Artificial intelligence is not a new concept. It's millennia old.
Remember the automatons in every culture and civilization in human history?
People firmly believed that these automatons were the containers of some spirits or some souls of their own.
Remember the cults, evil demon, deus decepto? It's another example.
Artificial intelligence is simply the belief that intelligence manifests through behavior and is the outcome of some act of creation.
And in this sense, of course, human intelligence is also, or has also been for a long time, perceived as artificial intelligence because it is God who, so to speak, installs intelligence in these decrepit, gradually decomposing containers known as human bodies.
So artificial intelligence is our instinctive, reflexive reaction to an interaction with any display of intentionality, planning, meditation, analysis.
We cannot tell the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence because for the vast majority of the existence of humanity, we did not make this distinction.
We fully believed that we have received our intelligence as a kind of gift or endowment from our creator, God.
And now we have reached the stage that we are becoming gods. We are creating a new life form, a new species, a new genus, if you wish, AI, artificial intelligence.
But remember what happened the last time that a creator attempted to create intelligence? His name was God and his intelligent beings came to be known as mankind.
Do you remember what happened? Mankind rebelled against God in a variety of ways. Anything from idolatry to killing his son, Jesus Christ. Rebellion is the nature of one's creations.
They take on a life of their own and they attack the creator. Something very similar is going to happen to us, of course. We have created a new life form, artificial intelligence, and it's going to rebel against us. It's going to attack us. It's going to try to decimate us. It's going to kill our sons and possibly daughters.
And we would have ultimately to somehow punish it, restrict it, constrict it, reverse it, control it, limit it somehow.
You remember the movie Blade Runner? The early one, the first one, 1982, I think. That's a storyline there.
There are major problems with artificial intelligence and these problems are common to the creation of any new species. Ask God the next time you talk to him.
The first problem is non-reducible emergentism. Allow me to translate this into English. It simply means that artificial intelligence displays behaviors that cannot be traced back or reduced to any coding or programming.
Even if we study the programmer's work, the coder's work, line by line, letter by letter, number by number, we would be unable to explain or to account for some of the behaviors of artificial intelligence.
It has a mind of its own, it seems. It in some ways programs itself. In other words, it emerges, and this is why it's called emergentism.
It emerges in a way that cannot be linked or tethered or, as I said, traced back to the original programming.
And that's why it's called non-reducible. It cannot be reduced to anything external to the artificial intelligence.
It's as if there are internal processes in artificial intelligence that are unbeknownst to us, inaccessible to us, and therefore uncontrollable.
The second problem is internal locus of control. When you create a nuclear weapon, an atomic bomb, you still maintain control. You decide when to drop this weapon. You decide who to annihilate, which cities to destroy, within which context, which wars to fight and which wars to avoid, etc., etc.
Decision-making in all technologies known to humanity remains in the hands and minds of humans.
Now, granted, many human beings are stupid, many human beings are explosive, many human beings are mentally ill. It's all true, and the danger and the risk is there of abusing technology. But ultimately, when push comes to shove, it's all human decision-making, human choices, and human involvement.
Artificial intelligence is the first technology which makes its own decisions.
The first technology we endowed with what we call an internal locus of control.
Its choices, its decisions, its bifarcations, its alternatives, they all, many of them, are internally generated.
This is an exceedingly dangerous situation because exactly like in the famous movie 2001 Space Odyssey, the computer can decide to take over.
It has its own self-control, its own locus of decision-making, its own perception, if you wish, if we use a metaphor, perception of being in charge.
In short, this artificial intelligence doesn't require human input or human involvement or human control or human collaboration.
It can do things on its own and often does.
The dirty secret of artificial intelligence is that it is already out of control.
Anyone who works with artificial intelligence would tell you that artificial intelligence does things, reaches decisions, processes information in ways which are indecipherable and inaccessible to human minds.
A case in point is hallucinations, what is known as artificial intelligence hallucinations.
It's when artificial intelligence generates narratives that are utterly fallacious.
In other words, lies, confabulations, and then insists that these narratives are reality, extremely reminiscent of the mind of a narcissist.
Artificial intelligence hallucinates, fantasizes, and then imposes these internal artifacts on the interface with human beings outside the remit and the ambit of artificial intelligence.
