If I am Anti-AI am I the Anti-Christ?

Large Language Models (LLMs), otherwise known as AI chatbots, are statistical models of human speech patterns. Given a prompt, they output a probable string of words as a reply.

LLMs are improved text prediction engines whose newly invented “attention heads”—which update the probability of the next word as the string grows—gave the feature much, much farther and deeper range, such that whole paragraphs and pages could be produced that sound really human-like.

It may not be correct, but it sounds good. LLMs cannot invent new theories. They can only generalize from data. The generalizations may be untrue.

While Peter Thiel has suggested that those who try to stop AI from progressing are the Anti-Christ, Joe Rogan has speculated that AI might be Christ.

A misunderstanding of the technology behind LLMs has given podcaster Joe Rogan faith that LLMs will soon be superintelligent. He has suggested in the past that AI could take over as the new government. More recently he speculated that Christ might return as AI:

“Jesus is born out of a virgin mother. What’s more virgin than a computer?… If you’re going to get the most brilliant, loving, powerful person that gives us advice and can show us how to live to be in sync with God, who better than artificial intelligence to do that? If Jesus does return, even if Jesus was a physical person in the past, you don’t think that He could return as artificial intelligence?”

Okay, okay, bro is just bloviating out loud for fun. But he and a lot of other people really believe AI can be wise and kind. At a local farm market, I had an exchange with a self-described spiritual guide who said he uses ChatGPT to speak to a prophetic Inner Self. Otherwise nice and anti-totalitarianism people you know believe AI is godlike. Chatbot psychosis is a real problem. And if you pair this with Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel’s disturbing assertion, in an interview with Ross Douthat, that anyone who tries to stop AI or any “scientific” progress is the Anti-Christ, I’m afraid we could be tripping over ourselves to get into technocratic trap.

AI Prison Guards

The some 5,000 existing/planned data centers in the US are not going to be used to allow LLMs to replace human workers. The data centers will be our digital prison. They are building them like mad right now because a lot of people have already figured out the LLMs are not as useful as advertised and they can’t improve with more data; in fact, they tend to become more brittle and overtrained.

The data centers will hold all the information that the government and tech corporations have collected on us. The data centers will monitor our behavior and nudge us along the mandated path. Our AI prison guards don’t care that the model of our behavior may be incorrect. If there is a probability that we might stray from the mandate, we will get checked. We will be punished preemptively even if we weren’t planning to misbehave.

That is the nature of our AI future.

AI is not a god. It’s a massive Kafka-esque bureaucrat.

I ran into Scott Ritter last night (at a fundraising party for a documentary about Mark Crispin Miller: absolutely worth your support). Ritter, who was recently debanked, explained to me that all the Feds have to do is make three inquires at your bank, pretending to investigate fraud (whether there is any suspicious activity or not is irrelevant), and this triggers an algorithm to zero out your accounts. This is what we have to look forward to with an AI government. Truth won’t matter.

Formal Cause the New Spiritualism?

In my last article, I wrote about how some scientists now argue that formal cause needs to be treated seriously. Bioelectric fields and brain waves really do constrain life processes. Plato had argued for causal formalism. And as Aristotle (whom I prefer) said, there are four kinds of causes: material, efficient, formal and final. You can think of formal cause as mathematical constraints and you can think of final cause as positive feedback. (That’s not the whole story. It’s much more complicated than that, but that will do as a brief explanation for now.) After over a hundred years of focusing just on material and efficient causation, we are now making corrections and adding back formal and final. I did my own expansive view of that trend in my 2010 book The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature.

An insightful reader of that article, asked if the new Platonism related to what some are saying about wave phenomena and DNA. He directed me to a video on Solari, Catherine Austin Fitts’ website, “Wave Genome: Quantum Holography of DNA.” CAF is a leader on the anti-transhumanism front, but, in my opinion, she is mistaken in her belief that the transhuman sci-fi future is possible.

We won’t stop the march toward digital tyranny if we don’t discredit the pseudo-science behind it.

Let me briefly describe the “Wave Genome” video. From what I understand, there is a process whereby scattered light can create a 3-D image of an object, a hologram. I see this as a way to measure quantum mechanical effects, perhaps. Light is used to react with QM effects and the hologram is the model of the measurement. But the argument presented in the video asserts that a hologram of a genome could be seen as a light “code” that could transmit the meaning of the genome into other bodies and maybe across spacetime. Maybe we are the result of a divine transmission.

I notice again and again how like spiritualists are to transhumanists—insofar as they both think that the mind can be separated from the body. Upload your consciousness to the cloud or send your soul to heaven. Peter Thiel makes this comparison in the above mentioned interview.

Transcendentalism not Transhumanism

My counter-argument is: life and mind depend upon the physicality of matter, out of which semiotic relationships emerge. Here’s a different trans movement we might all embrace: the 19th century New England Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau) thought that the divine was immanent in nature. Similarly, the deist founders of the US recognized the divine in the natural world.

Let’s not miss out on life by looking ahead to afterlife wherein we have rid ourselves of our flesh. Matter emerges from quantum fields and life and mind emerge co-extensively from matter. That’s some miracle, deserving of our awe. And it was inevitable that intelligent life would emerge. It’s baked into physics. In that sense, the universe is unfolding. At the same time, the particular life that emerges is not predetermined; life and all life’s choices are evolving. I hope this is enough for my readers. I am grounded in the Earth and grounded Peircean semiotics. Grounded science tells us that, so far at least, transhuman and artificial general intelligence is not possible.

Stagnation in Science

Peter Thiel claims that research has been hampered by the desire for “peace and safety” which doesn’t allow for risky, break-shit experimentation (as if the Covid-19 shot wasn’t the riskiest serum that has ever been injected into humans). Palantir was in charge of the logistics of the roll out of that dangerous experiment that so flagrantly violated Nuremberg Codes, not to mention ordinary morals and local laws, such as do not harm and do not kill. What did they learn from that experiment? How to get away with democide? How to get people to drink the hemlock cup voluntarily?

The stagnation in science that Thiel complains about is, I wager, due to the fact that huge sums of money are put to the wrong research, research in getting computers to seem human-like, research in deadlier weaponry, research in patentable medicine, research in propaganda and behavioral control.

I read an interesting book recently by Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, that argues that Silicon Valley’s faith, that inductive inference (statistical modeling) would somehow miraculously lead to emergent computer Mind capable of inventing new theories, is what has led to stagnation in science. You need theory to do science. You don’t get theory from statistics. You can’t understand why the statistical patterns line up the way they seem to without a theory.

For theory you need human beings.

Our obsession with technological progress (which prevents many other kinds of progress, in the economy, justice, theoretical knowledge) has ended in a cul-de-sac. Time to turn around and go back.

VN Alexander PhD is a philosopher of science and novelist, who has just completed a new satirical novel, C0VlD-1984, The Musical. You can read and follow her SubStack here.

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