. (If you’re great at it, good for you, and teach me your ways.) But this is really the moment to push for what you want. The unemployment rate in the United States is at decades-long lows, and while there are signs the labor market is cooling somewhat, it’s still pretty damn good. Now is the time for workers to try to make some of that strength stick for themselves. At some point, the job market won’t be like this anymore.
“This is such an unusual moment when workers have such leverage. It’s a shame to bargain that away, whether that’s actual collective bargaining or even other just non-union workers deciding whether to take a job or not,” Block said. “We don’t know where the labor market will be next year. Workers won’t be able to say, ‘You gave me a bonus last year, I would like one this year.’ They may not have as much leverage to demand that from an employer.”
That means, practically, that if there’s a signing bonus in the mix, try to see what sort of movement you can make on your base pay instead. That applies to someone applying for a service job and someone looking to land a new gig in marketing. “Employers think that’s the kind of thing that can lure people into the labor market. But again, I think if you step back, workers are much better off getting a higher wage than getting a one-time bonus payment,” Block said.
Workers may not always win this fight. Who among us hasn’t asked for a raise or bump in compensation, either to be told no, flat out, or offered some sort of one-time pile of cash as a consolation prize? Plenty of workers have seen spot bonuses and holiday bonuses come and go, seemingly at random, without any rhyme or reason.
Still, this is the time to go for it, Block said. “This is the moment for workers up and down the wage scale to push for as high wages as possible. We’re seeing wages rise for low-wage workers actually faster than high-wage workers. I can’t think of a time when that’s happened before,” she said. “My advice is then organize a union, so you can be sure that you continue to push for higher wages.”
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Each month, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.
The dehumanizing philosophy of AI is built on a hatred of our animal nature.
By now, you may have heard — possibly from the same people creating the technology — that artificial intelligence might one day kill us all. The specifics are hazy, but then, they don’t really matter. Humans are very good at fantasizing about being exterminated by an alien species, because we’ve always been good at devising creative ways of doing it to our fellow creatures. AI could destroy humanity for something as stupid as, in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s famous thought experiment, turning the world’s matter into paper clips — much like humans are now wiping out our great ape cousins, orangutans, to cultivate palm oil to make junk foods like Oreos.
You might even say that the human nightmare of subjugation by machines expresses a sublimated fear of our treatment of non-human animals being turned back on us. “We know what we’ve done,” as journalist Ezra Klein put it on a May episode of his podcast. “And we wouldn’t want to be on the other side of it.”
AI threatens the quality that many of us believe has made humans unique on this planet: intelligence. So, as author Meghan O’Gieblyn wrote in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, “We quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.” We tell ourselves, in other words, that even if AI may one day be smarter than us, unlike the machines, we have subjective experience, which makes us morally special.
The obvious problem with this, though, is that humans aren’t special in this way. Non-human animals share many of our capacities for intelligence and perception, yet we’ve refused to extend the generosity we might expect from AI. We rationalize unmitigated cruelty toward animals — caging, commodifying, mutilating, and killing them to suit our whims — on the basis of our purportedly superior intellect. “If there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic,” O’Gieblyn continues. “We spent centuries denying consciousness in animals precisely because [we thought] they lacked reason or higher thought.”
Why should we hope that AI, particularly if it’s built on our own values, treats us any differently? We might struggle to justify to a future artificial “superintelligence,” if such a thing could ever exist, why we’re deserving of mercy when we’ve failed spectacularly at offering our fellow animals the same. And, worse still, the dehumanizing philosophy of AI’s prophets is among the worst possible starting points to defend the value of our fleshy, living selves.
Transhumanism is built on a hatred of animality
Although modern humans defend the exploitation of non-human animals in terms of their assumed lack of intelligence, this has never been the real reason for it. If we took that argument at face value and treated animals according to their smarts, we would immediately stop factory-farming octopuses, which can use tools, recognize human faces, and figure out how to escape enclosures. We wouldn’t keep elephants in solitary confinement in zoos, recognizing it as a violation of their rights and needs as smart, caring, deeply social creatures. We wouldn’t psychologically torture pigs by immobilizing them in cages so small they can’t turn around, condemning them to a short lifetime essentially spent in a coffin, all to turn them into cheap cuts of bacon. We would realize that it’s wholly unnecessary to subject intelligent cows to the trauma of repeated, human-induced pregnancies and separation from their newborns, just so we can drink the milk meant for their calves.
