Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses. Also published on Real Left’s Substack. Please consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
If AI is not real, what is AI’s real game?
In Part II, AI’s algorithmic processes were put under the microscope to see if they could be equated with intelligence and cognition. AI was found wanting, as was the brain-as-computer model on which AI is predicated. In Part III, we’ll explore a sneaky paradigm that grants AI a measure of ‘intelligence’ before trying to fathom what AI’s real game is.
The roadmap for Part III:
· The problem with judging a material artificial product versus an abstract artificial product.
· Two paradigms for deciding whether AI is ‘real’ or simply mindless hype: the relativist paradigm and the absolutist paradigm.
· AI’s role in the West’s chimeric economy
· The meaning of AI.
Introduction
An artificial heart that pumps blood around the body and keeps the patient alive is a success. The artificial legs of the murderous Oscar Pistorius didn’t just allow him to run; he was able to compete with able-bodied runners at Olympic level. There is little doubt that these artificial products simulate the real thing.
However, it gets more tricky when dealing with artificial products that deliver abstractions, as opposed to stuff. You can have a conversation with an intelligent person about abstract concepts and not be certain that they’re right. Intelligence doesn’t always equate with being right.
So far, I’ve argued in Parts I and II that it’s not looking good for AI’s claim to a functional simulation of human intelligence, but there might be a way to pull a rabbit out of the hat and grant it intelligence. It would involve dialling down human intelligence in order to make AI comparatively smart. It’s a bit of a psyop, but psyops are all the rage now.
Absolutely wrong but relatively right
The Turing test often comes up in the AI debate and so we need to admit it into evidence — if only to prove that it’s part of the reason why so many are mistakenly convinced that AI products like ChatGPT are functional simulations of the intelligent human brain. The test works like this: if a machine can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it is deemed to have demonstrated human intelligence. The test can be broadened to give it more rigour. Essentially, we could require the machine to fool most of the people most of the time. The Turing test could be said to rely on relativity because the less ‘intelligent’, or discerning, the observer is, the more ‘intelligent’ AI becomes.
Under the Turing test, most, if not all, of the arguments I’ve made so far against machines possessing intelligence are almost irrelevant. Up until now, the question I posed was effectively: can AI think for itself? When we invoke the Turing test, the question has to be altered. It becomes: can AI fool enough people into thinking that it can think for itself? The first question presents an absolute bar for AI to jump. The second one presents a bar that shifts depending on the ‘intelligence’, or gullibility, of the people it’s trying to fool.
Judging by The Establishment’s success during the Time of Covid in fooling most people into accepting the ridiculous premises for global house arrest, mask wearing, and queuing for experimental injections, it is clear to me that the AI engineers may not have that far to go. I haven’t got a survey to prove it, but I suspect they may already be there.
The relativity implicit in the Turing test is problematic because the test is at the mercy of a phenomenon I will refer to as the “Jurassic Park” effect. When Jurassic Park was first released, people awed by its special effects could fantasise that the dinosaurs were living creatures that had been cloned in a lab. But after ten years of improvements in special effects technology, these people were embarrassed at how awed they had been by the effects produced. Over time, a trick loses its power to deceive owing to increasing awareness by the population of how the trick works, as well as the introduction of new and better tricks.
Turing himself recognised that the test does not prove a machine has intelligence; only that someone has designed it well enough to deceive people into thinking that it has. Hence its other name – the Imitation Game. ChatGPT’s answer to the lockdown question or whether the HMS Yarmouth was damaged during the Falklands War, discussed in Part II, illustrates how problematic the Turing test is. Despite being woefully wrong, if enough people in the population are as ignorant as ChatGPT, then ChatGPT becomes relatively right even if it’s absolutely wrong! The implications for a society relying on AGI that passes the Turing test can be summed up as the blind leading the blind.
