Artificial Intelligence: The Proper End of A Cycle
The Ring of Gyges.– The modern world is running a live test version of Glaucon’s brilliant challenge to Socrates in Book II of The Republic. The amoral thrill of being able to violate, invade, and steal everyone’s life, privacy, and property with impunity is now within reach of all of us, and above all, within the legislative reach of every government, and of every entrepreneur rich and pragmatic enough to win governmental support and protection for his Frankenstein fantasies. The combination of technological sociopathy and political greed is now allowing us all to do in broad daylight what Glaucon thought possible only with a mythical ring of invisibility, universalizing motives and behaviors that were viewed as criminal, to say nothing of sinful, for millennia — and providing the convenient social sanction and encouragement to rationalize this criminality and vice as progress, as the road to new modes of consciousness, creativity, pleasure, productivity, and peace to replace the old, natural modes that have been summarily condemned, without time for a twinge of doubt, as obsolete. And due to the perennial enthusiasm of the powerful, namely the irresistible urge to increase their power, along with the comfort-crazed compliance of the mentally addled masses, there is no significant public force, moral or quasi-moral, with the sobriety, let alone the strength, to withstand or push back against this breakneck race to obliterate individual human experience and private life — the bequest of five centuries of civilization — in the name of a mindless material gain sought, or rather passively received, by an undifferentiated ant colony, like a warm blanket accepted with barely a snort and a twitch by a sleeping drunkard.
The Great Replacement.– It now appears that the American bombing of a girls school in Iran during the opening phase of that dead country’s latest ill-fated looting operation was, in the end, the result of the U.S. military granting its final targeting calculations to an artificial intelligence program, rather than even giving human minds the final vetting authority on such calculations, as though decisions about the life and death of hundreds of human beings (or even one, for that matter), ought ever to be left to the “agency” of a soulless machine. (Granted, one would be hard-pressed to find a member of the current U.S. administration or military that could properly be described as anything better than a soulless machine, but we may leave that aside for the moment.)
What a perfect metaphor this catastrophic “mistake,” which is actually the result of deliberately chosen human stupidity, makes for the current and future state of our race in this age of (the falsely named) artificial intelligence! Children at an elementary school — young souls that ought to be feverishly engaged in the process of learning and developing towards a proper adulthood, which is to say a life of purposeful and intelligent engagement with the world, with their society, and with the great human heritage — reduced to a lifeless heap of bodies in a careless instant by the quasi-adult world’s mad rush to cede its own soul, any society worthy of being called human, and all connection to past greatness, to the exigencies of a fake brain expressly designed to replace thought and mystery with factual information and quick answers, to replace longing and curiosity with easy satisfaction and unquestioned consensus, and to replace the hierarchies of being and beauty with artificial (aka false) certainties and the heartless stimulations of prompt-generated wish fulfillment fantasies.
In short, this moment of final civilizational self-annihilation, our “artificial intelligence revolution,” entails nothing less than the deliberate, technology-facilitated obliteration of hundreds of millions of innocent young souls, undertaken on a global scale by various national cadres of power-mad fools, passively enabled by their millions of slavish serfs, scrambling over one another in breathless agitation to establish themselves as the leading force in the mindless destruction of humanity’s future.