In reality, we aren’t cruel to animals because they’re stupid; we say they’re stupid because we’re cruel to them, inventing fact-free mythologies about their minds to justify our dominance, as political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel lays this out in his brilliant 2015 book The War Against Animals. In a chapter called “The Violence of Stupidity,” Wadiwel contends that human power over animals enables us to be willfully and unaccountably stupid about what they are really like. “How else might we describe a claimed superiority by humans over animals (whether based on intelligence, reason, communication, vocalisation, or politics) that has no consistent or verifiable ‘scientific’ or ‘philosophical’ basis?” he writes. Humans, like animals, are vulnerable, breakable creatures who can only thrive within a specific set of physical and social constraints. We can only hope that future AI, however intelligent, doesn’t evince the same stupidity with respect to us.
While we can only guess whether some powerful future AI will categorize us as unintelligent, what’s clear is that there is an explicit and concerning contempt for the human animal among prominent AI boosters. AI research itself has strong ties to transhumanism, a movement that aims to radically alter and augment human bodies with technology. Its most extreme aspirants hope to merge humanity with computers, excising suffering from life like a tumor from a cancer patient and living in a state of everlasting bliss, as Bostrom, one of the main proponents of transhumanism, has suggested. Elon Musk, for instance, has said that he launched Neuralink, his brain-computer interface startup, in part so that humans can remain competitive in an intelligence arms race with AI. “Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind,” Musk said at a Neuralink event in 2019. “With a high bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.”
This aspiration can be interpreted as an implicit loathing of our animality, or at least a desire to liberate ourselves from it. “We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants,” technologist Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a 2017 blog post. “My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence” — meaning just a stepping stone for advanced AI — “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
Computer scientist Danny Hillis, co-founder of the now-defunct AI company Thinking Machines, declared in the early ’90s that humans are composed of two fundamentally different things: “We’re the metabolic thing, which is the monkey that walks around, and we’re the intelligent thing, which is a set of ideas and culture,” as historian David Noble quotes in his 1997 book The Religion of Technology. ”What’s valuable about us,” Hillis continued, “what’s good about humans, is the idea thing. It’s not the animal thing.” Merging with computers signifies our extrication from animal biology.
This human/animal dualism posits a clean cognitive break between us and the rest of the animal evolutionary tree, when in fact no such division exists. It relies on an implausible model of human intelligence as having nothing to do with our physical, animal selves: a notion that “the mind is computation, that it does not involve the affective dimensions of the human experience, and it doesn’t involve the body,” Michael Sacasas, a technology critic who writes The Convivial Society, a popular Substack, told me.
The societal reckoning taking place now over where humans fit in a world of AI, might, as Sacasas hopes, prompt us to start to rethink this dualism, to recognize that the body is “not just as the firmware for the rational software, but actually an integral part of what we call ‘mind.’” Breaking down that dualism ought to also mean giving up the separate status we assign ourselves as human beings. It could help us broaden the definition of intelligence itself to encompass the animal qualities described by O’Gieblyn — “emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel.” There is, after all, no single thing in our brains called “intelligence” or “thought”; it’s not a body part, but an emergent property continuous with our other mental processes. Animals share these, and in some cases exceed them.
Migratory birds, for example, can famously navigate by perceiving the Earth’s magnetic field. Raccoons can “see” and learn about the world with their hyper-sensitive hands (this is why they can sometimes be seen enthusiastically patting objects and other animals). Pigs are undoubtedly smart, but the widely cited idea that they’re “as smart as” 3-year-old children reflects the depressing way that we’ve come to measure intelligence against a single-variable, anthropocentric yardstick, rather than recognizing different beings as having different minds. Yet this is dehumanizing to us, too, because it judges our cognition as though it were a computer’s CPU. If we can properly value animals’ capacities, then we might also see how claiming human exceptionalism through a disembodied view of our minds has done spiritual harm to ourselves.
