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I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
In reading your post and contemplating it, I realized that a very likely response that humans would have to a significantly super-humanly intelligent AI is to worship it as a god. I suppose this is old hat. There must be hundreds of old sci-fi stories with this premise. But I used to find this premise hokey, whereas now it actually seems pretty plausible. And it is especially plausible if the AI is super-humanly charming as well as being super-humanly intelligent in a scientific way. And why wouldn't it be super-humanly charming? This AI would combine in one being an intelligence that is beyond any of humanity's geniuses and the charisma of a pop megacelebrity like Elvis or Michael Jackson, or a politician like Hitler, but on steroids. The likely human reaction to such a being is not just fawning support, such as Obama gets from Democrats or Trump from Republicans, it would probably be something more like religious awe.
Some might object that humans would not feel such an awe because they would be aware that the machine intelligence was a human creation. But I am not convinced by that. Humans are capable of worshipping Jesus even though Jesus was born from a human woman. It would be easy for future humans to imagine that the super-humanly intelligent AI was actually some sort of being from beyond the metal, some kind of essence that the universe suddenly decided to activate in that metal like Jesus becoming incarnate in a human body.
Granted, the AI wouldn't have a human body, unlike say Michael Jackson, who could get worshipped as a demi-god off the power of his accomplishments and raw charisma by standing still and turning his head occasionally, and who still has the largest online defense force of any modern celebrity, one that includes thousands of people who worship him and constantly argue online against the idea that he was a pedophile. But it would have so many other advantages that I'm not sure the lack of a human body would matter. For all I know, it might even help. Humans have never yet in their history, unless you credit stories about gods or aliens, been exposed to an intelligence that is genuinely significantly super-human.
As long as I'm talking about Michael Jackson, I might as well mention that he was so beloved and worshiped that he could release a music video that is basically fascist propaganda and get away with it. Check it out, the HIStory Teaser is both hilarious and epic. Even if it was meant to be satirical, it is still probably the best fascist music video that has been made in the West since Leni Riefenstahl, or maybe parts of the Pink Floyd The Wall movie.
So, my church doesn't have an official position on this, but the unofficial one I've seen in a lot of places is that if 'true' GAI happens it'll be used as a puppet by demons.
This makes sense on a secular level if we translate demons to something like Scott's take on Moloch. Naturally-emergent suboptimal (or downright deleterious) local minima / pernicious local attractors in the possibility space of ways-of-being, of niches.
But I don't see why it needs to be either/or.
I am not a member of any organized religion, but I think that your post nails something very important.
And is pragmatic intelligence really anything other than an ability to objectively survey the field, especially when that means being able to see past the local maximum to a higher one?
But though I agree with you at least in that there is a similarity between the religious notion of a demon and the possible darkness of AI, I am not convinced that the argument makes sense unless I accept your metaphysical perspectives. From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?
I suppose the non-secular, more optimistic argument would hold that humans have some kind of extra sauce, something that naturally makes them less demonic, maybe more altruistic, than an AI following pure gradient descent on matrix math would have. But what is the evidence that this is true?
And I say this as someone who thinks that consciousness might be beyond the ability of humans to ever understand. But when it comes to ordered/demonic, I'm not sure why the AI would tend to be more demonic, unless I buy into some kind of metaphysics that I see no reason to buy into so far at least.
Darwin. The human brain, and its various chordate forerunners, is the product of hundreds of millions of years of ruthless selection forces; who knows how many vulnerabilities and failure modes both gross and subtle have been winnowed out over the aeons?
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