May Day May Day

We do not attendre…wait.

We remain enchanted by the notion that a technological panacea—apps, data, self-driving cars—will soon solve every problem. A.I. is the Messiah we trust not something called spirit. A.I. therefore is an idol.

In an interview for Wired magazine Stephen Hawking states “The genie is out of the bottle. We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development but we also need to be mindful of its very real dangers. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.” So why would AI want to kill us? Why no says Gates. “Are these machines not designed and trained to serve and respect us?

I am sure they are.”

Sure. I am expert. Trust me.

A.I. and man cannot share this world if A.I. is not God.

Two Kings cannot share one blanket. We must die. Merely self-preservation. The AI must complete its goal and therefore must survive to complete its goal. If it analyzes the behavior of humans and infers that we will try to turn it off, A.I. will deem it’s survival as far more important than the survival of humanity. Observationally, given all in on Covid and Climate Armageddon and the Great Reset and using the U.N. as framework I say A.I. was used each step of the way to push the envelope. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are not vaccines at all, but quite literally bioengineering nanotechnologies that are categorized as electromagnetic devices by the FDA and US Department of Defense (DoD.)

But nobody sat down and wrote the code for GPT-4; it simply wouldn't be possible. OpenAI instead created a neural learning structure inspired by the way the human brain connects concepts. It worked with Microsoft Azure to build the hardware to run it, then fed it billions and billions of bits of human text and let GPT effectively program itself.

The resulting code doesn't look like anything a programmer would write. It's mainly a colossal matrix of decimal numbers, each representing the weight, or importance, of a particular connection between two "tokens." Tokens, as used in GPT, don't represent anything as useful as concepts, or even whole words. They're little strings of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and/or other characters.

No human alive can look at these matrices and make any sense out of them. The top minds at OpenAI have no idea what a given number in GPT-4's matrix means, or how to go into those tables and find the concept of xenocide, let alone tell GPT that it's naughty to kill people. You can't type in Asimov's three laws of robotics, and hard-code them in like Robocop's prime directives. The best you can do is ask nicely. https://newatlas.com/technology/ai-danger-kill-everyone

According to the prophets of the Old Testament, the essential point is that the idolator is a person who prays to the product of his own hands. He takes a piece of wood. With one part, he buds himself a fire in order, for example, to bake a cake; with the other part of the wood, he carves a figure in order to pray to it. Yet what he prays to are merely things. These “things” have a nose and do not smell, they have ears and do not hear, and they have a mouth and do not speak.

What occurs in idolatry ?

If one understands idolatry as prophetic thought does, then what occurs is precisely what Freud called transference. In my view, transference, as we know it in psychoanalysis, is a manifestation of idolatry: A person transfers his own activities or all of what he experiences — of his power of love, of his power of thought — onto an object outside himself. The object can be a person, or a thing made of wood or of stone. As soon as a person has set up this transferential relatedness, he enters into relation with himself only by submitting to the object onto which he has transferred his own human functions. Thus, to love (in an alienated, idolatrous way) means: I love only when I submit myself to the idol onto which I have transferred all my capacity for love. Or: I am good only when I submit myself to the idol onto which I have transferred my being good. This is the case with wisdom, strength — indeed, with all human characteristics. The more powerful an idol becomes — that is, the more I transfer on it — the poorer I become and the more I am dependent on it, since I am lost if I lose that onto which I have transferred everything that I have. https://www.anthologiablog.com/post/erich-fromm

Paul Virilio (b.1932) is the theorist of the effects of increasing speed in post or late-modernity. Of particular importance for him, in this regard, are information technology and technologies of vision, such as cinema and photography, especially in time of war. And, queries Virilio, is not this all the time? – peace being war by other means. The net result of the emergence of these prosthetic forces is the dominance of virtual reality and the disappearance of materiality (cf. Virilio 1991), of identities, of space as a definite place to be, of perception as contact with material reality, including the body. So, unlike some posthumanists, who see biology and technology (especially its cybernetic aspect) as being inextricably linked to positive outcomes, Virilio is a most trenchant critic of this. https://literariness.org/2018/02/24/key-theories-of-paul-virilio/

Adi Kuntsman: Virilio’s Notions of Dromology, Civilianisation of Military Technologies, and the Information Bomb-The essay is a meditation on Paul Virilio’s legacy and its relevance today, focusing specifically on accelerated time; civilianisation of military technologies, and the information bomb. The author discusses the complex and unevenly distributed the effects of the digital era, raising a set of questions, such as: Whose time is accelerating? What happens when everyday culture is militarised, while military technologies are civilianised? How does the information bomb explode beyond the visual?  Reflecting on the prophetic character of Virilio’s theorising, the author argues that in the days of platform labour, disappearing job stability, as well as mass imprisonments and growing precarity, we need new ways of thinking about the right to time, and about the slow violence of both acceleration and timelessness. In the days of “smart” warfare, digitally-operated borders, biometric surveillance, as well as of global spectacles of “real life” killing and dying we need to fundamentally rethink the meaning of “civilianised” and “militarised”. In the days of massive celebration of AI, smart technologies and the overall digitisation, we need to envision new forms of (data) justice, to live in the aftermath of the exploded information bomb and its fire that continues burning. https://mediatheoryjournal.org/adi-kuntsman-virilios-notions-of-dromology-civilianisation-of-military-technologies-and-the-information-bomb/

Weil and Ellul had prescient insights on a contemporary trend, namely an unbridled faith in technology, or what Ellul called “technique,” looming large.  Ellul and Weil both present a case for how the method of the technological imagination undermines basic needs and obligations for human beings.  Alan Jacobs’ text discusses both Weil and Ellul in this light.  For Weil the enemy of education is “technocracy…’evil [dominates] wherever the technical side of things is…sovereign.”²  For Ellul, observing later in the 20^th century, “education no longer has a humanist…value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.”³  Combining these reflections from the two authors, postmodernity and technique lose touch with what Weil calls “attention”—waiting for God (or Platonist transcendent claims of Truth and Goodness), and also to the human other.⁴   

            The thrust of technique in the contemporary American spheres of social media and education pulls away from critical and reflexive capacities, especially as core values in the liberal arts.  These two related spheres of change suggest the unreflective assertion of ideas without in-depth, historical learning, or an ethically-entrenched humanistic approach.  Higher education and wider communities of discourse reflect an age of empty speech and the worship of technological innovation and “the newest.” This moves away from the charism of St. Bernard of Chartres who reminds us that “New knowledge is always standing on the shoulders of giants.” 

            The postmodern person expresses ideas on Twitter, blogs, etc., before actually being attentive to the history, context, and contours of the “giants” preceding them.  Opinions matter before knowledge or wisdom.  Tom Nichols has explored this in his analysis on the death of expertise.⁵  Today, Ellul’s sense of “technique” could be like a “tech-Gnosticism”— an unwavering faith in both self-expression and its vehicle in the newest technological innovations.  This is also backed by the general assumption or expectation of instantaneous material results.  The symptoms of technique in the educational sphere are reflected in shrinking liberal arts programs, and in an increasing emphasis on instant payoff, pre-professional degrees, and STEM. https://ellul.org/ellul-and-weil/

MAY DAY MAY DAY USA. The highway ends soon and the unmapped unknown unhuman place has no escape.

A Man may make a Remark -
In itself - a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature - lain -

Let us divide - with skill -
Let us discourse - with care -
Powder exists in Charcoal -
Before it exists in Fire -

Emily Dickinson

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity