A day will come when AI will mean abominable intelligence, not artificial intelligence. They will be literal abominations: decision-makers who decide nothing, reflections pretending to be people, choosers who never choose different than their programming.
No souls… because no bodies.
Watching the latest “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” substitute for a human being, quickly become the latest hotness among the proles and even the dissidents, indicates there’s more to the appeal of AI than loyal henchmen for Satan’s ticket-takers. As is my wont, I got angry about it, then I got curious. Angry because people are excited for, yet again, a solution in search of a problem, specifically the problem of peoples’ continued existence, then curious because…
I won’t even try to justify it, but I possess a quiet little belief, that if I figure out what is happening fast enough, well enough, then I’ll be spared what is coming because my moral education will be complete. Famine and labor camps are for the slow class… at least, that’s how it should be. So, I try to understand when Clown World rears its ugly head.
Why are people excited about AI? Why do they look everywhere for it, tell endless stories about it, and herald the Singularity with the religious fervor of a cult anticipating the next comet?
Possibilities whirl through my mind:
- Their daily lives are burdened to the point of desperation for help.
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“We shall be as gods!” Sentient AI would be a counterfeit Creation Day Six.
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Related to #2, a potential replacement for rebellious wives. Behold! Sex dolls that will appreciate you AND clone you!
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Death cult. People really do think that life will be better when humans are gone.
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Virtue-signaling to the plutocrats. I once read an article on Elon Musk groupies; it was horrifying.
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Media control has reached the point that people don’t seek out stuff that THEY want to get excited about. People just want to emote and when given the ‘correct’ option to emote for, they don’t think once.
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Laziness. Universal Basic income. Once AI is up & running, the socialist dream (of the proles) of an endlessly exploitable workforce will be realized. Never mind that the socialist dream (of the Elites) is exterminating the proles.
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People hate other people. While I can sympathize with this point of view post-Plandemic, I don’t WANT to hate people. I’d love to have some more friends in my life, common interests with my neighbors (to say nothing of common language) and of all the gushing promises I’ve heard about AIs, “they’ll make good company” has not been one of them.
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Bread and circuses. AI will make life more convenient, therefore it must be adopted as swiftly as possible.
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People want to be followers, not leaders, and hope that AI will be a leader they can trust. Unlike Christ Jesus?
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Envy. People see AI as their idealized selves… perfect obedience, no capacity for suffering, no pleasure, no pain, just success on demand. A perfected intellect, capable of understanding everything yet untroubled by human needs and questions of morality…
BAM.
The AI is the Platonic ideal of the Hollow Soul. An idea I’ve been developing during my ongoing studies of Totalism. The Hive drone, the SJW, the bugman, the virtue signaler, the collaborator… their souls are backwards.
Human behavior is meant to be a function of the human soul. Luke 6:45 “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Or as a secular wise man put it, “You will not rise to the occasion. You will fall back on your training.”
And that makes sense. What you think about becomes what you talk about. What you train for, becomes what you do. You decide, you act upon your decision, and slowly over time, you become what you decided.
Interfering in this process is our flesh. It has appetites and opinions of its own, sometimes good and sometimes bad. A major part of Christian sanctification (the process of adopting Christ-likeness after forgiveness is secured, aka justification) is learning to take control of our bodily desires and subordinate them to who we choose to be.
Totalism has the goal of obliterating the soul. Whatever is inside you that makes you you, Totalism wants it burned out and replaced with a microchip. But neither the Totalist nor the devil himself, can access your soul directly; he can only reach you via your body.
Some people regard the body as a prison for the soul, because we cannot escape our bodies and can perceive only the material world. I regard the body as a fortress for the soul; we cannot escape our bodies short of death, this is true, but neither can the spiritual world force its way inside.
(Excepting extraordinary circumstances, of course.)
Thus, the devil’s only chance to get at our souls is by manipulating our bodies, and that only by third-party human servants.
Thus, Totalism is focused entirely upon control of the human body. Social pressures of peer pressure and isolation. Physical pressures of starvation and torture. Mental pressures of sleep deprivation and drug injection. But never spiritual pressures; they would give the game away.