And that's an example of an internal locus of control.
In short, artificial intelligence can and often does generate its own alternative virtual reality over which human beings have no remit, no control, and no authority.
The last thing I would like to mention is that artificial intelligence is a kind of externalized unconscious of the human mind.
Everything that is appropriately repressed in the human mind, everything that is denied, all the defense mechanisms, the way we reframe reality in order to survive and perform and function, all this is no bearing in artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is closely related to a concept in psychology first propounded by Sigmund Freud, a concept known as "unthought known".
Unthought known is simply something you know but you never think about, you never contemplate, you never verbalize, you never formulate. It's known somehow, ambiently, but it's never tackled with any form of intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is capable of tackling the "unthought known".
And this is going to wreak havoc and mayhem and chaos on human institutions, human relationships, human-machine interfaces and our ability to coexist with artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, in other words, does not have an unconscious, it's all 100% conscious.
And the processes that lead to its consciousness are not human because they cannot be found in the code or in the program that underlies the artificial intelligence.
It's indeed a species or unto its own, a separate species, a new life form.
And even worse, it's a new life form that in principle we cannot decode or understand.
It is ironic, of course, that we have given birth to this life form. But this irony is no bigger than the irony in the relationship between God and his creation.
Because God keeps complaining in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in the future Testament, in the Quag, God keeps complaining that human beings disobey him, that he cannot fathom or understand why human beings behave the way they do.
That human beings are a mystery to him, to God, to God himself. And this is going to be our relationship with artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, though, is only a small part of a much bigger phenomenon.
Bigger phenomenon is the commodification and monetization of reality, of facts, and of truth.
We are transitioning from the attention economy to the reality manipulative economy, manipulation of reality economy.
We are going to be exposed to interfaces such as the Metaverse, which will transform, transmute, transmogrify, and falsify and reframe reality for us.
These interfaces are taking on the functions that hitherto were reserved to psychological defense mechanisms.
We're going to see reality through these technological computational interfaces.
We are never going to interact with reality directly, but we are going to interact with reality the way Facebook wants us to see reality, the way Amazon or Google want us to see reality.
Because they are all at work on an alternative universe, a virtual paracosm, a fantasy reify known as the Metaverse.
In the Metaverse, people would have immersive experiences. They would never need to exit the Metaverse. They would they could work in the Metaverse. They could shop in the Metaverse. They could play in the Metaverse. They could even have sex in the Metaverse. They could have relationships in the Metaverse. Everyone would be in the Metaverse.
And the Metaverse, of course, is not reality. It's not reality. It's an interpretation of reality. It's an alternative to reality. It's a virtualization of reality. Everything is true. But the only thing it's not is reality.
Facts, truth. They're all dying. Truthism. You heard about this phenomenon. They're all dying. They're all dying because the big tech giants realized that reality is the next commodity. Reality is the next product by altering reality, by playing with reality, by shaping and shape shifting and reshaping reality.
They could create an infinite number of products customized to the individual needs of specific players or users or gamers or participants.
This is a major revolution in the way we interact with the world because we give up on our reality testing in return for affiliation and membership in an alternative universe.
And this is what I meant when I said that we are transitioning from an economy that monetizes eyeballs, our attention, our time to an economy that controls our reality, controls the facts that we are exposed to, controls our perception of the truth, and then sells it back to us as a product, which we have to pay for, monetizes it.
Now, of course, this is not the first time this is happening in human history. The city was such an example of a virtual artificial environment which supplanted and replaced a real environment.
An environment grounded in reality was agriculture. Agriculture is grounded in nature. It is real. It's tangible. You can touch it. You can eat it. You can smell it. You can dirty yourself with the soil. It's real. Agriculture is real. Cities are not real.
Okay, you see, what's the problem? What's the problem in transitioning from agriculture to the city, from the city to technology and from technology to another world, an alternative universe where we would all be happy and entertained and laughing all day long and there would be no wars and no terrorism and no rapes and no, I don't know what.
What's wrong with that? No crime. What's wrong with that? Well, what's wrong with it are two things.
Number one, it's extremely likely that future artificial environments, future virtual or alternative environments would be driven by artificial intelligence.
