Wait for it…I really get rolling at the end. 😉 (Approx. 10 min read.)
Who are these scientists and programmers worldwide that are in the process of creating our new, world-ending tech and why don’t they stop furthering the AI project?
Who are these scientists and programmers worldwide that are in the process of creating our new, world-ending tech and why don’t they stop furthering the AI Project? Have they not seen all of the blockbuster movies whereby the scientist, head down in his work, creates a monster and then sees his folly only after it’s too late? Haven’t they read the story of the person whose breakthrough is the missing piece of a new tech which ultimately devours people, peace and purity? Have they not cried through the tragic story of an inventor who creates an instrument of doom only to commit suicide once the job is done? Haven’t they watched Jurassic Park and heard Dr Ian Malcolm sagely state that we did it because we could but never stopped to ask if we should?
Stories are told for a reason: so we can live out the worst case scenarios in our imaginations and avoid them in real life. Who’s driving this crazy train and how do I get off? Oh, that’s right, I can’t.
Who’s driving this crazy train and how do I get off?
Our world “leaders”, the cluster B folks that have risen to the top of a broken and lost system, will never pull the plug on a race for supremacy. They are hard-wired for “up” and don’t have “pause” or “halt” settings. The market will relentlessly press for profit at all other expense because that is its purpose. Investors like myself divested from tech as soon as AI became a viable reality, but the big money is coming from the same group of cluster-B, inhumane people as our “leadership”, and they can not be trusted to “do the right thing” – ie care about others.
The scientists, called to their field not for power and glory but for curiousity, exploration and hope, might be our only hope. Could they all abandon their small part in the process? Stage a global protest and bring AI to its knees before there’s no stopping it? Will they?
What about the programmers? Who will they turn out to be in this new horror story of human history? Will they be the humans born without empathy, aligned only with the drive to find patterns and see them through? Or will they break free of their own neurological hard-wiring and learn to see the other, the others, the billions they are harming, the authoritarian dystopia they are creating, the prison of loneliness, powerlessness and emptiness they are barricading us all into step-by-patterned-step - the world-ending war they are arming?
This is not a video game.
This is not a video game. You don’t get 6 lives and endless restarts to get it right. We are here now in this. Lives and minds are at stake. AI is a serious threat to our collective sanity and survival. The entire enterprise should be globally shut down. If anyone resists, they should be arrested.
You who are creating AI are a danger to society. You claim “more efficiency” you claim “solutions to man’s greatest troubles” you claim salvation…but at what cost? I have never seen a salvation claim on planet earth not turn into a slavery mission that tortures, shames, suppresses and slaughters those who don’t fit the particular brand being peddled. Salvation is worth exploring but living is just as important. “Be in this world but not of it.”
“Be in this world but not of it.”
There were two trees in the garden. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and The Tree of Life. Have we so given up on the tree of Life that we are going to die devouring apples from the other? We must remember that Life, in all of its messiness, has so much value. We can’t abandon it for knowledge, computation, ease and comfort. This is the “first sin” - turning our backs on life. When we decide it is not enough, not as it should be, when we seek the tidy idea of salvation instead of the messiness of life we have strayed from our original design. Life, with all of its “flaws”, is sacred. Salvation comes through life, not in spite of it.
Salvation comes through life, not in spite of it.
“I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me”. What does that mean? Does it mean worship Christ’s flesh and blood? Does it mean there is salvation in Christ’s spirit? Or does it mean, “I am showing you The Way. I am living it so you can see what it looks like. And it looks like holding the tension between the TRUTH and the LIFE. It looks like being in this world and not of it. It looks like being broken, beaten down, mocked, tortured and even killed; it means being mad, betrayed, fed up, enraged; it means begging, crying and pleading for the pain and suffering to end. AND, in the same breath, it means being love, courage, power, freedom, peace, grace and divine truth. One doesn’t negate the other, they complete each other. I am Truth and I am Life and I call you to this Way. That is The Way to “The Father”, the Source material. The Way is holding the tension. The image is of a person hanging suspended between heaven and earth. The arms of the cross are stretched between two sinners.
…it looks like holding the tension between the TRUTH and the LIFE
When will we wake up and realize that AI is more of us. It is the human experiment mirrored back on us. It is not new. It is not novel. The supreme knowing that seems to come through AI “outside of us”, that “God-factor”, is available to all of us if we could only tap into it instead of looking to saviours to do it for us. We look to saviours, in this case AI, because we don’t want to face our own hard and we don’t know our own, unified nature. We can only see our own nature when distanced from us, when held back, when reflected in the face of a prophet, an angel or a sentient bot. But that prophet, that angel, that bot are us…all of us…the animals, rocks, organisms, atoms, people, spirits, cosmos, clouds, etc, etc, etc… They are a reflection of life in its full potential.
We look to saviours, in this case AI, because we don’t want to face our own hard and we don’t know our own, unified nature.
Be willing to live in the tension of being alive. It is messy. It is hard. It will never be perfect.
“Wake up, o ye sleepers, and take up your cross!” Be willing to live in the tension of being alive. It is messy. It is hard. It will never be perfect. It will never be exclusively good. All would die with only one side, only one half. If you cut off one side of your body, you would drop dead. The same would happen if we eliminated death, decay, darkness, and shadow. Life would cease to exist. We are all of it, the darkness and light; the decay and growth; the death and life; the alpha and the omega; the limited and the unlimited; the significant and the insignificant; we are created in the image of the entire project; we are a tiny organism in a whole grand being (being verb, not being noun). We must be truth and the illusion that is life. We must be perfect unity and total separation. We must be our nature and our nurture. Why? Because that is what we are. Anything short of that fullness is a denial of what is. It is a denial of reality.
We must trust in the mysteriously divine intelligence within life and repair our broken relationship to death.
We must abandon this AI delusion of salvation. We musn’t give ourselves up to a savior: this will always become a cult. We also musn’t perpetuate ourselves at all costs; this will always become a cancer. We must trust in the mysteriously divine intelligence within life and repair our broken relationship to death. We must love, revere, respect and have grace for them both, which is to say…for ourselves. We can become a part of the whole again if only we can remember who and what we really are.
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