AI criticism ought to include non-human animals
You don’t have to believe that AI could become autonomous and orchestrate our extinction to see how, for example, chatbots are already blurring the line between humans and machines, creating the illusion of sentience where it doesn’t exist, a critique made by linguist Emily Bender. Others, like Sacasas, point to how AI replacing humans represents the culmination of modernity’s drive to eliminate inefficiency from life. “By the logic of the market and of techno-capitalism, if you like, the inefficiencies of the human being were always ultimately meant to be disposed of,” he said. “AI, in a sense, just kind of furthers that logic … and brings it to its logical conclusion, which is, you’re just getting rid of people.”
These kinds of critiques ring true to me — yet they also have a way of fixating on the ethical and spiritual uniqueness of human beings, to the exclusion of the other sentient, intelligent creatures with whom we’ve always shared the planet. “One of the anxieties generated by AI is built upon how we have sought to distinguish the human, or to elevate the human, or to find the unique thing about the human,” Sacasas points out. Humans are, in important ways, obviously unique among animals. But the critical discourse about AI has shown little interest in thinking beyond ourselves, or reckoning with what implications this moment has for our undervaluing of animals.
One of the best-known critiques of AI large language models, or LLMs, for example, compares AI’s lack of language understanding to that of an animal: the concept of the “stochastic parrot,” which refers to how chatbots, not having minds, spit out language based on probabilistic models with no regard for meaning. “You are not a parrot,” proclaimed the headline of a widely read March profile of Emily Bender in New York magazine.
I’m sure Bender has nothing against parrots — exceptionally smart animals that are thought to reproduce sounds with astonishing fidelity as part of their communication with one another and with humans. But parrots aren’t machines, and imagining them as such only reinforces the human/animal dualism that gave us the disembodied view of our own minds. It’s as if we have no language for affirming our worth as humans without repudiating animality.
The ascendance of AI should be a pivotal moment from which to start to come to grips with our relationship to other sentient, biological life. If AI were ever in a position to make judgments about us, we should hope that it’s far more charitable than we have been, that it doesn’t nitpick, mock, or nullify our capacities and needs as we’ve done to other animals. If we wouldn’t want to be tyrannized by a more powerful intelligence, we have no credible defense for continuing to do the same.
We don’t know if sentient AI is possible, but if it is, we shouldn’t build it
None of this necessarily tells us whether the machines themselves could ever become sentient, or how we should proceed if they can. I used to find the idea of sentient AI risible, but now I’m not so sure. The scientific method has not figured out how to explain consciousness, as O’Gieblyn points out. Modern science, she writes, “was predicated in the first place on the exclusion of the mind.”
If we don’t know where consciousness comes from, we may want to be careful about assuming it can only arise from biological life, especially given our poor track record of appreciating it in animals. “Evolution was just selecting repeatedly on ability to have babies, and here we are. We have goals,” as Vox’s Kelsey Piper said on The Ezra Klein Show in March. “Why does that process get you things that have goals? I don’t know.”
We have no reason to believe any current AIs are sentient, but we also have no way of knowing whether or how that could change. “We’re kind of at the point where we can make fire but do not even have the rudiments of what we’d need to understand it,” my friend Luke Gessler, a computational linguist, told me.
If sentience in AI could ever emerge (a big if), I’m doubtful we’d be willing to recognize it, for the same reason that we’ve denied its existence in animals. Humans are very good at dismissing or lying about the interests of beings that we want to exploit (including not just animals but also, of course, enslaved humans, women, and any other class of people who have been excluded from moral consideration). Creating sentient AI would be unethical because we’d be bringing it into the world as chattel. Consigning sentient beings to property status, as we know from the experience of non-human animals, is inherently unjust because their welfare will always be subordinated to economic efficiency and the desires of their owners. “We will inevitably inflict suffering on them,” science fiction author Ted Chiang said of building sentient AI in 2021. “That seems to me clearly a bad idea.”