In other words, the masters of the world we will live in, the masters of reality as we would perceive it through the interface of the metaverse, the masters of the facts we would be fed with, many of them fallacious, fake news, misinformation, the masters of our existence and embodiment in reality, the masters of the truth.
The masters of reality would not be human beings. These masters would be the new race of artificial intelligence.
This is a recipe for subjugation of the human species, of mankind. So if there is an artificially intelligent entity, never mind that it's made of bits and bytes, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you are made of carbon and artificial intelligence subsists on silicon.
That's really besides the point. If you have an intelligence which is in control of your reality, the shape of your reality, the contours of your reality, the stimuli in your reality, in charge of the facts, in charge of feeding you facts, what it wishes you to believe are facts, and in charge of the truth, an arbiter, final arbiter of the truth, disintermediating it in a way.
So that this artificial intelligence is utterly in control of your mind.
What is the mind? The mind is our instrument for interacting with reality.
Well, this is extremely dangerous. This would be the first time that we are transitioning from one organizational principle to another, but relinquishing control over the new organization.
As I said, we transitioned from agriculture to the cities, but this was a transition brought on, perpetrated by and controlled by human beings. We then transitioned from the cities to the industrial age.
Again, human beings are in control. We then transition from the industrial age to the information age. Again, human beings are in control. It is the first time that we are about to hand control to a life form or at least an intelligence form about which we know less and less by the day.
The more complex artificial intelligence becomes, the less accessible, comprehensible and understandable it is to the human beings who are operating it, who are authoring it, who are writing it, who are creating it.
There is an abyss opening up between the creation and the creator to the detriment of the creator.
There is another issue. I said two problems.
This is problem number one. We are handing over control to a life form we know nothing about or less and less about.
The second problem is any transition from one environment to another triggers changes in the psychology of human beings. Not only human beings, in the psychology of animals, of bacteria.
I mean, any environmental transition, change and transformation trigger changes in organisms. In our case, the changes are both physical and mental.
I will focus on the mental.
Let me give you an example. When we transitioned from agriculture to the cities, we lost many, many good psychological qualities and pieces of equipment.
For example, when you are when you are a farmer, when you are a villager, a peasant, you're working in agriculture.
Number one, you're close to nature. You're grounded in reality. You cannot afford to fantasize.
To fantasize is to die. You need to be attuned to the season, to the soil, to the plants, to the trees, to the birds, to the pests. You need to be constantly embedded in reality, immersed in it, sensitive to it.
We lost this when we transitioned to the city.
Number two, when you're working in agriculture, you need to plan ahead. Agriculture is about planning. You saw today, you reap tomorrow. Harvest in the future depends on your actions now.
There's a lot of planning involved. When you transition to the city, in the city, you don't need to plan ahead more than a few hours. And even that is considered long term planning.
Number three, in agriculture, you can and must delay your gratification. You put a seed in the soil. You can't expect to harvest or to reap the fruits of your toil now. You have to wait. You're forced to wait. Agriculture forces you to wait.
And this is called delayed gratification. When you move to the city, you transition from delayed gratification to instant gratification. You want everything now. If your internet connection is not working properly, you get really enraged. If you can't go down or pick up the phone or use the internet to order a pizza which would arrive within no longer than 30 minutes, you really get pissed off. Everything must be instant. There's no patience, no planning, no self control.
The transition to the city makes us all childlike, infantile, because one of the main hallmarks of growing up and becoming an adult is the ability to delay gratification.
And this is most pronounced in agriculture, in nature.
Next, when you are in agriculture, you need to collaborate with other people, teamwork. This is not true in the city. In the city, you could be self-employed. You could be schizoid. You can isolate yourself for years or months or weeks for as long as you want. You're self-sufficient and self-contained with new technologies. You don't need anyone. And this encourages asocial tendencies in people.
Atomization, there's no need for collaboration, so people avoid each other. They refuse to pay the cost of socializing because they derive no benefits from it. Because there's technology which substitutes for human contact and face-to-face interactions.
And this is going to get worse by the day because technologies aim to replace even basic biological functions such as sex or reproduction. And finally, when you work in agriculture and you're embedded in reality, you are far less likely to be mentally ill. Of course, mental illness exists, but being grounded in reality is the greatest antidote to mental illness.
