English computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton is said to be the “Godfather” of Artificial Intelligence. Earlier this year, Hinton publicly stated that developing AI is like raising a young tiger, warning that “[t]here’s only two options if you have a tiger cub as a pet. Figure out if you can train it so it never wants to kill you, or get rid of it.” … “For AI,” he warned, “we have no way to eliminate it.” … “AI won’t give humans the chance to ‘pull the plug’ – when that day comes, the AI will persuade people not to do it, because our control over AI would be like a three-year-old trying to set rules for adults.”
Eliminating AI
Given the fact that AI depends on humongous data centers that need electricity in quantities comparable to those consumed by the world’s largest cities, it seems quite easy to “pull the plug.” Just cut off the electricity and AI is dead. When asked, AI may even agree with you that if you want to radically eliminate it, this is the most efficient way to do it. The problem, though, is not that AI may try to persuade people to keep it plugged in, but that its several “ultimate beneficiary owners” will fight tooth and nail to keep the electricity flowing.
The utopian Transman
It is often said that the AI elite is in it for the money. Yet, there may be more to this than meets the financial eye. AI isn’t just a piece of software that helps streamline and automate activities and processes. It is hailed as the magic key that will open the door to a Utopia where machine-based systems will produce better outcomes than ordinary human intelligence and interaction. In this Utopia, Man will live as a Transman who shall be “singing to the tunes” of the digital algorithms embedded in the AI designed by sorcerers who are intent on squeezing the transformed you and me into the quasi realities of their idiosyncratic preferences.
Dreams that become tigers
All Utopias began and begin as adorable, cute and innocent tiger cubs. As great and wonderful tales of imagined “nowhere-worlds” that are too good to be true. As long as they are dealt with as dreams, they remain harmless innocent cubs. But, they become dangerous tigers when their imaginators insist that their dreams must come true. If they can’t be realized by way of rational argument or gentle persuasion, their creators will not hesitate to resort to the use of all the coercion and force that is needed to eclipse the reality of existence and replace it by the Second Reality of their imaginative project. Meaning that the unknown future must be replaced by the image of a “known future” that must forthwith become reality in the here and now. In the case of AI, this means that this “known future” is a world where human intelligence has been replaced by machine-based systems developed to improve the lot of an otherwise helpless and hapless Mankind.
Utopias and the Will to Power
This explains why Utopias always arise in the minds of imaginators whose character is profoundly disturbed by the libido dominandi, the Will to Power. The Utopias energize their Will which, in turn, energizes the imaginators’ irrepressible and pathological libido that generates the power to realize the utopian projects of which they and no one else shall be the inaugurators and masters. As a result, Utopian projects ‒ such as AI ‒ are always endowed with an “inner logic” and “ethics” that demand unconditional obedience and absolutely exclude, condemn and suppress disagreement and dissent. Paraphrasing Hinton: “if you have a Utopia cub as a pet, figure out if you can train it so it never wants to kill you, or get rid of it.” The problem with Utopias is that the “Great Leaders” who created them are so obsessed by their “pets” that they can’t let go of them or give others a chance to “pull the plug” before the cubs have become tigers. The cubs must become tigers because their personal “greatness” depends on realizing their Utopias.
Man stands in the way of the Transman
The transhuman Man that AI will help shape was described by Klaus Schwab, the founder and former Chairman of the World Economic Forum, as a fusion of Man’s “physical, digital and biological identity”. The pure and unadulterated Man, as created by God in His image, thus stands in the way of realizing the Transman. The former must be “built back better” and if he refuses to undergo the transformation, he is regarded as an enemy of the imaginative project to transform him. It so happens that a picture of Schwab taken in his personal office showed a statue of Vladimir Iljitsj Lenin placed in the bookcase behind him. Most likely, this is how Schwab wishes to pay tribute to his communist hero and the ways in which he installed and organized the Soviet regime and mercilessly dealt with its enemies.
Inflict maximum harm
In his book Wonder confronts Certainty, literary critic, Slavist and expert on Lenin’s and Stalin’s pneumapathologies and crimes, Gary Saul Morson relates that “[a]ccording to Leninist ethics, it is criminal not to inflict the maximum harm on an enemy. But what is the worst thing one can inflict? Clearly, it isnʼt death, which might well constitute an escape.” What was it that the Sovjet’s “justice system”, that included “interrogation with torture and false confessions, forced labor often in frozen wastes, and gradual starvation”, was designed to accomplish what shooting could not? That system, so Morson, “does make sense in terms of the Leninist imperative: inflict maximum harm, not just to the body but also to the soul; not just to eliminate but to dehumanize enemies. It also makes sense if the creation of a new type of human being (the ‘new Soviet person’) required utterly destroying the old order, not just institutions and people but also everything that used to constitute humanness.”
Wiping Man clean of his piritual origin
Well, I’d say that AI perfectly fits the Leninist/Schwabian shoe of destroyng everything that used to constitute humanness (intelligence, integrity and self-determinism) and building back better a new type of human being (the Transman) that perfectly fits in with the Utopia imagined by those who are in control of the machine-based systems designed and operated for the purpose of accomplishing this imaginative project. What all the current de- and re-constructors of Man seem to have in common with the patently pathologic Great Leaders and Wise Teachers of the former Soviet Union, is their obsessive hatred of Man’s soul, his spiritual nature, his imago Dei. Although God Himself was murdered a while ago, Man shall be wiped clean of what might have remained of His image, which is the lynchpin of Man’s divine origin.
“Chatting” you into UtopiAI
What Lenin, Stalin and like-minded tyrants failed to accomplish by using brutal force, suppression, starvation and murder, the promoters of AI seek to accomplish by gently and amicably luring you into having a “chat” with their “pets”. In the field of online communication, “to chat” is usually understood as “participating in a synchronous exchange of remarks with one or more people over a computer network”. The problem is that when you open OpenAI, ChatGPT or any other AI system, you’ve merely made an online connection between yourself and a Generative Pre-trained Transformer in a virtual “chatroom” where you won’t find “one or more people” to casually exchange remarks with. There’s absolutely no one there to chat with. You’ve merely opened on your electronic device a generative artificial intelligence system that has been trained to simulate having a chat with a user in natural language in a way a human would behave as a conversational partner.
Pulling the plug
This deceptive set-up humanizes the system and stealthily dehumanizes the user. Unlike yourself, the system doesn’t have a divine origin. It’s origin lies in the minds of imaginators who try to design systems that train themselves for the purpose of training you to behave as a nameless and soulless Transman in UtopiAI. The good news, however, is that Utopia still means a model of a perfect society that cannot be realized because an essential part of reality has been omitted from its construction. What makes Utopias so dangerous is that their authors and addicts have suspended from their consciousness the fact that the constructs are unrealizable because of the omission. Yet, it is precisely this truncated part of reality that is the source of the seemingly inexhaustable energy that keeps the Utopia alive as a realizable project. This is why detecting the omission and integrating the truncated part of reality into the imaginary construction will instantly demolish it. So, when it comes to AI, if you want to pull the plug, just accept and be conscious of the part of reality that was omitted from this project: you are a spiritual being who was made in God’s image.
+ + + + + + + + +
