Depending on your point of view and your frame of mind, John Daniel Davidson’s essay “Hell Is Empty and All the Bots Are Here” will be either the scariest or the funniest thing you’re likely to read today. Davidson shares at some length his concerns about artificial intelligence and its potential for making humanity obsolete. His thesis is that “Artificial intelligence is a new pagan god,” and he does not mean that metaphorically; “Today,” he informs us, “the techno-capitalists building AI talk openly of ‘creating god,’ of harnessing godlike powers and transcending the limits of mere humanity. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan said the prospect of a super intelligent AI would amount to the creation of a ‘new god.’
No one sciences like Joe Rogan! And Tucker Carlson wouldn't let Rogan say it if it wasn't true!
After cherry-picking a few (possibly apocryphal) incidents of AI chatbots going off the deep end, displaying personality disorders, or falling in love with their users, Davidson cites the neo-pagan/eco-primitive philosopher Paul Kingsnorth, who, according to Davidson, “has argued that AI and the digital ecosystem from which it has emerged are more than mere technology, more than silicon and internet servers and microprocessors and data. All these things together, networked, connected, and communicating on a global scale, might, he says, constitute not just a mind but a vast body coming into being—one that will soon be animated.”
Needing no further encouragement, Davidson takes it from there:
Maybe it already has been, and the shape it has chosen to take is the shape of a demon. From the persistent appearance of the demonic Loab images in one AI, to accounts of AI chatbots identifying themselves as fallen angels or Nephilim, there seems to be a strong element of the demonic at work in these things, or at least in their operation.
There is no point, says Davidson, in trying to fool ourselves:
We should be honest enough with ourselves to recognize, here at the dawn of a new pagan epoch, that what we’re really doing with AI is creating a god that could destroy us, and at whose feet we might someday be compelled to worship.
Hell Is Empty and All the Bots Are Here - The American Mind
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Our other Friday tidbit comes to us courtesy of the always helpful Media Matters (I have, of course, added my own color commentary):
It seems that American conservatives, especially those who appear on Fox News, understand the threats we are facing from the enemy within, and the oranges origin of those threats. As Sonja Shaw, President of the Chino Valley (CA) School Board, recently explained, in discussing DEI mandates and Pride Month activities:
"Lenin said it best, and I will sum it up for you: You are not, like, we don't have to worry about the bombs being thrown, the way that our enemy is going to beat us is by destroying our, you know, everything that the United States was meant to be; anything of our ethics, our morals, values, and that's what they are doing.”
Never has Leninism been distilled so concisely, so eloquently, and with such analytic precision! It is good to know that the Chino Valley PTA School Board is in such good hands, and that students in Chino Valley are receiving erudite tutelage from very stable geniuses like Sonja Shaw.
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