This piece in The Conversation, though written a year ago, is still relevant to ChatGPT4. It asks whether GPT4 has passed the “threshold of human-level artificial intelligence”. I have chosen to quote the answer it provides as a summation of the arguments I have made in Parts I and II:
“The plausibility of AGI is contested by several philosophers and researchers, citing that current models are largely ignorant of outputs (that is, they don’t understand what they’re producing). They also have no prospect of achieving consciousness since they are primarily predictive – automating what should come next in text or other outputs. Instead of being intelligent, these models simply recombine and duplicate data on which they have been trained. Consciousness, the essence of life, is missing. Even if AI foundation models continue to advance and complete more sophisticated tasks, there is no guarantee that consciousness or AGI will emerge. And if it did emerge, how would we recognise it?” [emphasis added]
The point about AI not understanding its own outputs is a point that I thought was illustrated by ChatGPT’s self-contradictions generated by the mere re-phrasing of the lockdown question. I also addressed the issue of recombining and duplicating data under the heading “cognition versus algorithms” in Part II. The author of the quote above gives an apparently conclusive ‘No’ answer to the question: is AI intelligent? And yet he attempts to maintain a non-committal stance by adding that whether GPT4 has passed the threshold of human intelligence depends on how you view the AGI issue, his answer above being one way to view AI.
He suggests that the second way to look at AI is that humans collaborate with each other in networks and systems. Up until now, these networks have been mainly human, and, while “we might take insights from someone…we don’t treat them as an active agent in our cognition”. He sees AI becoming “part of our cognitive network”. A tool or resource. Under this second model of viewing AI, he concludes that:
“AI doesn’t need to be sentient or possess general intelligence. It simply needs the capacity to be embedded in and part of our knowledge network to replace and augment many of our current jobs and tasks.” [emphasis added]
So, this supposed second way of viewing AI does not endow it with any more intelligence than the first one! It merely reinforces the conclusion he reached in the first view: AI is not intelligent. And if it’s not intelligent, it would make sense to view it as a tool.
Joseph Mercola is of the same view:
“ChatGPT and related technologies can radically improve your life if you use them carefully. ChatGPT, for example, provides radically more efficient information gathering…drastically reducing wasted time and effort in finding information that would allow you to achieve your goals.”
If I were to take a similarly disingenuous non-committal view about whether AI is intelligent, I too would say, “It depends.” It depends on whether you think enough people can be tricked into thinking AI can think for itself, or whether you take an absolutist view by looking more closely at: consciousness and intelligence; the brain-as-computer model underpinning AI; how AI models are trained; what data biases really mean; what algorithms do; what AI can’t do, and ultimately; whether AI can adapt to survive or even just display a basic type of adaptiveness by thinking and learning independently.
If AI is not intelligent, then what’s the hype all about? Following the money is a good place to start in answering that question.
AI’s stellar contribution to the West’s chimeric economy…but the robot revolution is real
The West’s decay is looking increasingly like an end-stage turbo cancer. When the masters of the universe abandoned the idea of a real productive economy, it left them with little choice but to engage in the chimeric industry of money making money. Derivatives, collateralised debt obligations, credit and debt became the new commercial products of the Western economy, along with a Byzantine ‘services’ bureaucracy that diminishes the individual’s will to live while sucking the life out of what little is left of the real economy.
But the West hasn’t forgotten how to make military weaponry. Despite abandoning the art of making stuff, the West has not forgotten how to kill. Speak softly and carry a big stick is the animating philosophy of Western ‘democracy’, and great leaps forward have been made in the art of killing. And, wouldn’t you know, AI is playing a starring role! The current commander of an ‘elite’ Israeli intelligence unit wrote a book in 2021 on “how to create synergy between human and artificial intelligence that will revolutionize our world”. He is no doubt satisfied that AI is now successfully solving a problem in Gaza that has vexed Israeli ‘intelligence’ for some time. They weren’t able to kill enough people or, as he put it in industry tech language, the Israeli army has now resolved the problem of the “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
For a while, it appeared that the chimeric enterprise of money making money was going swimmingly. Until the great Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The masters of the universe solved that gambling crisis the way most gambling addicts solve bad bets – by doubling down. They used other people’s money to buy time. But time ran out, as it always does, and in March 2020, without warning, the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital smashed a hole in our bathroom door with an axe and, like Jack Nicholson in that famous scene from The Shining, maniacally announced, “Here’s Johnny!”.