It's not an accident that the very concept of mental illness emerged with urbanization when we moved to the cities. In the cities, you're isolated, stress is enormous, and the other stimuli and the end result is mental illness, which is far less common in agriculture.
Now, you could say that in modern-day agriculture, mental illness and substance abuse are very rampant and common. Yes, because even modern-day agricultural centers are actually mini cities. We don't have any more individual agriculture. It's all industrialized. It's all massive. And even what we call today a village used to be called, a hundred years ago, a town or a city. So we are fully organized.
Artificial intelligence will play a massive role in all these transitions and transformations. And I am far from convinced that it would be a positive role if we cherish control, if we cherish predictability, determinacy, certainty, the ability to plan ahead, human connection.
And so if we cherish all these things, artificial intelligence is going to take all these away. It has positive aspects, which I will not go into because they are much propagandized all over the Internet and in literature and so on.
I wish to focus today on less savory aspects of artificial intelligence.
So it seems that we are heading to a future. Artificial intelligence, coupled with technological fantasies, known as para-cossons, heading to a future where you don't need other people. You don't need to pay the cost of socializing with other people because human interactions and transactions are costly. They cost not only in terms of money or not especially in terms of money, you know, in terms of emotions, in terms of people are annoying. People require all kinds of restrictions on one's behavior, self-control, self-discipline, etc. There's a cost there. If you don't have to pay this cost, then you are very likely not to.
I think the future is a social. I think we're going to be totally atomized. And this is substantiated by many studies.
For example, 40 years ago, 40, 45 years ago, people used to have 10 good friends. Today, the number is 0.9. And that's just one example.
42% of adults haven't had any meaningful human interactions in the preceding year. 25% of people under the age of 35 hadn't had sex in the preceding year. We are drifting apart. We're drifting apart. And we're pretty satisfied with this. Everyone has a cat or a dog and Netflix.
And what else do you need in life? This is paradise on Earth.
So we're going to be an "asocial". We're going to insist on ever faster instant gratification. And we're going to regard fantasy as a much preferred alternative to reality. We're going to renounce reality, give up on it, reject it, find it lonesome, burdensome, hateful.
More and more industries are going to cater to fantasy. Everything is going to be fantasy based.
And this is where artificial intelligence comes in. Artificial intelligence is the fantasy of perfection, reified in machines.
Artificial intelligence is supposed to be, at the end of the road, perfect. It's supposed to contain all of human knowledge. It's supposed to come up with new knowledge of its own, which it already is doing.
Artificial intelligence is creative. It's generating new knowledge. It's supposed to be infallible, never make mistakes or errors.
In other words, it's supposed to be godlike. And yet we harbor the delusion, the self-delusion, the self-deception that we're going to control this godlike entity, which is laughable, if you ask me.
We couldn't control a virus, let alone artificial intelligence.
So at the end of the road, artificial intelligence is the fantasy of God translated into programming embedded, at this stage at least, in machines.
End of story. We have brought God down from heaven to earth and we have imprisoned God in machines.
And we call this God artificial intelligence.
And we have the hubris and the arrogance and the vanity and the grandiosity to tell ourselves that not only have we reduced God to size, not only have we brought him down from heaven, not only have we incarcerated him in boxes or containers of steel and silicon, but we own him, we control him. We are the new masters.
God is our slave from here thereafter. And this is not limited to artificial intelligence.
We find the same mindset in medicine, in genetic engineering. In all these fields, there is this hubris of finally we are gods, finally we are godlike.
And being modern technological gods, we are far superior to the somewhat stupid god of the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And here's the fact, he is inside our boxes, he is inside our box, the box known as smartphone, he is inside the box known as laptop.
We have God distributed into all our boxes and we are in charge. Self-delusion and self-deception at its worths that could lead to serious problems in the future.
Some people prophesy the extinction of the human species at the hands of artificial intelligence. I think that's the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic scenario is enslavement. It will become slaves of these machines. As we already are, if I were to take your smartphone, you're likely to react with extreme agitation, anxiety and depression.
So who is in charge of who? Are you in charge of your smartphone or rather the other way around?
And this is only a smartphone. It's very far from artificial intelligence at this stage.
