How AI Will Help The Totalitarian Control Freaks To Push Humanity To A Higher State Of Consciousness
Not Kidding - There Is A Silver Lining To All This Madness
The AI Hype Is Deflating
About a year ago I published
In a nutshell, I proposed that despite the hype and the fancy presentations, AI is still nothing more than a potent program that analyzes patterns. All this talk about it being like us, even much better than us, that it would develop “consciousness” and maybe has to be treated like a sentient being (Sam Harris BS) fanned the hype.
Meta’s AI chief just confirmed that it is hype. Maybe it is just a marketing plot to lower the fear and lower public scrutiny, but it sounds reasonable:
The type of artificial intelligence that powers systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini will not be able to reach human levels of intelligence, Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun told the Financial Times […]
He says, that
[…] they are only accurate when they have been given the right kinds of training data […]
In his latest Substack, Jeff Childers, sums up nicely how they work:
Large language models, or LLMs, are explained to work predictively. After absorbing large libraries of books and articles, they string one word after another, apparently calculating, or predicting, based on all the absorbed text, what the next most likely word should be.
Then he poses an interesting question:
Do infants learn just like large language models do? In other words, do baby humans absorb large amounts of spoken text, and then, once ‘trained,’ form their own thoughts and responses somehow predictively?
In my opinion, of course. But there is more to it than that. And this “more” will always give us an edge over machines. It is called “inspiration”.
No Divine Inspirations For AI Robots, Sorry Scientist.
Rupert Spira explains it very well in this YouTube video
If you are not into non-dual terminology, skip the first 3 1/2 min and start at 3:28 min. (Side Note: This video also confirms my no-free-will stance, which I have extensively written about on my Substack.)
Spira asks the rhetorical question. (My comments in brackets)
Is it [The Ego] (Translation: All of our habitual conditioning) just spontaneously having these thoughts?”
And then answers: “Yes and No”. He continues:
It is not completely spontaneous because there is a pattern to Tom’s mind (Referring to the man asking the question) . Tom’s mind has a particular shape.
After giving an example he continues:
So although the source of your thinking is completely free, nevertheless that freedom is channelled through a conditioned collection of thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions.
In other words, our minds and thinking are not free but conditioned. And conditioned minds can be predicted. AI is also conditioned by the text modules given to it. It can only predict, what it has learned and the patterns it has recognized.
Therefore, it is reactive by nature and can only predict the most likely next word and string them together. But that is not creative human thinking.
Rupert continues:
It is also quite possible that infinite awareness (Some call that God’s will), may appear in your mind in a form that is not conditioned by previous conditioning. It is the intervention of a greater intelligence into our finite mind, which is not simply an extension of the past. That is what's called inspiration.
He then offers two examples, problem-solving and sports, where this is applied in everyday life. Conditioned thinking will only bring our past experience to the problem and the solution will only be an extension of known past experiences. Nothing truly new will evolve. That will be AI solutions - incredibly deep and vast collective knowledge of humanity, but only an extension of the known.
Einstein Was Much Smarter Than AI Will Ever Be
If Einstein had only that at his disposal, relativity theory would have never been invented. Einstein made a creative inspirational jump beyond a mere extension of the known. It partly obliterated the known.
Sometimes the old has to die for the new to emerge. That’s how all great discoveries in human history were made - through inspirational genius ideas contrary to the dominant known ideas of the past.
This is the advantage conscious beings will always have over machines. This is the divine aspect that the transhuman developers of AI technology do not acknowledge because they don’t understand it. And if you don’t understand it, you think it is not real, just an irrational belief.
But it is right in front of our noses and so obvious for any person with common sense and without a science degree. (Of course, many people with a science degree have also common sense and can see it)
AI Is A Weak Master, But A Powerful And Obedient Slave
- As It’s Parents Should Be
Every technology is just an innocent tool. It is how it is used, that matters. Ethics are important. AI, used to the benefit of all, can be incredibly useful. But in the wrong hands, AI will be a powerful tool for transhuman surveillance.
The totalitarian control freaks always had some data on us, long before AI. Now, they have more than ever. We transmit them through our devices and government and industry collections. But they are searching for needles in a massive stack of hay. And AI will help them.