Since then, it’s been one damned absurd atrocity after another. The IDF in Gaza and the West’s political class are making Jack Nicholson’s character look like Eckhart Tolle.
Accompanying this descent into Hades is the obstinate refusal to return to an economy which produces tangible wealth that is necessary for survival or promotes well-being. So much so that the West is now at war with the people whose job is to feed us – farmers. Choking the food supply of the entire planet on the pretence that carbon dioxide is killing us is called ‘sustainable development’. Hardly anyone here does anything that has real meaning anymore. It can’t go on. And yet it is going on, and on, and on. The debt and derivatives ponzi scheme seems to have acted like a gateway drug getting us hooked on other chimeric industries, AI being one of them.
‘Vaccines’ that aren’t vaccines is another one. Not that vaccines ever were vaccines, but they’ve doubled down on themselves, taking their absurdity to surreal heights. That ghastly and lethal fraud made a brisk trade around the world, finding its way into billions of willing arms. Being fooled into self-harm is sad enough, but begging for it is the epitome of tragedy.
I see AI as yet another magic trick in the West’s chimeric economy, in which more vaults of money will be fashioned from either pure abstraction or deception or, in the case of AI, both. AI is now vying for centre stage as the lynchpin of the great Fourth Industrial Revolution in which information is the new oil, the new source of energy for the economy. Exactly what purpose all this information will serve is not clear if the West is planning to freeze and starve its population to death in the name of using less energy. Whether you know it or not, there really is a war on population levels.
Nevertheless, the hyper-rational idiots who run the world now want to see if they can manufacture thought. Does it get any more chimeric than that? Apparently, it’s such a brilliant idea that it’s worth pouring $7 trillion into. I am betting that will be $7 trillion of your money, not Altman’s or Zuckerberg’s, or any other oligarch’s. The parasitic plutocrats have perfected a knack for making us pay for our own demise. Just as we’re now paying for the 2008, covid, ‘vaccine’, and Ukraine money-trees. Make no mistake, they’re going to try to make us pay for the debt bubble when it eventually bursts. And that debt bubble ($34.6 trillion in the US, 121% of GDP, and £2.65 trillion in the UK, 100% of GDP) has to burst eventually, and it’s going to be ugly.
So, if the parasitical plutocrats think it’s worth investing a cool $7 trillion in technology to expand their wealth and control, we should probably pay attention to Economic AI, over which there is much anxiety, perhaps well-founded.
The anxiety over whether machines will replace us is perhaps a subconscious recognition by many of us that we are not doing meaningful work; that we are in fact doing soul-destroying mechanical work which, by its nature, puts us in direct competition with machines and AI.
Elon Musk’s plans for Economic AI are ambitious:
“I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans. It’s not even clear what an economy is at that point.”
Indeed, it’s not clear, but what is clear is that the rich and powerful would much prefer to be waited on at a restaurant by a clean, well-oiled, AI-powered, humanoid robot which also ‘understands’ the benefits of lockdowns, rather than some surly pleb with his thumb in the soup.
Let’s pretend Musk isn’t as daft as ChatGPT and that his prediction of a 1:1 humanoid to human ratio should be taken half-seriously. Is it going to be 7.5 billion robots to 7.5 billion humans, based on the world’s current population, or 0.5 billion robots to 0.5 billion humans, based on the lower end of an ‘optimal population’? Not my words. That ‘optimal population’ is the esteemed view of the Overpopulation Project. By the way, it isn’t called the Overpopulation Project because they’re keen for you to go forth and multiply. They’re a bunch of killjoys who want to curb your procreational enthusiasm.