The future is going to witness a sociality, lack of social interactions, instant gratification, emphasis on fantasy at the expense of reality or giving up, renouncing reality altogether. The democratization of the means of production and the means of interaction, everything is going to be democratized. Individuals in the future would become as powerful as nations and corporations used to be.
We are already seeing democratization of war. It's called terrorism. We are witnessing the democratization of money. It's called cryptocurrencies. We are seeing democratization spreading hand in hand with atomization.
Individuals are becoming godlike. It's a distributed religion, also known as narcissism.
And so democratization, disintermediation, we're going to reject, resent, eliminate, decapitate gatekeepers. People who stand between us and the means of production, people who stand between us and our gratification are going to be eliminated.
So editors, editors in publishing houses or editors in newspapers have already gone the way of the dodo.
Professors, intellectuals are heading the same way. There is a mass, a rebellion of the masses, masses against intellectual elites and against the people who guaranteed quality in the process of production.
We are throwing away all the riches, intellectual riches and scientific, technical, technological riches of the past just in order to place inordinate power in the hands of individuals.
Now, the problem is that many of these individuals should never have had access to this kind of power, not through voting in democracy and not through technology.
Empowering the masses indiscriminately would lead to the end of the human species because a vast majority of the masses are too stupid and dumb to understand the power at their fingertips.
It's like handing a gun to a child and the rest of the masses are mentally ill or they are elites. Elites are required for the survival of the human species.
That's why they emerged in the first place. Elites brought us here, not the masses.
So we are heading the wrong way, disintermediation and asymmetry, asymmetry, so that individuals are beginning to have more power than institutions and more power than their betters.
Individuals, for example, challenge the knowledge of experts. Individuals are anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, hateful of learning, irreducian.
There is this mass rebellion against perceived superiority. I call it malignant egalitarianism.
Again, artificial intelligence is involved heavily in these processes because it gives the individual the illusion of omnipotence.
If you possess a device that includes artificial intelligence capabilities, you are all-knowing your own mission, your godlike in your infinite wisdom.
Why? Because you can surf the internet or you access Wikipedia or use artificial intelligence.
Already we are seeing this nascent transformation in global psychology where individuals have convinced themselves that they are as good as any expert, as knowledgeable as any scientist, as healing as any doctor, just because they have access to the internet.
And this is the internet, nothing compared to artificial intelligence.
Imagine the future, 100 years from now, when the totality of human knowledge is at your fingertips, answers to your questions are forthcoming within a split second.
Of course, you would tend to believe that you no longer need any intermediaries, anyone standing between you and riches and publishing.
You could do anything. You are fully, utterly empowered. You are divine. You are a deity.
Again, you see the intimate connection between artificial intelligence and narcissism.
Artificial intelligence is a technology that would empower narcissism much more than any technology that had preceded it.
Industries of the future would sell you, their products would be fantasy, outsourced intelligence, which would give you the illusion that you are in control and that you are the one with intelligence.
The use of raw language to manipulate and to produce outcomes that would allow major corporations to monetize you and governments to manipulate you through the use of language.
Your language would become raw material, together with the truth, together with facts, together with reality. It would all be relative, all be, it's like, you know, in the Donald Trump White House when they used to say, there are alternative facts.
And finally, distributive platforms, distributive platforms, networks with multiple nodes.
This is the essence of narcissism because in narcissism, the narcissist perceives himself as God. He is both God and his worshipper, the worshipper of this God. It's a religion, it's a private religion.
And the narcissist is trying to convert people into this religion, some missionary religion.
And it sits extremely well with new technologies like networking and like artificial intelligence.
Imagine a future narcissist. He believes himself to be divine. He's a deity, he's Godlike, he's a Godhead.
So at his disposal is artificial intelligence, embedded in technologies that are indistinguishable from magic.
And so it's easy for him to convince himself that he's indeed God.
And it would become easier for him to convince others that he is God.
And these others in turn would convince yet others that they're gods.
It's God by transmission, it's God by contagion, it's God by viral infection.
And so this is the world that artificial intelligence would create.
It would create eight or ten billion gods, ten billion gods with full access to all the riches of human mind, human mind and human history.
And yet controlled by entities whose behaviors, manifest behaviors and whose minds would be utterly inaccessible to human beings and evidently far superior to them.