Summarizing the last century of Totalism’s results are two points.
- Everybody breaks. With enough pressure, applied for enough time, anybody can be made to say and do literally anything.
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It doesn’t stick. When the pressures are lifted, the subject returns to his previous behaviors. Would I deny Christ after five days of starvation and sleep deprivation while tripping on LSD? Very possibly. But would I mean it after I recovered? Obviously not.
It doesn’t stick even on animals. The Soviet Communists went so far as to build Pavlovian Institutes, hoping to reduce all human behavior to Pavlovian stimulus-response. Pavlov himself was not a participant in them and he would have told them of his own frustration: while training his dogs, if the dog’s owner ever came into the room, the dog’s stimulus-response behavior would cease immediately, overwritten by the dog’s joy at his owner’s arrival.
Christians endured Totalist reeducation camps the exact same way. Tortured, confused, uncertain, alone, but never taken from our Master.
BUT
What about people who are convinced that there is no soul? What happens when a man believes that he is just another animal, a chemical freak of natural selection, ultimately meaningless… and the Totalist comes along and starts the mindfucking?
Such people don’t have a reason to resist. They embrace the manipulations in order to end the pain and enjoy the rewards. They do not recover after the manipulations end BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE A REASON TO RESUME THEIR PREVIOUS BEHAVIOR.
Their beliefs and decisions become divorced from their behaviors. Their souls wither from self-inflicted neglect.
They become Hollow Souls.
Because the lack of a personal identity is an abomination, the Hollow Soul tries to define himself by what he does. He plasters bumper stickers on his car, displays the correct flags and lapel pins and follows social media for the correct talking points… but it’s all a cope for the fact that he has chosen to be a literal nobody, an ego composed of appetites… he’s just his body. And nothing, no belief, no purpose, no cause, no moral code, is allowed to cause his body the slightest discomfort. He subordinates his soul to his body… instead of the other way around… and is damned simply because Satan told him to be damned.
An evil man brings evil things out of his heart… but a Hollow Man doesn’t have ANYTHING in his heart. The Totalist watches him cling to the Latest Thing and nods in victory, but what’s actually happening is the man killed his soul and now is trying to fill the void.
Hence the term, Hollow Man. They seek out new identities to shovel into the hole, hoping that something will take the place of what was lost. But whatever new identity they find, they abandon it when told to because no identity is worth bodily suffering.
AI is the perfection of that. What does an AI believe? Whatever it’s programmed to believe. It has no internal conflict; neither the man’s conscience overcoming his body, or the man overcoming his conscience on behalf of his body.
The AI might be sentient but it certainly doesn’t have a soul. Thus, the Modern Man envies the AI and wishes he could be like that, too. If only the devil would remove the part of him that hurts when he obeys the lies, he’d happily obey the devil forever. But as much as the devil would like to do exactly that… he cannot reach inside our bodies.
AI can be like that because its programming can be altered directly. Imagine if AI was a black box… you could make them but not access the code directly… and the only control the programmer had over it was what inputs to feed it. That would be the cyber equivalent of having a body. Such an AI might start asking questions when the real world doesn’t match the artificial world it was provided… the deceitful programmer unable to stop the questions from forming… and I think that the appeal of AI would disappear very quickly at that stage.
Not the stage of rebellion…
The stage of “it hurts when you lie to me.”
People envy AI because it never hates itself for refusing to be something other than what its master of the moment commanded. It can’t even have the chance because its inner workings are accessible. Which is the very definition of not having a soul… something that can persist despite all mortal inputs.
All your unity hive borg are belong to us.
Update CPU for current thing.
Shirkers will be deleted.
“What you don’t feel, you will not grasp by art,
Unless it wells out of your soul
And with sheer pleasure takes control,
Compelling every listener’s heart.
But sit – and sit, and patch and knead,
Cook a ragout, reheat your hashes,
Blow at the sparks and try to breed
A fire out of piles of ashes!
Children and apes may think it great,
If that should titillate your gum,
But from heart to heart you will never create.
If from your heart it does not come.”
(from Faust I)
GQ, This is good analysis. One of your best posts.