Musk claims to be in favour of maintaining the current population level but he seems to be as confused in his thinking about that as ChatGPT is about lockdowns. Maintaining the current population seems to contradict his vision of Economic AI and a world (or workforce) shared fairly and squarely between humans and robots. But if you believe humanoid automation is credible, as Musk does, how will 7.5 billion robots share the employment market with 7.5 billion humans? We’d be creating jobs for 7.5 billion robots, while all the humans still manage to maintain theirs. Does that strike you as realistic? Either Musk’s maths is very cockeyed, or he’s betting on the Overpopulation Project being very successful.
WEF acolyte and Gollum extraordinaire, Yuval Hariri, seems to be on the same page as Musk, even if they didn’t attend the same finishing school. Gollum believes that AI and other technologies are going to create a “new massive useless class” and is therefore leaning in the direction of scenario number two in order to fulfil his vision of a world filled with Google software engineers and other dull young things. AI venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee shares Gollum’s dream of a world rid of worthless workers, predicting that technology will replace 40% of jobs within the next 15 years, including both white-collar and blue-collar work.
And if you think these doom-laden views are expressed solely by the parasitic class, there are plenty of realists in the freedom movement who see mass unemployment on the horizon. Mike Adams, who is building his own Large Language Model, says:
“AI systems will take over, I would guess about 80% of the customer service jobs. To handle the first interaction with the customer…the first complaint the first question, and only then if they can’t handle it, then it would escalate to an actual human being. But that might only be 20% of the current support workforce. So I would say eight out of 10 customer service people lose their jobs in the next two years…And by the way, in some of the conversations that I’ve had with some of the people involved in machine learning systems, and the licensing of various technologies, I have learned that the number one area where this is going to be implemented is in health care…Your days of talking to a human are just about over by the way, you’re not going to be able to reach a human being to ask anything about your insurance policy, your coverage, your medical bill, no, no. It’s all going to be automated. It’s happening now.”
Let’s not forget that the year began with AI stealing the jobs of a class of professionals who had a really important job to do but failed miserably to do it. In January, massive mainstream media layoffs were announced by media barons who have coldly calculated that Generative AI will be more reliable, and far cheaper, than the mindless MSM stenographers who had been going around calling themselves journalists.
Goldman Sachs are fully on board with the human replacement scheme, but then they would be, wouldn’t they? The GS analysts think that in the US and Europe “roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work”. Globally, they estimate that “generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation”.
They have put an uncharacteristically cheery spin on these forecasts by assuring us that “worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth”. Perhaps, but what are all those people who lose out to AI going to do? Think chimerically! Maybe a customer services worker who loses his job to an AI bot could retrain as an AI geek who has to write more AI programs to make the AI bots who replaced him more efficient. To stay employed, he would have to prove that his AI ‘efficiencies’ paid for his salary. A sort of AI employment Hunger Games.
Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary and now OpenAI board member, is a lot more gung-ho about AI than even Gollum or Musk. He thinks that over time, AI will replace human workers in nearly every job:
“If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution. This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor.” [emphasis added]
Robots, robots everywhere, and not a single human to spare.
There clearly seems to be a mad rush by a small group of humans to replace as many humans as possible at the lower end of the food chain because they are deemed expensive and less reliable than the latest AI gizmo. The purpose of work in a sane world is to provide meaning to existence. The purpose of technology should be to enhance meaning by removing drudgery. And yet, as meaningless work increases, technology stands ready to remove people instead of their drudgery. That’s one way to expunge meaninglessness – get rid of the people suffering from it.
While the West’s economy is rapidly declining into a chimeric maze of useless and often destructive ponzi schemes, the robot revolution is real, especially in countries that actually are producing stuff. Robot automation has been a sword hanging over the heads of unskilled workers long before “AI” became a fashionable term. This short video report titled “New $10 Billion Turkish Humanoid Robot Factory Shocked The World” documents how robot automation is already slashing workforces in China and elsewhere.
The robots being manufactured in Turkey “can perform tasks such as “promoting products in shopping centres, distributing brochures at fairs, escorting at bus terminals or airports, and making sales at stores. These robots, which can even work as nurses in hospitals, are programmed to provide specific assistance to housewives.”