In a May essay, Columbia philosopher Dhananjay Jagannathan offered a different perspective on the AI minds question. Drawing from Aristotle, he suggests that the nature of thought isn’t something that can be scientifically deduced or implanted into a computer, because it’s an irreducible part of our lives as biological animals. “Thinking is life,” the Aristotelian idea puts it. A raccoon who pats things to learn about her environment, for example, or a baby bird who pecks around at objects to do the same, or a human whose sense of smell vividly triggers a distant memory are all having experiences of thinking that are inextricable from the biological organs through which they’re engaging with the world.
One upshot of this, Jagannathan writes, is that the transhumanist dream of digitally uploading our consciousness and splitting from our bodies, far from being any sort of liberation, amounts to “self-annihilation.” The idea of thinking as inseparable from animality can be hard for modern people to comprehend because, as O’Gieblyn writes, our concept of the mind pulls so heavily from computational metaphors. Because we imagine our cognition as a computer, we start to imagine, erroneously, that computers can think.
AI evokes our anxieties about the fragility and mistreatment of animality
Jagannathan’s view, that we can understand thought through our kinship with non-human animals, helps clarify what is disconcerting about the dualist, computational view of experience, taken to its logical endpoint by AI and transhumanist philosophy. The assumption that we can apprehend, measure, and perfect subjective experience, rendering life as though it were bits of information encoded on a computer, can lead to conclusions that are obviously repugnant. It has made the annihilation of biological life, both human and non-human, imaginable.
Prominent philosopher Will MacAskill, for example, proposed in his 2022 book What We Owe the Future that declining populations of wild animals (we are, if you haven’t heard, in the middle of a mass extinction) may actually be desirable. Their lives might be “worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain),” he writes, because they may consist more of suffering, from things like predation and disease, than of pleasure. Perhaps, then, they’d be better off if they’d never been born — an argument that springs from the same well as the transhumanist impulse to remove suffering from life and colonize the universe with beings merged with machines.
The idea of wild animal eradication represents one of the more extreme manifestations of the drive to denude life of physical content. In a similar vein, transhumanist philosopher David Pearce, who sits on the board of the organization Herbivorize Predators (it aims to do what the name implies), hopes to technologically “eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience from human and non-human life, replacing suffering with ‘information-sensitive gradients of bliss.’”
In the actual world, where wild animals are often exterminated wholesale when their presence is inconvenient for us, the notion that it could actually be morally righteous to get rid of them might provide a justification for the ecocide that humans are engaged in anyway. Who’s to say that an AI won’t one day say the same thing about us, deciding that it’s best to put us out of our misery based on its cold calculation of our pains and pleasures? That would be consistent with the transhumanist ethos of transcending the hardship of physical existence.
Yet this dim estimation of our biological selves, as well as those of animals, forecloses the possibility of valuing or interpreting life in other ways. We can hardly access an animal’s interiority, much less be able to say whether they think their lives are worth living. If a utilitarian bean counter told me that the rest of my life would be 70 percent suffering, I wouldn’t choose to die, even if I truly believed them; I would want to live out my life.
A very different, more integrated interpretation of animal life, one that I return to again and again, can be found in a work by the poet Alan Shapiro. His 2002 poem “Joy” gives expression to the strange entanglement of joy, fear, and tragedy that defines our lives, and, he imagines, perhaps those of wild animals also. “Joy,” he writes, is the thing that is “Savagely beautiful,” likening it to antelope evading a lion:
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This vision doesn’t, to me, suggest that the suffering of wild animals doesn’t matter, but rather that the vulnerable, mysterious fullness of their lives is worth living. AI evokes our anxieties about the fragility and mistreatment of animality — our own, as well as that of nonhuman animals. It reminds us of our own vulnerability, the parts of us that are unfathomable or expendable in mechanistic terms. In a world where the ability to manipulate language is no longer a uniquely human capacity, the rationalizing impulse might ask us to co-sign our own obsolescence. We might, instead, decide that our creaturely selves are worth holding on to, and, in doing so, invite our fellow animals into our moral circle.