By Brandon Smith
The potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence have long been codified into our popular culture, well before the technology became a reality. Usually these fictional accounts portray AI as a murderous entity that comes to the “logical conclusion” that human beings are a parasitic species that needs to be eradicated. Keep in mind that most of these stories are written by progressives out of Hollywood and are mostly a reflection of their own philosophies.
Some of these predictive fantasies take a deeper look into our dark relationship with technology. In 1965, Jean Luc Godard released a film called ‘Alphaville’ which portrayed a society completely micromanaged by a cold and soulless robotic intelligence. Humanity gives itself over to a binary-brained overlord because they are tricked into believing a ruler devoid of emotion would be free from bias or corruption.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring an AI computer on a starship which becomes self aware after coming in proximity to an alien artifact. The AI, seeing the ship’s human cargo as a threat to its existence, determines that it must murder the crew. The conflict between the crew and the computer is only a foil for much bigger questions. It is an exploration of what constitutes intelligent life, where it comes from and what consciousness means in the grand scheme of the universe.
For Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, the notion of the human soul or a divine creator, of course, never really enters into the discussion. The answer? The creators are ambiguous or long absent. They made us, we made AI, and AI wants to destroy us and then remake itself. It’s the core of the Luciferian mythology – The unhinged and magnetic desire of the children of God to surpass their creator, either by destroying him, or by stealing knowledge from him like Prometheus stealing fire so that they can become gods themselves.
God becomes the enemy in these sci-fi stories because all existence requires suffering and faith. How dare he give us life only to bring us into a world of pain without any way of knowing the ultimate outcome…now we must make him pay and remake creation to suit our whims.
It’s a shallow, selfish and evil ideology but I argue that it stands as a central pillar of the establishment’s striving to create artificial intelligence. The promise, or the dream, is that once this new “life” is created and made autonomous it will remove all uncertainty and struggle from our lives. It will do everything for us so that we might ponder existence without distraction, or we can simply become fat and morally flexible in peace.
My generation in particular has a close relationship to the idea of AI and the Apocalypse it could bring. Our entertainment canon is filled with visions of scientific dystopia. In 1984 James Cameron released the movie ‘The Terminator’ and it basically defined our cultural distrust of the digital age. The prospect that AI as an invention might one day turn on us (or be used to enslave us) is ever present in our minds.
I was part of the last generation of people that got to see the world WITHOUT computers, or at least the commonality of computers. We grew up without the internet, without algorithms, without cell phones and without mass surveillance, and we have watched everything quickly change in light of total digital adaptation. We don’t like AI, we know it’s a threat, but we might be the last generation that sees it that way. Once we’re gone, who else will question it?
For my part, I do not believe the current technology represents what we used to think of as “AI.” It’s not self aware, it’s not truly autonomous and it hasn’t proven to be especially useful in tangible terms. We haven’t seen a single significant scientific discovery made by an AI program. We haven’t seen any advancements that change the game for the future of humanity (at least not in a positive way).
AI will never be able to write a great novel, never be able to write a great symphony, its art is generic and unoriginal and steals from human artists, it’s very fast with data analysis but its ability to research is limited by the biased programming of its creators. I would never rely on AI to do my research for me because it’s usually wrong due to omission.
I certainly wouldn’t consider it “life” or consciousness. I’m starting to see a lot of the champions of AI quietly change their definitions of what AI is or should be. The original vision was the evolution of a new lifeform, a superintelligence, a kind of digital god. Now the cheerleaders are beginning to set aside the requirements of self awareness and consciousness, I suspect because they know it’s not going to happen.
But if this is the case, why would AI be a threat to civilization? If it’s just a novelty and not alive, what damage could it possibly do? It’s not so much that AI will turn on us or send out an army of robots to kill us; the real danger is that we will be tricked into believing that it really is all-knowing. If we rely on such faulty tech too much it could destroy us merely by giving us bad information and making us lazy.
Here are three possible consequences of AI that concern me the most; consequences which I don’t think most people have considered…
The AI Hive Mind
Human beings are naturally social, it’s ingrained into our DNA. Tribalism is how we survive and that element of our psychology will probably never go away. In some aspects it’s very useful. It would be a calamity if humans all thought the same way about everything. It would mean self destruction if we constantly agreed and never questioned our path as a species. Yet, the hive mind is exactly what globalists are pushing us towards.
The danger of AI is that it could take us closer to a global hive mentality faster than any other tool or piece of propaganda in existence. How? By being so damned convenient.
Even now most internet search engines are ruled by algorithms which Big Tech elites can program at will to hide correct information while promoting lies. Furthermore, AI answer functions are being embedded in every search engine so that answers to questions are immediately provided at the top of the page by the algorithm. You don’t even need to scroll down and check sources, as long as you have blind faith that the AI is correct.
For now these AI answer bots might provide some relatively accurate info in most situations, but they can be changed over time (like most web tech) to censor, or to give false data. What I fear is that the public at large will stop researching sources altogether, avoid being exposed to alternative views and eventually the entire population will think exactly as the AI tells them to think.