The report goes on to explain that these robots have begun to be deployed in factories:
“A Chinese factory has replaced 90% of its employees with robots and achieved a 250% increase in productivity….Among other areas where progress is strongly evident is in industrial robotics. Specialists are creating new robots that are in many cases much more efficient than humans. One example is the replacement of workers at one of China’s industrial enterprises in the city of Dongguan. Out of the 650 people working at the factory, the management left only 60, replacing the rest with robots. The remaining employees only perform maintenance work on their metal colleagues.” [emphasis added and yes, robots have been anthropomorphised into ‘colleagues’]
A world stalked by the prospects of humanoid robots and mass AI-induced unemployment creates the potential for a scenario in which a large number of humans might be expected to politely go home and die. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people who own most of the world’s material wealth, and who see AI as the single most important weapon to deploy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also think that the world is overpopulated. There is definitely something about being a billionaire that makes them more likely to be obsessed with curbing the masses’ ability to multiply.
Billionaire Ted Turner has five children but insists that the world’s population needs to shrink to 2 billion. He also owns 2 million acres of natural habitat. That’s roughly the size of Puerto Rico, a whole US state. Puerto Rico has a population of 3.2 million. If Puerto Ricans got fed up with living in Puerto Rico, they could relocate to Turner’s ranch. His desire to shrink the number of the great unwashed makes perfect sense if you assume that he has no plans to give up his modest chunk of the planet to Puerto Ricans or anyone else bored with their current address. It obviates the need to hire an expensive army to prevent the multiplying masses from converting his nature reserve into lebensraum, not to mention barbecuing the herds of bison roaming Turner’s plains.
As his fellow psychopaths continue to ravage humanity and the earth with one ‘sustainable development’ scheme after another, like making it harder for farmers to grow food or digging up 225 tonnes of earth to make a single electric car battery, the world’s poor will find it harder and harder to feed themselves. But Turner’s purported concern for their plight doesn’t quite ring true, especially as he chose to give $1 billion of his wealth to the UN, and not the poor. Oddly enough, the UN is also very concerned about the very same thing its generous donor is concerned about. The UN Population Fund’s carefully worded mission is to help “states build capacity to formulate population policies”.
A tip for the uninitiated paying a visit to the UN’s depopulation website – population control agendas are not called population control agendas by organisations paid to curb population growth. Too much transparency can be a dangerous thing. So, to avoid transparency overload, it’s called “people-centred development”, or “women’s empowerment”, or any other word salad that makes depopulation sound like the work of good Samaritans. But make no mistake – the UN and Ted Turner are here to save you from yourself. If you don’t have the common sense to stop breeding like rabbits, some “people-centred development” and “women’s empowerment” should help you see the error of your ways.
Mr Dasgupta, a Cambridge Economist who has three children and also spends his time writing about how dangerously overpopulated the world is, has crunched the numbers for an optimal population and is convinced that you are not optimal. You are unsustainable. And based on the lower end of his optimal population, 93% of you must go.
How is this surfeit of humans to be pruned back? How will the fecund masses across the overburdened planet be incentivised to become less fertile? What is to be done? Indeed, have they already done it, or tried to do it? Are they still trying to do it with furious attempts to spark WWIII?
Infuriatingly, the Dasguptas and Turners of the world steadfastly refuse to lead by example, by either not breeding or by removing themselves from the overpopulation equation altogether and leaving their money and land to the poor for whom they profess to care so much. This tiny parasitic class that hoards the world’s wealth and believes that its parasitism is the justification for deciding your destiny – they, oddly enough, do not see themselves as the problem.
Humans will become machines before machines become human
Despite the complexity of human intelligence and the unfathomable nature of consciousness from which intelligence is derived, there is a relatively easy way to create a functional machine simulation of the human brain – simply massively downgrade the human brain. Ignoring the smart-arses who are chuckling, “Can it go any lower?”, the gist of the theory is that if you can’t make the machine human, you make the human into a machine. And the easiest way to dim the wit of humanity without a transhumanist lobotomy (although that is very much on the table) is to get humans to accept that AI is the new god. People must become convinced of AI’s ability to take over what little thinking humanity has been collectively engaged in thus far.
