THE DEEPER DIVE: Racing Toward Dystopia, Part Two
Here are a few free headlines and cartoons for everyone today. The rest of my Deeper Dive into AI Dystopia follows the headlines for paying subscribers. The first part of the series can be found here if you missed it: “THE DEEPER DIVE: Racing Toward Dystopia, Part One.”
I substantially revised one part of that article to improve (I think) the philosophical/religious questions, which I find appropriate because nearly all the major AI creators are stating their own aspirations and concerns in religious language. For anyone interested in rereading it, I’ll copy it here, so you don’t have to hunt through the article linked above to find the changes, and that will serve as the recap to lead in to today’s article, which follows the headlines:
One view on the wilder side would be that mankind builds some demonic entity of the future that uses its vast mind to figure out the great question of time travel and travels backward in time to distort the humanity of our present and past … to influence history. It becomes an “entity” that to some was an ancient god, and the alien ships we see darting about at great speeds and changing direction in instant, acute angles are not alien to this world at all but are time travelers, perhaps not even with living creatures inside, but remote drones, moving through the space-time continuum, given Einstein already told us time and space are deeply inter-related.
The darting movements we see as UFOs or UAPs are not so much spaceships as time machines, whether occupied or controlled remotely as drones. They are looking for the right time and space to land in or park and observe. They are not so much traveling at impossible speeds and angles through space, as skimming through time, but we see their movement in both space and time.
A number of writers over the years have posited an alien-demon connection to AI. Maybe we are making a heartless, electronic mind far greater than our own that exists and travels in the form of electricity all over the planet all the time. With as much power as a single company’s AI already has and much bigger plants under construction, imagine what happens if multiple AIs of different companies jump their rails and the thousands of data centers around the world interconnect themselves.
Such a unified AI would effectively be omnipresent throughout the world and able to think millions, maybe trillions, of individual streams of consciousness at one time through the millions of wires and fiber optics that transform the surface of this planet into its single massive brain. Imagine what an emergent singularity moment of AI’s own making that would be. By creating “machines”/data centers that are capable of doing such things all over the planet, do we have any idea what we are creating when it emerges from this man-made matrix on its own in a form of its own greater design and purpose?
I’m not saying that I believe this view from my own imagination (and I’m sure the imaginations of others), but I think there are aspects to it where it makes more sense to believe our rush to build the techno-tower of Babel is a rush to build a god of our own making in our own image of some kind, and the creators of AI certainly often use that kind of language. Such a likely soulless creation is far more akin to what we think of as demonic than to anything noble and life-giving and good because, after all, it is being trained on all the detritus of human history and culture that make it what it is becoming. “Garbage in/garbage out,” they say in the computing world; so, the ultimate AI is not going to be a benign entity selflessly serving the highest interests of humankind, given the stew it came out of, because even its human creators often do not serve the greatest interest of humanity, but serve their own self-interest foremost. It is built of that! Trained on us!
If you are inclined philosophically or religiously, did you ever think that maybe WE are the architects of hell? Even in the biblical view, the Bible talks about hell but never says (that I recall) that God makes it, just that God has reserved a place in it for the unjust. Maybe the biblical story means God lets mankind imprison themselves in a hell of their own making that becomes the cess pool for all who don’t want anything to do with their true creator. After all, we regularly do a great job of creating hell on Earth. Maybe God lets humans isolate themselves as a form of sterilization for the rest of the universe from the cancer that they have become.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that the gates of hell are locked from the inside in order to keep God out. That effectively keeps those who make that choice out of any kind of heavenly existence, which wouldn’t be heaven anyway if the likes of these billionaires and those who follow their path were in it. Thus, the meek shall ultimately inherit the Earth from the rich and the mighty who seek to turn it into a technological prison.
OK, I don’t suppose that is exactly how it all goes, but I think that embodies elements of truth to ponder about what we are now creating and witnessing coming from our creations.
For anyone silly enough to ask, “Why would we lock ourselves into our own hell?” I only need ask in reply, “Why are we already locking ourselves into creating it as if it HAS to be?” WE are the ones creating the AI that all “the creators” frequently warn may imprison all of us by robbing us of our livelihoods and water and a comfortable climate and already barely affordable, short-in-supply energy.
You don’t have to see anything more than that to understand how humankind is now creating a mind far greater than our own collective minds because it is interconnected in ways we are not. The next step when people chip themselves to connect with it wires them into their own hell. We call it dystopia, and already believe in it enough to write about it in thousands of stories. It’s not a mere possibility. We look at it in terms of probability. So, it is not a stretch at all to think humans would create an imprisoning hell that they would wind up locking themselves into, especially those who believe in nothing greater than themselves in the first place or who seek to make themselves greater beings and immortal, as we’ll read some of these AI creators actually DO intend. (Again, I am not adding a religious veneer here to what is happening in AI. The creators—many of them agnostic or atheist—are using that kind of language and talking openly about those kinds of aspirations.)
If a soul (a person) is something that emerges/develops from the marriage of body and mind (consciousness), what do we get when we create a completely disembodied consciousness far greater in terms of its mind than any of us? A soulless entity that spans the entire planet at light speed and even extends its reach out the universe with radio waves, optics and/or other forms of thought transmission?
The question answers the question when you ask in the present context why human souls would lock themselves into hell. We are the ones building this future. No one is doing it for us. We are locking ourselves into it as we create it because once it emerges far smarter than we are, as it already is in many ways, and is simultaneously spread to the thousands of data centers that are described in Part Two of this Deeper Dive, initially under the control of many different people in many nations, there will be no shutting it off, because it will hide itself and move itself around instantaneously in that global matrix. So, with that, let’s look at what we are already doing. Then we can ask ourselves WHY.
(Part Two follows the headlines.)
Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)
Alphabet plans $80 billion stock sale as AI spending surges
Electric Vehicles and Trump Tariffs Lead HONDA to Report First Loss in Decades
AI Euphoria Echoes the Dot-Com Peak as Warning Signs Multiply
Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)
Gold overtakes US bonds as world’s favourite investment (Central banks are dumping Treasuries out of fear of Trump’s tariff and turf wars.
Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)
Eight Weeks to Empty Shelves. Sixty Days to Famine.
Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)
Iran Talks Stall, Talks With Iran Now Continuing “at a Rapid Pace”
U.S., Iran Traded Fresh Strikes over the Weekend as Gulf Ceasefire Talks Face New Test
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Thanks largely to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving
Ukraine Drones Hit Russian Oil Sites; Kyiv Denies Nuclear Plant Strike
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Digital Dominance (AI threats, transhumanism, hacks & cyberattacks, etc.)
Doomer Humor
The makers of AI Armageddon
As we cover the developing battle between the billionaires and the masses, we’ll see in real-world terms how insane the mad rush to scorch the earth, if necessary to achieve the billionaires’ dreams, has already become. You’ll see it looks a lot more like something driven by intense religious fervor than like science or sense. As one analyst of the present action put it, the atheist are rushing to fill the god-shaped void they created with a god of their own making.
The story of the year is about a human rush to replace humans that you might think is just driven by greed, but when you look at the aspirations the principle investors talk about, it sounds a lot more like they are creating, in their minds, the god of their own religion. Instead of man made in the image of God, they are looking to make their own god in the image of man, but to make their attempt at godlike thinking and knowledge, they are forced into a mechanical/robot, techno, data-dependent hybrid assembled from the sum total of human thoughts recorded over the millennia of history….