They are searching for the few thousand brilliant dissident minds and ideas threatening their power. That’s the needles. They are hidden by trillions of chatter snippets posted by billions of people every day. That’s the haystack. And AI will be a powerful tool to filter out the noise from the signal.
But - and that is the crucial part we have to understand - only if the signal has the shape of a conditioned pattern in line with what they have learned, will they be able to recognize it. If you break that pattern and create a completely new idea, AI will not be able to find it.
If AI had been around in November 1915, all it knew was Newton's physics. Then Einstein published his papers on General Relativity and it would be impossible for the AI of the time, to understand it, assess what it means for physics and predict the future of physics.
If it can only add the next word based on the probability of words previously learned, there will be no words on General Relativity available and therefore nothing to predict.
Suppose there is a brilliant new inspired idea on combating totalitarian systems effectively that is not based on the past known attempts. In that case, AI can’t understand and assess it, and predict what it means for totalitarian systems.
In other words, the creative, inspired human mind will always be ahead of machine learning, no matter how powerful. And I doubt, that infinite consciousness, or God, will ever inspire machines because consciousness is linked to life itself. I doubt dead people are conscious of anything.
And, no matter how much godless transhuman computer scientists love and admire their AI creations, teaching them all the human tricks of listening, looking, speaking and habitual thinking, it will never make them “alive”.
To Escape AI Surveillance, Humanity Needs To Make An
Evolutionary Jump To A Higher Level Of Conscioussness
So, in a divine paradoxical way, the AI-powered transhuman totalitarian control freak will drive humanity in a much-needed spiritual paradigm shift and creative evolutionary jump.
To escape the machine, to escape the Matrix, not unlike Neo, we either have to develop new superpowers or vanish in totalitarian mindless slavery and death. But these new superpowers are not physical. They are spiritual.
And, for new readers, with “spiritual” I don’t mean believing that an imaginary God saves us. Unfortunately, we have to get off our religious arses and do what the prophets told us to do, not pray that they do it for us.
If our habitual way of being and thinking creates repetitive patterns giving us away to the AI search robots, the solutions are obvious. Let’s drop our habitual ways of being and thinking.
How do we drop it?
Know Thyself
By first knowing them, studying them, recognizing them within ourselves - the age-old “Know Thyself”, which has been continuously promoted by the greatest philosophical minds and mystics over the past millennia. As if they tried to warn us and prepare us, but only a fraction heeded their advice.
Like water to fire, this will be the antidote to a conditioned mind. Mystics and some philosophers - people who thoroughly investigated and broke their human conditioning (or karma) - all demonstrated that it is, indeed, possible, to learn a new unpatterned way of living. It is possible and achievable for everyone serious about it. all of them insist. And they provide methods. And it’s free. (Still the best argument for any materialist)
They all lived spontaneously and paradoxically. They still let habitual patterns take care of the basics of life - sleeping, eating, working and so on. But their minds were unassailable to psyops, nudging and propaganda. And that’s all that is needed. Make our minds unassailable by becoming masters of our minds.
There is always a silver lining to everything. For humanity, what is going on now, might be exactly the evolutionary push we need to finally get serious about knowing our minds. We can only control what we know.
People who know and control their minds will get two rewards. They will be immune to totalitarian mind games and free of their own habitual pitfalls. This is superpower one.
And they will be ready for the next step. Find out what is beyond the mind. This is the holy mother of all superpowers.
And that’s when the real magic happens. But first, we need to do the work. Each on our own. Pretty soon. Time is ticking.
AI is the ruler of rule based societies. For the control freaks AI is their satanic godhead. We the living will be forever alive and keeping the law of nature. We will be attacked by AI, as we were attacked by the control freaks, but life wins over the things life constructs.
I agree, and I like this train of thought.
The following is my response in an email family discussion about AI. We were all raised in a scientific family, my father a very respected marine scientist (now passed away), and now my 3 brothers are all engineers of one sort or another (the one who instigated this discussion used to work for DOD in - I think, it was highly classified - AI control for guided weapons systems). And my sister and I became psychologists, myself with a biological science double major.
If I had a substack, I would probably make this into my own article... but I am happy to add it to the discussion here!
It's probably a mistake - one that leads to spurious argument - to consider "intelligence" as a single cohesive concept, or even as a spectrum. And while it makes sense to think of "intelligence" as multi-factorial, I think it is also limiting to lump all higher human functions as "intelligence".
As we've discussed before, psychologists are still battling about what intelligence actually is... but let's change the framework of discussion a bit.
We're getting into a more mystical realm at this point, and you are all perfectly free to disagree with me - but one thing you will not be able to do is to mount a successful argument about it (either for or against) because we can only discuss the levels/functions/processes beyond the rational by conceptualising them with language - which as we have more or less agreed, is more or less equivalent to thinking - and this is necessarily limited.
(I apologise in advance if this sounds as though I am invoking some sort of superior awareness to cap the discussion - that is not my intention - and I'm happy to hear any responses, just that I know that I won't be able to be convincing on a rational level, because this is the realm where we encounter our own frameworks of knowing.)
Was it Plato who used the analogy of trying to understand 3 dimensions, if you live in a 2 dimensional world? Anyway, it is a good analogy.
Not that people haven't tried - there are whole bodies of knowledge, including many, many words, about this: the entire field of philosophy. And we have one sub-discipline, epistemology, which is the study of knowledge itself.
More successfully, there are the Zen stories and koans - the fingers pointing to the Moon. These are intended to take you past the finger, past the words and intellectual concepts, to perceive the Moon itself.
Anyway, I am a gnostic, meaning that I believe in gnosis: direct knowing.
Most thinking, even for the most intelligent among us, is indeed just juggling ideas around, "memory bites" to use (my brother's) phrase - but every so often, for some of us (and I am sure this applies to all of you reading this) we get a burst of inspiration.
Where does it come from?
There is a concept called the "noosphere", a sort of soup of ideas floating around in the ether, that people tap into. This is used to explain the fact that often in scientific discovery, you get 2 people coming up with the same idea at around the same time.
(Still of course this doesn't explain where the ideas come from... and the concept of noosphere is still not well formulated, and in the end, really only a model.)
I don't believe we can adequately think about thinking, using our rational (thinking) faculties... we need to posit a plane or function beyond rational thinking. And that is what (my sister) is referring to when she speaks of Consciousness and Self-awareness.
The technology to explore this is not secret - it is available to anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort to meditate.
But it is not knowable through verbal discussion. Or thinking.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud rational thought, I celebrate it, and agree with (my brother) that it would be better if more people could practice it!
Back to AI, creativity, consciousness...
Rather than engage in the bootstrap exercise of trying to discuss consciousness, let's think about Life.
The standard (scientific) theory of how life began postulates a sort of molecular soup, getting more and more complex through random interactions, until one day one of these complex entities achieves the state of a living being, and can reproduce, reverse entropy, etc.
But IMO this is just like the theory that a monkey sitting at a typewriter could one day produce one of Shakespeare's plays. Yes, in theory (probability theory) it is possible... but nobody ever really thinks this is actually how it happened.
Anyway, as a student of the biological sciences, I am continually amazed by the numinosity of life and the processes of life - how amazing it is to have this body, with all its complexity, being able to move and sense the environment and to keep powering away for 71 years (even with a bit of dysfunction, that is pretty amazing!)
And sure, scientists keep saying they are just a step or 2 away from creating life in the lab - but that step is the vital one, and I doubt that it will ever happen. (But I am open to evidence, if it ever comes!)
My hip implant is an amazing piece of technology - but it can't ever compete with the original.
Similarly, I do not think a machine will ever be capable of creative thought - that spark of inspiration that is a bit beyond what we can achieve through rational thought.
I can hear you all thinking "But that is a different thing..."
Maybe it is.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
But I think it does matter... I think that quantum leap, between non-living and living, between pedestrian thinking and creative inspired thought, is extremely important.
And I think that we need to explore the part of us that is beyond our 5 senses and our brain function - or else we will indeed find that AI is taking over from us, and perhaps in a way that is not conducive to our wellbeing or even our survival as a species.