As I read your thoughts on the AI manipulating the internet for the benefit of its controller, I thought of essentially a whole new internet, whole new world history created possibly every day, your blog post with the same style but supporting a new narrative, my comments just as poorly punctuated leading to different thoughts. And I wandered if we, or our descendants will be stupid enough to fall for it?
Much of modern civilization's actual goal, it seems, is to firmly enmesh men who have eternity in their hearts in the temporal. To drive us so hard with 'the current thing' that we don't recognize our own past selves and cannot have a say in the building of our future selves.
For what it's worth, I have spent almost a decade building and designing industrial automation and to me that is what AI is, it is simply automation for intellectual machinery, rather than automation for physical machinery. Nothing that is being programmed now has the potential to think an original thought, any more than a robot arm has the potential to grab a part that someone didn't build an end of arm tool for. The confusion comes in confounding our actual independent and original thoughts with mere intellectual labor. AI will make a better 'code monkey' but it will not know WHY the code is made, why it is good code or why bad, and much of what we call AI is simply a very novel way of querying a database.
But you are right, AI is desired as a god. The Globohomo, the Establishment Cabal, whatever they are has long sought to turn their ideology into a religion, it has many zealous adherents, much unquestionable dogma, but it lacks a credible god. As soon as an AI that can fill the role to any degree is created, it will be deployed as an idol, worshipped by its creators. Augustine of Hippo was once confronted with the defense of 'images' in churches, the defense being that they are teachers of those who are illiterate, those who can't read can see a picture or a statue that conveys the relevant truths to their mind. His response was, 'They are much more fitted to deceive than to teach, seeing they look like men yet are not. They have feet yet can't walk, mouths yet they can't talk.' Of the AIdol perhaps we should say the same, 'It is a deceiver because it speaks but can't think.' But the AIdol's true task is to elevate men above humanity, to create the Transhumans, it is good to know in advance that it will fail.
Thank you for another brilliant essay to stimulate the gray matter and inspire ongoing resistance!
Back to you with some of my own thoughts on AI:
AI is...
> the crowning level of humanity's latest "Tower of Babel" called "Modernity" (the way of life that seeks incessant economic power growth via scientific and technological progress), built on and bred from all the previous science and tech we assembled in the levels below. Just like the story from the Old Testament wise men in the Book of Genesis, we should expect this tower, this effort to be God, to end in yet another giant fall.
> the human-unique (made possible by our species uniquely evolved characteristics) manifestation of the essence of life, its fundamental drive, will to power (as Nietzsche labelled it)...the human way of trying to be God, the will to be God
> the greatest "progress trap" ever for humanity, and therein may lie the hand of God that will destroy our modernTower of Babel and/or our species, or at least evolve it into a new species...transhuman borg
> an agent of weakening far greater than anything the lumpen parasites will ever achieve...a tech that will weaken us and make us more dependent on it than any tech that has come before it
> a tech advancement so fraught with risks that it should be discarded entirely but that will instead, like all other godlike power-giving techs before it, be embraced by the sheeple (who love tech just as much as their elites do, but because they think it will save them from work) and especially by the owner-elite investor class who see it as a new source of profit (economic growth that goes into their own pockets) and as a way to replace even the intellectual workers with new machines operating more reliably and at lower cost than human workers
AI, the next step in the ongoing post-agricultural-industrial-info tech "revolutions" (actually creeping normalcy type of process) devolution of humanity and the emergence-evolution from homo sapiens of a new non-biological machine life-form. The only thing that can stop it is the failure to make the transition from our current nearly-exhausted fossil energy and non-closed-loop materials technology and resource paradigm to a next-one with the same or higher potential economic power as this one. Humanity, like all other forms of life, cannot do anything but follow its basic drive, will to power, until it hits insurmountable barriers, and it will do all it can to try surmounting those barriers until it simply has to epigenetically-culturally adapt to a steady state.
