1 Comment

Thank you for the summary of AI in overdrive. Here's a few thoughts that sprang to mind.

I can see the Religion of Technology is in hyperdrive with these guys. Perhaps they would like to define what they mean by 'Progress'. (The same sort of language greeted the advent of the Steam-Engine and the Internal Combustion Engine, and nuclear power {"electricity will be so cheap it won't even be worth billing you for it"). And the benefit is always in the future; just wait a bit longer.

Technical progress? Sure. Technological progress (where technology meets society)? Highly doubtful - poverty, wars, destruction of community & environment continue apace; the 'technological fix' for the previous technological screw-up solves very little, and generally makes things worse.

The old-fashioned word for all this was 'idolatry' - where humans make creations to serve themselves, and then there is a role-reversal and Man ends up serving his creations - engendering fear of their creations in case they 'turn on him'. So much then for the grand project of reducing the fear of an unpredictable Nature - it has merely produced an unpredictable technological milieu instead.

Then there is the very long-standing belief of technological development as an act of transcendence - reversing the effects of 'The Fall' - an act of redemption - and not only getting back the Paradisiacal state where Adam 'gave names to all the animals' (controlled Nature) but the hubris of 'going beyond God' with technology (transhumanism). This is where AI says "I'm the man; I can do this". Really; why?

Another word that the techno-freaks need to define is 'intelligence'. What exactly is 'intelligent' about the power of technology being used build more sophisticated weapons, rape the Earth with massive machinery, and build a surveillance state? Ah yes, of course, these guys are total pyschos. They have an ultra-arrogant anthropocentric mind-set. Have they never heard of the Symbiocene?

Expand full comment