Musings on Artificial Intelligence
“Artificial Intelligence” is the purest of lies, with each of the words of which the phrase is comprised denoting a falsehood as complete as is the phrase taken as a whole. For what it euphemizes as artifice is merely theft; and what it aggrandizes as a form of intelligence is simply an extremely efficient consensus-generating algorithm, one made possible only, and entirely, by means of the aforementioned theft. AI is in this way a perfect product and projection of the progressive mind, the same mind that has inured the modern world to the idea that the State is the greatest and most appropriate source of money, benefits, and even rights for its population, all of which beneficence depends entirely on the unlimited violation, in principle and in practice, of the time-honored and civilization-buttressing notions of property, family, and spiritual maturation.
Although what we have been trained to call “artificial intelligence” is in reality nothing of the kind, one thing is certain: Wherever, and to the extent that, this technology is allowed to permeate human life, it is reducing natural intelligence, and can only continue to do so. The trajectory, followed to its logical conclusion: a society operating entirely on consensus-generating algorithms grounded in stolen and rehashed intellectual achievement (i.e., plagiarism), while bereft of all traces of genuine human intellectual activity.
Apart from the obvious deterioration of human thinking wrought by increasing reliance on AI — and what is even more fundamentally catastrophic, the evaporation of the natural desire to think that the ancients identified as the essential human motivation, the soul’s definitive goal-directedness — there is the inexorable, and already readily apparent, moral decay engendered by our accelerating accommodations to the convenience and efficiency of displacing human intellect and effort with the products of “borrowed” and computer-regurgitated easy answers. Formal education is, as we speak, in the process of being untethered forever from the vectors of character formation and the promotion and admiration of the thoughtful and serious, as it becomes instead advanced modernity’s primary, secondary, and tertiary purveyor, and winking pitchman, of incentivized dishonesty, self-seeking laziness, and a win-at-all-costs amorality about every perceived opportunity for material advantage that would formerly have been immediately recognizable as a budding sociopathy, before it became universalized, and thus normalized, by society’s cowardly submission to the “irreversible inevitability” of progress.
