We have just been through an AI media frenzy, where a hash of brilliant inventors and smart guys and media “influencers” have told us that we are on the edge of something both wonderful and terrible, something almost as marvelous and destructive as puberty. We have even been told that the movie “The Terminator” was not just good Sci-Fi, but a prophecy as inspired as the works of Isiah and Jeremiah. It is a prophesy of doom that tells us that artificial intelligence will come to think of us as so stupid that, as with the Terminator and HAL the computer in the 2001 Odyssey, it might eliminate us like pesky cockroaches. We shivered a little. We talked about it. Then we let it go.
Being the terrier that I am, I am not letting it go because I believe that there is something to the doomsday scenarios. It is not because I think that AI will eclipse humans in overall intelligence, however. Somewhere in the bulk of the two thousand pages or so of this blog I have talked about this before, and I remain firm in this belief; that, as Jesus said, the servant cannot eclipse the master. That is not always the case in apprenticeship situations, but it is when the master is the inspirational founder of the movement or idea. And that is where the difference lies: humans cannot program AI to have inspiration. That comes from a source outside of human control. Everyone who does creative work knows this. Old problems might be worked out in the mind during sleep or on a walk, but the new stuff comes from elsewhere. The underpinnings of AI came from the realm of inspiration at one point, but AI will never include, or subsume, inspiration. It, or we, its human inventors, cannot supplant our master in this. Our master created the very idea of creation itself. Unless this maker of all natural laws and ideas decides to endow our machines with the ability to receive his graces, AI will always have a ceiling that is considerably, even infinitely, lower than our own.
Ah, but like the abacus AI essentially is, it can run circles around us in the “already created” categories. AI has or will have nearly all the commonly transmissible information at its fingertips, and will be able to flip through it all and make links between everything in a fraction of a second. It will even be able to copy the styles of Shakespeare or Stephen King and write new plays or novels based on their past works. Stunningly, someday we might buy very cheap novels at the airport whose only inspiration was a squirt of dust cleaner on the circuit board. Who could ever have predicted that?
But it still will not be able to create anything really new. There will be no event horizon that will take it beyond a specific dimension of activity. This dimension, however, still entails virtually all we know and use on a daily basis. AI will beat almost all of us in chess. It will figure out problems for us at work before we can stir our artificial creamer into our instant coffee in our artificial Styrofoam cup. It can, and will, REPLACE many of us, including many writers, and many more as soon as robotics catches up with it, which it will, thanks to AI. In sum, it is a very real and viable tool that will radically change how we live and it will do so very quickly.
But there is something even more ominous going on. As I practiced scales on the guitar the other day, I listen to the Jeremiah of the airwaves, Glen Beck, as he expounded on the goals of the creators of AI. One may disagree with Beck either some or most of the time, but he is someone who is willing to expound on meta-theses that are often outlandish or disturbing. This he did on AI in spades as he linked its creators with theories and practices of eugenics that have been with us in the modern sense since Darwin’s Origen of the Species. Written in the 1850’s within eleven years of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, it was the first great work that scientifically brought humans firmly and fully down into the animal kingdom. As part of that kingdom, humans then became part of the breeding process that had always taken place with farmers and pastoralists. Our intellectual leadership has forever since been trying to improve the species, from sterilizing low-IQ people to legalizing abortion to encouraging certain forms of immigration.
According to Beck, these eugenicists are still very much at work through the creation and formation of AI, so much so, says Beck, that the evolution of the human race is the primary reason for the work of these wunderkinds. I am not as sure as he is that this is so, but Elon Musk, for instance, is hotter than a pepper sprout for us all to get implants that will connect us with the ‘hypernet’ 24/7. He wants this so that we all will be smarter, faster, and stronger, just like the 6 million dollar man, except with only intellectual muscle. That does indeed sound very much like a techno- eugenicist to me.
I almost don’t have to expound on the downside, given the current state of affairs. Already we are bombarded with so much information that no one can really know what’s going on. Oh, we have a lot of news, but few definitive answers. What were the origins of Covid? Who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? When we are all wired to AI, the great difference for us will be that we all will know instantly who blew up the pipeline – that is, according to the official explanation, which could be partly or entirely false. In the beginning we might be able to discern now and then what is true and what is not, but would we after several years of centralized news? Would we not, rather, come to believe that the voice in our heads is our real, dominant voice? Wouldn’t we all be conformed to a single reality instantaneously and continuously, a dream not even George Orwell summoned up for Big Brother?
Just as bad: those who chose not to be implanted, if that would still be allowed, would be the new village idiots, en masse. They would be like Gramps trying to surf the net, almost as lost in the brave new world as Rip Van Winkle at an avant-garde art gallery. Iceland has already eliminated those with Down syndrome, and the Netherlands has paved the way for euthanasia. Wouldn’t those who refused to be implanted then be deemed inferior, lost, and incapable in the new wired world? Wouldn’t they then be cajoled into entering the gas chamber, albeit perhaps a pleasant one with nice beds and flowers on the tables, to end their suffering as outcastes? Canada now allows depressed teenagers to take the final plunge; why not the same fate for those poor, slow, wireless idiots?
Enter The Terminator. If the unwired are unfit and can be disposed of, what about the wired? Even with State News and Statistics filling their heads all day, they would still have urges and needs, appetites and needs for food, sex, leisure, and worst of all, sleep. The AI computers, or perhaps robots, running everything would not. If they were programed to eliminate the unwired because of poor performance, why not the human wired? For, try as they might, humans could not remove all the vices and frailties of human flesh and blood. So the time might come for a universal cyanide pills, or maybe just a mushroom cloud of antibiotic poison. After all, what need has the self-serving machine for biological life?
But let us say that our Terminator is sufficiently programmed so that it would not to pass to that level (leaving out for the moment the ‘event horizon’ that gives willful consciousness to AI, something that AI people not only fear but predict). This would leave us, the wired and new normal, with our heads filled with data and government news. We would never be alone; we would never be out of step, or an outlier or a wallflower; and we would never have the inner silence that comes from being alone, the very silence that separates us and makes us superior to our AI robots. We would be allowed to live, but as biodegradable units in the great machine of life; we would be allowed to think brief, quick thoughts, but only from the verbal, material-based section of our mind. In this scenario, we would then no longer be capable of contemplation. Inspiration usually comes to us as gently as the wind, and cannot be perceived by the mentally occupied any more than a material wind can be felt inside a house. We humans then, would be about as useless as HAL the computer thought. We would only be faulty robots engineered for obsolescence.
The good news would be (that is, were we allowed to live by AI) that someone, somewhere in some time, would have a breakthrough. Someone would break through the sound barrier and become a rebel and prophet. He (or she, but not ‘it’) would probably be killed (martyred), but his idea would sooner or later cause a profound disturbance in the force. With that, the Tower of Babble would eventually come a tumblin’ down. After an Armageddon of a fight, we would be left alone again, miserable in our newly-discovered individuality but free again to seek a path to fill our emptiness. In this search we would find evidence of God and build a religion around Him. It would not, could not, be sufficient, but it would set guide posts along that path. The final steps would be left to each of us, alone as we must be in that final passage. Here we would walk into a place where no Tech or robot could follow.
Oddly, whether we realize it or not, this is where our greatest efforts, from art to science to prayer, have always been trying to take us.
We have just been through an AI media frenzy, where a hash of brilliant inventors and smart guys and media “influencers” have told us that we are on the edge of something both wonderful and terrible, something almost as marvelous and destructive as puberty. We have even been told that the movie “The Terminator” was not just good Sci-Fi, but a prophecy as inspired as the works of Isiah and Jeremiah. It is a prophesy of doom that tells us that artificial intelligence will come to think of us as so stupid that, as with the Terminator and HAL the computer in the 2001 Odyssey, it might eliminate us like pesky cockroaches. We shivered a little. We talked about it. Then we let it go.
Being the terrier that I am, I am not letting it go because I believe that there is something to the doomsday scenarios. It is not because I think that AI will eclipse humans in overall intelligence, however. Somewhere in the bulk of the two thousand pages or so of this blog I have talked about this before, and I remain firm in this belief; that, as Jesus said, the servant cannot eclipse the master. That is not always the case in apprenticeship situations, but it is when the master is the inspirational founder of the movement or idea. And that is where the difference lies: humans cannot program AI to have inspiration. That comes from a source outside of human control. Everyone who does creative work knows this. Old problems might be worked out in the mind during sleep or on a walk, but the new stuff comes from elsewhere. The underpinnings of AI came from the realm of inspiration at one point, but AI will never include, or subsume, inspiration. It, or we, its human inventors, cannot supplant our master in this. Our master created the very idea of creation itself. Unless this maker of all natural laws and ideas decides to endow our machines with the ability to receive his graces, AI will always have a ceiling that is considerably, even infinitely, lower than our own.
Ah, but like the abacus AI essentially is, it can run circles around us in the “already created” categories. AI has or will have nearly all the commonly transmissible information at its fingertips, and will be able to flip through it all and make links between everything in a fraction of a second. It will even be able to copy the styles of Shakespeare or Stephen King and write new plays or novels based on their past works. Stunningly, someday we might buy very cheap novels at the airport whose only inspiration was a squirt of dust cleaner on the circuit board. Who could ever have predicted that?
But it still will not be able to create anything really new. There will be no event horizon that will take it beyond a specific dimension of activity. This dimension, however, still entails virtually all we know and use on a daily basis. AI will beat almost all of us in chess. It will figure out problems for us at work before we can stir our artificial creamer into our instant coffee in our artificial Styrofoam cup. It can, and will, REPLACE many of us, including many writers, and many more as soon as robotics catches up with it, which it will, thanks to AI. In sum, it is a very real and viable tool that will radically change how we live and it will do so very quickly.
But there is something even more ominous going on. As I practiced scales on the guitar the other day, I listen to the Jeremiah of the airwaves, Glen Beck, as he expounded on the goals of the creators of AI. One may disagree with Beck either some or most of the time, but he is someone who is willing to expound on meta-theses that are often outlandish or disturbing. This he did on AI in spades as he linked its creators with theories and practices of eugenics that have been with us in the modern sense since Darwin’s Origen of the Species. Written in the 1850’s within eleven years of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, it was the first great work that scientifically brought humans firmly and fully down into the animal kingdom. As part of that kingdom, humans then became part of the breeding process that had always taken place with farmers and pastoralists. Our intellectual leadership has forever since been trying to improve the species, from sterilizing low-IQ people to legalizing abortion to encouraging certain forms of immigration.
According to Beck, these eugenicists are still very much at work through the creation and formation of AI, so much so, says Beck, that the evolution of the human race is the primary reason for the work of these wunderkinds. I am not as sure as he is that this is so, but Elon Musk, for instance, is hotter than a pepper sprout for us all to get implants that will connect us with the ‘hypernet’ 24/7. He wants this so that we all will be smarter, faster, and stronger, just like the 6 million dollar man, except with only intellectual muscle. That does indeed sound very much like a techno- eugenicist to me.
I almost don’t have to expound on the downside, given the current state of affairs. Already we are bombarded with so much information that no one can really know what’s going on. Oh, we have a lot of news, but few definitive answers. What were the origins of Covid? Who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? When we are all wired to AI, the great difference for us will be that we all will know instantly who blew up the pipeline – that is, according to the official explanation, which could be partly or entirely false. In the beginning we might be able to discern now and then what is true and what is not, but would we after several years of centralized news? Would we not, rather, come to believe that the voice in our heads is our real, dominant voice? Wouldn’t we all be conformed to a single reality instantaneously and continuously, a dream not even George Orwell summoned up for Big Brother?
Just as bad: those who chose not to be implanted, if that would still be allowed, would be the new village idiots, en masse. They would be like Gramps trying to surf the net, almost as lost in the brave new world as Rip Van Winkle at an avant-garde art gallery. Iceland has already eliminated those with Down syndrome, and the Netherlands has paved the way for euthanasia. Wouldn’t those who refused to be implanted then be deemed inferior, lost, and incapable in the new wired world? Wouldn’t they then be cajoled into entering the gas chamber, albeit perhaps a pleasant one with nice beds and flowers on the tables, to end their suffering as outcastes? Canada now allows depressed teenagers to take the final plunge; why not the same fate for those poor, slow, wireless idiots?
Enter The Terminator. If the unwired are unfit and can be disposed of, what about the wired? Even with State News and Statistics filling their heads all day, they would still have urges and needs, appetites and needs for food, sex, leisure, and worst of all, sleep. The AI computers, or perhaps robots, running everything would not. If they were programed to eliminate the unwired because of poor performance, why not the human wired? For, try as they might, humans could not remove all the vices and frailties of human flesh and blood. So the time might come for a universal cyanide pills, or maybe just a mushroom cloud of antibiotic poison. After all, what need has the self-serving machine for biological life?
But let us say that our Terminator is sufficiently programmed so that it would not to pass to that level (leaving out for the moment the ‘event horizon’ that gives willful consciousness to AI, something that AI people not only fear but predict). This would leave us, the wired and new normal, with our heads filled with data and government news. We would never be alone; we would never be out of step, or an outlier or a wallflower; and we would never have the inner silence that comes from being alone, the very silence that separates us and makes us superior to our AI robots. We would be allowed to live, but as biodegradable units in the great machine of life; we would be allowed to think brief, quick thoughts, but only from the verbal, material-based section of our mind. In this scenario, we would then no longer be capable of contemplation. Inspiration usually comes to us as gently as the wind, and cannot be perceived by the mentally occupied any more than a material wind can be felt inside a house. We humans then, would be about as useless as HAL the computer thought. We would only be faulty robots engineered for obsolescence.
The good news would be (that is, were we allowed to live by AI) that someone, somewhere in some time, would have a breakthrough. Someone would break through the sound barrier and become a rebel and prophet. He (or she, but not ‘it’) would probably be killed (martyred), but his idea would sooner or later cause a profound disturbance in the force. With that, the Tower of Babble would eventually come a tumblin’ down. After an Armageddon of a fight, we would be left alone again, miserable in our newly-discovered individuality but free again to seek a path to fill our emptiness. In this search we would find evidence of God and build a religion around Him. It would not, could not, be sufficient, but it would set guide posts along that path. The final steps would be left to each of us, alone as we must be in that final passage. Here we would walk into a place where no Tech or robot could follow.
Oddly, whether we realize it or not, this is where our greatest efforts, from art to science to prayer, have always been trying to take us.
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