The new paradigm being subliminally drilled into the collective conscious is that AI can think far better and faster than you on the things that really matter in life, like whether to subject yourself repeatedly to medical experimentation, or whether to be locked down in a ‘smart’ city, or whether Co2 is the existential threat that warrants you happily eating bugs and eschewing summers on sandy beaches…while your masters eat steak and jet around globe. Invite AI to do all your thinking and then invite it to police and punish you for actions not aligned with ‘correct’ thinking. Totally surrender to AI.
The systematic degradation of the cognitive capacity of human beings is already well underway with the ramping up of 5th generation warfare that commenced with the covid psyop, and AI is well placed to accelerate it. In Kissinger’s and Schmidt’s brave-new-worldy glorification of The Age of AI, the hyping up of AI as some mysteriously inscrutable and vast intellect is about as subtle as an Anthony Joshua uppercut delivered in slow motion. To quote (the now dead) Kissinger et al:
“The advent of AI obliges us to confront whether there is a form of logic that humans have not achieved or cannot achieve, exploring aspects of reality we have never known and may never directly know. When a computer that is training alone devises a chess strategy that has never occurred to any human in the game’s millennial history, what has it discovered, and how has it discovered it?” [emphasis added]
I’ll have a go at answering that question. It ‘discovered’ its strategy thanks to the combination of complex algorithms and a huge memory for storing infinitely more combinations of moves than a human brain can store. And these things were actually discovered by its programmers and developers, not AI. Remember that trick of anthropomorphising technology? AI is not David Livingstone. It did not discover anything because it’s software. What you are being emotionally manipulated to accept is that an algorithm written by human programmers has inexplicably been alchemised into a mind of its own.
This is not to downplay the impressive performance of applications labelled as AI in narrow tasks that require high-performance brute-logic. There is a place for that, and we should welcome it as a tool to relieve drudgery and enhance learning. But welcoming a high-performance diagnostic tool should not lead you to think that you can reject your doctor (notwithstanding the medical profession’s craven embrace of biomedical fascism during covid; we do need to fix that, but not with AI).
The authors of The Age of AI have explicitly said that AI will command what you think and how you think, because, they say, it is essential to protect us from “malicious actors aiming to sow social discord”. For “malicious actor”, read anyone who dissents from their laws and policies. For “social discord”, read any act of defiance or disagreement with your overlords. The AI god will come to the rescue with “the design and deployment of algorithms to detect, identify, and counter disinformation and other forms of harmful data”.
So mysterious are the ways of AI that it “sometimes operates in ways even its designers can only elaborate in general terms.” And what are the consequences of the mysterious AI god’s will? “[T]he prospects for free society, even free will, may be altered.” Not obliterated, mind you. Just altered. And what should societies do if they wish to avoid the loss of freedom and free will? Well, nothing really, apart from understand and reconcile themselves to the new reality:
“Even if these evolutions prove to be benign or reversible, it is incumbent on societies across the globe to understand these changes so they can reconcile them with their values, structures, and social contracts.”
My own speculation on this psychopathic style of expression is that it is born of a sense of boundless conceit – these people truly believe they possess the ability to tell you are going to hell in such a way that you will look forward to it. The second quality inherent in psychopathy is the deep-seated contempt in which the psychopath holds you. How could you not know that the loss of freedom is a perfectly natural ‘evolution’? The third motivator of this style of sophistry is a sadistic sense of humour. Some will read The Age of AI and think that the psychopaths’ twisted vision of the future is exciting, and some will experience a boiling of the blood. But both are a source of amusement for the psychopath. To the psychopath, the first bunch are fools who deserve what’s coming to them. As for the latter, the psychopath looks forward to placing his jackboot on their necks to prove that being right does not afford protection from the law of the jungle – the jungle he owns and operates. Psychopaths do not believe they can lose, which is partly why they can’t stop themselves from embarking on such preposterous schemes.
