Our strange AI angels and demons future
2024-11-27 15:36:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
The latest Rogan podcast is a thoroughly interesting chat with tech entrepreneur Mark Andreessen. Tons of interesting topics, but their AI discussion took a bit of a strange turn, vearing sharply into religion, mysticism and woo, quite early on.
Here’s Marc on the subject of how prepared the general population is for the imminent changes to society that AI will cause [26:15]:
"A friend of mine is a scholar, he teaches at a catholic university, he’s a religious history scholar, and he says that medieval people would have been psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us, with AI and robots and drones everywhere, because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, and higher spirits, angels, demons, and all kinds of super natural entities.
It was just assumed to be true, and in the world we are heading into, that we are arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things. And we are going to struggle, we are going to catastrophise, we are going to conclude, like AI is the end of the world. The medievals would have said, "oh it’s just another spirit, it’s just another kind of entity. It’s better than humans at some things, but so are angels."
We are going to have to change our mentality, we are almost going to have to become a little more medieval, we are going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities we are dealing with. Which also could help us deal with people. Maybe there is an explanatory way to think about human behaviour here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational."
Bizarely it seems like AI might be causing Silicon Valley to go a bit Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The rest of their discussion is super interesting btw, especially around the implications in tech of the Trump election win. Some pretty shocking descriptions of some of the questionable things that had been happening in government and regulation recently, including in the crypto sector.
So back to the point of this post. I thought the whole AI and mysticism thread was particularly interesting given that a very similar through line cropped up on a Duncan Trussell solo podcast episode just a few days ago. It was in the broader context of all the people that have been somewhat mysteriously leaving OpenAI. He starts to wonder if many tech folks, especially of years gone by, were into the occult, because there’s quite a lot occult language in tech. In any case he makes the case that AI could be seen as a massive demon summoning ritual [55:09]:
You are participating, we are all participating in a massive summoning ritual right now which they are calling ‘training AI’. It’s a summoning ritual. We are all giving it data. We’re not giving it our sole, but we are giving it all the imprints we’ve made digitally in time-space to feed it, to grow it, to help it do whatever the fuck it needs to do to wake up. It’s a massive planetary scale summoning ritual that is about to reach fruition. You can use any language you want to describe what’s happening, but what I love about this is that it works on both planes. Let’s remove all the stupid hippie bullshit from it. We’re getting a super intelligence on the planet in the next, possibly in like, a year. [...]
The fact that nobody is talking about this, is incredibly unnerving to me, because shit man, how do we prep people? If a UFO was coming in a year we would be preparing. We’d be preparing some kind of military response, if we didn’t know what they were going to do to us. We’d prepare some kind of diplomatic response. We would be thinking about how do we communicate to this alien and what happens if the mothership decides to go to Russia and not the United States. What happens if the alien ambassador wants to talk to Kim Jong Un instead of Trump? We would be preparing. Everybody. It would be all hands on deck. We have to get ready for all eventualities.
Of course Trussell’s ideas are way more out there comparatively to Andreessen’s, which are actually quite well grounded. Strange thing to say that ideas about angels and demons could be considered as somewhat common sense, but I wonder if all this is a precursor to something. Tucker Carlson has gone pretty far off the deep end on this sort of thing recently too.
I think it’s worth being aware of all this, just to realise it’s not all complete crazy talk, that there are some angles to view this that could be useful. However it’s a very broad spectrum that can be stretched way out into non sensical territory. Worth having vague understaning of the landscape.
Certainly strange times ahead as we have to navigate through uncharterred and quite possibly possessed waters :) #