As I read your thoughts on the AI manipulating the internet for the benefit of its controller, I thought of essentially a whole new internet, whole new world history created possibly every day, your blog post with the same style but supporting a new narrative, my comments just as poorly punctuated leading to different thoughts. And I wandered if we, or our descendants will be stupid enough to fall for it?
Much of modern civilization's actual goal, it seems, is to firmly enmesh men who have eternity in their hearts in the temporal. To drive us so hard with 'the current thing' that we don't recognize our own past selves and cannot have a say in the building of our future selves.
For what it's worth, I have spent almost a decade building and designing industrial automation and to me that is what AI is, it is simply automation for intellectual machinery, rather than automation for physical machinery. Nothing that is being programmed now has the potential to think an original thought, any more than a robot arm has the potential to grab a part that someone didn't build an end of arm tool for. The confusion comes in confounding our actual independent and original thoughts with mere intellectual labor. AI will make a better 'code monkey' but it will not know WHY the code is made, why it is good code or why bad, and much of what we call AI is simply a very novel way of querying a database.
But you are right, AI is desired as a god. The Globohomo, the Establishment Cabal, whatever they are has long sought to turn their ideology into a religion, it has many zealous adherents, much unquestionable dogma, but it lacks a credible god. As soon as an AI that can fill the role to any degree is created, it will be deployed as an idol, worshipped by its creators. Augustine of Hippo was once confronted with the defense of 'images' in churches, the defense being that they are teachers of those who are illiterate, those who can't read can see a picture or a statue that conveys the relevant truths to their mind. His response was, 'They are much more fitted to deceive than to teach, seeing they look like men yet are not. They have feet yet can't walk, mouths yet they can't talk.' Of the AIdol perhaps we should say the same, 'It is a deceiver because it speaks but can't think.' But the AIdol's true task is to elevate men above humanity, to create the Transhumans, it is good to know in advance that it will fail.
Thank you for another brilliant essay to stimulate the gray matter and inspire ongoing resistance!
Back to you with some of my own thoughts on AI:
AI is...
> the crowning level of humanity's latest "Tower of Babel" called "Modernity" (the way of life that seeks incessant economic power growth via scientific and technological progress), built on and bred from all the previous science and tech we assembled in the levels below. Just like the story from the Old Testament wise men in the Book of Genesis, we should expect this tower, this effort to be God, to end in yet another giant fall.
> the human-unique (made possible by our species uniquely evolved characteristics) manifestation of the essence of life, its fundamental drive, will to power (as Nietzsche labelled it)...the human way of trying to be God, the will to be God
> the greatest "progress trap" ever for humanity, and therein may lie the hand of God that will destroy our modernTower of Babel and/or our species, or at least evolve it into a new species...transhuman borg
> an agent of weakening far greater than anything the lumpen parasites will ever achieve...a tech that will weaken us and make us more dependent on it than any tech that has come before it
> a tech advancement so fraught with risks that it should be discarded entirely but that will instead, like all other godlike power-giving techs before it, be embraced by the sheeple (who love tech just as much as their elites do, but because they think it will save them from work) and especially by the owner-elite investor class who see it as a new source of profit (economic growth that goes into their own pockets) and as a way to replace even the intellectual workers with new machines operating more reliably and at lower cost than human workers
AI, the next step in the ongoing post-agricultural-industrial-info tech "revolutions" (actually creeping normalcy type of process) devolution of humanity and the emergence-evolution from homo sapiens of a new non-biological machine life-form. The only thing that can stop it is the failure to make the transition from our current nearly-exhausted fossil energy and non-closed-loop materials technology and resource paradigm to a next-one with the same or higher potential economic power as this one. Humanity, like all other forms of life, cannot do anything but follow its basic drive, will to power, until it hits insurmountable barriers, and it will do all it can to try surmounting those barriers until it simply has to epigenetically-culturally adapt to a steady state.