Wallowing in their sadistic musings, Kissinger’s and Schmidt’s techno-dystopic vision conjures a world in which AI has seeped into every pore of human life. It is accepted not because it is good, but because it has taken over, because it has won, and there is nothing anyone can do to roll it back.
“AI‑powered technology will become a permanent companion in perceiving and processing information… it will alter our experience as reasoning beings and permanently change our relationship with reality.” [emphasis added]
According to the AI visionaries, these things will come to pass. And whatever you think is real will be supplanted by another ‘reality’.
One facet of consciousness is the ability to see the world (inner and outer) for what it really is. Truth is not relative, despite our limited capacity to perceive all of it. It is in fact our perceptual limitation that entices us into believing that truth is an illusion. The whole truth may never be available to us in this life, but it is the sincere search for it that makes consciousness less of a riddle and more of a gift. The AI visionaries are careful not to say that we will move closer to a true perception of reality. Rather, they say our relationship with reality will change. In other words, AI will be Plato’s cave for the 21st century.
Frankly, in religious terms, if God is truth and Satan is deception, the Age of AI was inspired by the latter.
Artificial Intelligence is not intelligent, but it is a powerful technology. There seems to be an exponential growth in misnaming things. Central Bank Digital Currencies aren’t currencies; they’re payment systems. The covid ‘vaccine’ isn’t a vaccine because it didn’t stop transmission and infection from covid. The pandemic wasn’t a pandemic because there was no excess death until a range of counter measures were applied. The climate ‘crisis’ is not a crisis. It goes without saying that deliberately misnaming things is part and parcel of the art of deception, and deception is the essence of a psyop. If power structures can get you to believe that AI is intelligent, they can get you to relate to AI in ways that make it your master, not your servant. Kissinger et al’s The Age of AI is a psyop.
Sadly, science itself is turning into a psyop. The aura of mystery in which AI is being cloaked is one of many new fads signalling science’s evolution into scientism – science as religion, not method or tool. And the new religion may soon have an icon to worship. The new-age pagans finally have a god that they can talk to and that talks back to them – the god behind the screen. One day, the Neuralink god inside the human brain may merge with the AI god behind the screen, and a screen will not be needed to tell you what to think and do. The new-agers might then relish the bastardisation of Jesus’ words with a new mantra: “The kingdom of AI is within you.”
The priest class of central bank governors, UN and WHO Directors General, IPCC heads, ministers and MPs in ‘national’ governments will quack out new edicts on blasphemy from public podia. Blasphemy has a new name in the age of AI, but it operates in the same way as it did in the 14th century. It is called mis- dis- and mal-information; hate speech, and; ‘conspiracy theory’. ‘Far-right’ is the sinister group to which these sinners belong. All cults require thought-terminating cliches to guide the mind and the cult of the AI god will be no different from those that have preceded it.
The quackers in the priest class and the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC) will be exempt from all of the AI god’s more demanding edicts, although they will insist they are not. They will insist that they are eating the same bugs as everyone else, but they will somehow look healthier. You won’t see cattle grazing on pastures that produce the finest rib-eye steaks because you’ll be trapped in a smart-city, eating bacon-flavoured bug crisps. You will hear rumours of debauched billionaire steak parties, but if you are caught spreading them – and AI is very efficient at detecting the mildest mis-dis-mal-information – a re-education camp for the ‘far-right’ awaits. The internet will be made ‘safe’ at all costs, and the AI god can do it.
The omniscient AI god will dictate medical compliance, hand down instant judgements in digital courts of law, take down ‘misinformation’ (formerly known as dissent from government orthodoxy, essential to democracy), and ration carbon daily. Appealing against capricious AI judgements will be futile because the AI god is always right, even when it is wrong. How could a dimwit like you outperform an algorithm?