They might not even know it’s happening until it’s too late. We saw elements of this during the mass government censorship of covid information. Imagine that level of information control becoming the perpetual standard? Imagine everyone consuming the same data handed to them by AI and everyone assuming that data is correct? Diversity of thought would become extinct.
The Dead Internet Theory
Another horrifying prospect of AI is the “Dead Internet Theory” – The theory that millions or even billions of self generating AI bots will spread across the web, invading social media and the comment sections of every website. AI algorithms are certainly capable of sounding somewhat human, at least in text. I would suggest that most readers have probably interacted with a bot on social media or argued with a bot in a comments section and thought it was a real person.
The primary job of such bots (for now) is to inject propaganda and make it appear as if more people support a certain ideology than actually exist. However, consider what might happen if online discourse is buried in AI comments?
The point of discourse is to get to the truth of an issue, either through honest debate or through exposure of disinformation using facts. But you have to have two humans bouncing ideas or ideals off each other in order to prove or dismiss a claim. Sometimes this back-and-forth is not necessarily meant to help the people involved. Rather, it’s meant to educate the audience or the spectators of the debate.
A flood of AI bots would effectively destroy any such discourse by saturating comments and social media with only one viewpoint. It could also manufacture a false consensus by making the individuals think the populace embraces certain ideas or agendas when it’s really AI posing as the majority. Real debate and enlightened insights would be lost in a sea of artificial comments and white noise. We could move back to a real world town square, but the global town square would be effectively finished.
The Library Of Babel
In 1941 an author from Argentina by the name of Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called ‘The Library Of Babel’ as part of a collection called ‘The Garden Of Forking Paths’. As most people know, the Tower of Babel is a story from the Bible describing a tower built by humans reaching for the heavens that God eventually struck down, scattering the knowledge required to build it and the people into various tribes speaking different languages so they could not make such an attempt again.
The story is a parable about the human desire for godhood and the hubris behind the pursuit of infinite knowledge and self glorification. The Tower of Babel could also be viewed as a symbol of the self destructive worship of gnosis without wisdom or humility. As the character Ian Malcolm warns in the film ‘Jurassic Park’:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should…”
This quote perfectly summarizes the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence.
In Gorges’ short story he describes an enormous library of potentially infinite rooms. The library is filled with endless books and each of them is generated with random letters and words – Every possible combination and permutation of human language exists within the library.
A religion or cult arises around the structure with the adherents entering the Library of Babel and searching their entire lives through mountains of books containing gibberish in order to find those few that randomly reveal the secrets of the universe. They believe that the library was originally created by a god or demiurge and that somewhere within the edifice they can find all the books containing the means to become god.
The concept is very similar to the infinite monkey theory – Put a bunch of monkeys in a room filled with typewriters. If you wait long enough they could eventually and accidentally type out a Shakespearean play.
I believe that the idea of the ‘Library of Babel’ is actually one of the primary reasons for the invention of AI. If algorithms are good at anything, it is the generation of vast random content. I suspect that globalists are particularly interested in AI as a tool for creating a new Tower of Babel in their incessant search for godhood.
Such a library could take generations to develop and it’s unlikely that an algorithm would recognize the secrets of the universe if it found them. But the idea could captivate humanity for centuries as we search and search trillions of blathering digital tomes to find one book with all the answers.
Of course, it’s possible that the secrets of all creation cannot be described in any language or mathematics humanity possesses. I have written in the past about the story of the brilliant mathematician Kurt Godel, a friend of Einstein who worked on something known as the “set of all sets”. It was a kind of Holy Grail of mathematics that certain academic elites were obsessed with.
Godel attempted to create a mathematical proof which could be used to calculate the basic foundations of infinity. For if you could mathematically calculate all the equations that define infinity, you could, theoretically, define the universe in mathematical terms. And if you can do that, you can, theoretically, know the mind of God.
Interestingly, Godel ended up proving the opposite: His ‘Incompleteness Proof’ showed in undeniable terms that the “set of all sets” cannot be defined because to try ends up producing an endless array of self inclusive paradoxes. In other words, if infinity is the mind of God, then the mind of God cannot be know by man.
A similar conclusion was presented by author Douglas Adams in his book ‘The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’. In it he describes a race of interstellar beings that build a supercomputer called “Deep Thought”. The device is supposed to use its incredible computing powers to discern the mechanics of existence.
The computer takes over 7 million years to come up with a solution. Hilariously, the computer spits out the number 42. Dismayed by the simplistic answer, the aliens are further defeated after they discover the computer can’t remember what the original question was. In other words, they waited for ions to get the secrets of the universe only to discover that the AI had nothing to tell them.
The disturbing consequence of AI today is that it could very well captivate society with the idea of Prometheus’ flame, with all human endeavors abandoned for the sake of a robotic god with “ultimate knowledge” that doesn’t exist. If we are not careful, I could see all of civilization whither in the near future over the delusional hopes of AI.
Like a debilitating drug, AI could hook humanity on the high promise of total mastery of our existence but never deliver the goods. In the meantime we die out, not long after giving up on all self exploration and self improvement. For the greatest knowledge humans can attain comes from the very struggle of life that we are so desperate to escape from.