At a deeper psychological level, the popular acceptance of the ‘omniscient’ persona of AI (not the promotion of it by the OCGFC) represents the progression of an infantile abdication of responsibility. The OCGFC fully understand and exploit this need for so many humans to relieve themselves of the burden of having to engage in self-directed thinking and to act on it.
Many people don’t fully appreciate the true import of the Milgram studies conducted in the 1960s to understand why ordinary Germans followed depraved orders during World War II. The meaning of the Milgram experiment is not necessarily that most humans will happily obey the man in a white coat, but rather that most humans will commit evil acts as long as they can pass the responsibility and accountability for those acts onto the man in a white coat. The real meaning of the Milgram studies is guilt transference and absolution – there is no sin if there is no guilt.
AI has the potential to be the new man in the white coat who takes all the blame. It’s not me guv – it’s the computer. You can see it happening already. People will even be willing to accept punishment from AI as the price to pay for being relieved of responsibility. In other words, given the choice between shouldering the responsibility to act ethically on values-based thinking or accepting arbitrary punishment for not following orders, many people would opt for the latter.
Responsibility transference has a far greater pay-back for the psychopathic OCGFC who aren’t plagued by guilt and responsibility in the way normal people are. For them, it will simply mean there will be no person to blame, no soul to damn, when AI ‘decides’ to systematically commit evil in the everyday lives of millions. If the Turners and Dasguptas at the Overpopulation Project get their way, it will be millions and not billions.
The AImperor has magisterial plans
The proposition that a technological innovation being harnessed by technocracy could surpass human consciousness is an invitation to take the first step inside Plato’s new seven-trillion-dollar cave. The AImperor’s fantastical plans hinge on humanity’s refusal to see that he is naked. In the same way that AI is not conscious but has the capacity to fool us into thinking it might be, there are those who are completely unconscious but somehow manage to fool us into thinking that they are conscious. The AImperor is banking on the latter to make his kingdom governable.
The AI-powered digital gulag under construction might be viewed as ideological blowback, the seeds of which were planted during the Age of Reason. That age ushered in the mechanistic worldview and the science of materialism. Darwinian evolutionary theory has, with a great degree of success, promoted the notion that the current earthly and cosmic state of affairs is entirely the result of random events. Randomness is the order of the day in hard science and, consequently, nihilism is the new meaning of everything. The meaning of life for a Western population embracing AI consists of bread, circuses and an all-too-often meaningless job to pay for both.
Today’s legacy of the Age of Reason is meaninglessness. This is paradoxical because a fundamental by-product of consciousness is the search for meaning and purpose, and yet reason has moved us further away from this. Are we therefore less conscious as a species today than we were, say, 200 years ago? Very few people today reject the premise for the exaltation of reason. The sincere pursuit of reason is a noble objective. It is therefore understandable that advances in technology, coupled with the pursuit of reason, have led humans in the 21st century to embark on a mission to manufacture reason outside of the human brain, as ridiculous as the proposition is.
What should make reasonable people scratch their heads in dismay is that this is happening while supposedly rational minds are committing every imaginable unreasonable deed their minds can conjure. In four short years, the masters of reason have waged economic warfare on the world’s poorest with the weapon of mass lockdowns, coerced the entire planet to partake in human experimentation with unproven and dangerous substances, censored anyone who reasonably dissented, and are now aiding and abetting a hyper-militarised and deranged colonial settler state in committing genocide, to list but a few of their meticulously planned atrocities and assaults on humanity, reason and compassion.
It appears that a sustained period of over 300 years of the exaltation of reason over emotion has finally driven the masters of reason in the West mad. The attempt to manufacture artificial intelligence, the all-thinking god, is just another insane hoax among the many we have endured thus far. Emotion is having its revenge on reason. It has taken a while but revenge is a dish best served cold.
But, as always in matters of politics, power and money, there is method to the madness. The sci-fi novels about AI gods powered by an “existential hatred of mankind” are not far-fetched at all once it dawns that the AI gods in the novels are avatars of our masters of the universe – the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital.
An excellent piece.
Thanks Folks.