The Knownothinger

An Uncertain Vision

I must admit to you that I suffer from a particular vice. Vices, like many impulsions in the human experience tend often to reveal something about oneself that one might never have known without their often inexplicable embrace. Yet, very recently this was not the case. In fact, this vice of mine opened my eyes in an unexpected way. My vice is this: when I grow weary of the burden of battling arcane and ephemeral technical challenges in my profession as a software engineer working from my home office I often surrepticiously slip away from my desk to head to the nearest gas station for an unhealthy snack. I usually find myself in one of several stations in proximity to my house, some more polished than others.

Gas stations are curious places in that they tend to be frequented by all stripes of people at any given time. One might find a polished businesswoman on her way to a gleaming office tower, a wayward and oblivious software engineer trying to blend in, blue collar workers escaping the heat of the day, or an exhausted delivery person on a well deserved break all at the same time. Quite often the only thing any given set of patrons passing through a gas station have in common is their mutual, compulsory haste to leave as quickly as possible. However, on one particular day not quite so long ago, it was my my chance reflection on this unity of purpose that gave me such pause as to see a monstrous and frightening vision of the future only by virtue of a brutal and altogether unforgiving contrast.

On that day I observed an elderly man tucked away in the back of the store. But what struck me so hard that day was a jarring and sudden realization that this admittedly was not the first time I had seen this patron here before. As I attempted to stave away the guilt of yet again being bested by my sweet tooth and was rifling trough the sugary drinks in the refrigerator, my usual lazy rationalizations were interrupted, and quite surprisingly I found myself standing rather still with my consolation prize in hand and altogether departed from my usual sympathy with the haste of the typical clientele of the store. It dawned on me suddenly that this gentleman had been there in the very same spot in this store every single time I had ever been to this gas station. Fundamentally, this might not have been worth a second thought. But upon further reflection, it was quite surprising given I had been haunting this gas station for more than three years.

The man was what could most politely be described as disheveled. His beard was long and untrimmed and was rivaled in its disrepair by his matted grey hair that had obviously not seen a pair of scissors for more than a year, much less the right end of a showerhead. His hands were swollen and stiff with the arthritis afflicted by what seemed half a century of physical labor and his skin was dark with the tan of just as long under an unmerciful sun. He had obviously lived a very hard life. He sat before a colorful and cacouphanic electronic slot machine, repeatedly striking at the big and colorful button under his hand with a grim and altogether lifeless look in his eye.

Furthermore to the oddity in which I was struck that day was that I had only by unhappy happenstance hazzarded to be at this gas station at an unmercifully early hour. There were no other patrons rushing through and the cashier seemed positively catatonic as he slumped at the register, resigned to haunting a place that everyone but he could rush away from. However, our gambler was as alert as I had ever seen him and just as determined. I looked out to the parking lot and the pumps. Mine was the only car there.

The weight of a thousand questions hit me in that moment through my bleary eyes. Why on earth would this man be gambling at this most desolate and unhappy hour? What fixated him so that he had somehow managed to arrive here through the black of night by means of what could only have been his half rotten work boots and no small amount of singlemindedness to return to his regular post? Further still, didn’t this man know that he played a game that he would never win? After having worn the button on the machine into a mere vestige of its design, why didn’t this man realized that after at least three years, and perhaps indeterminately longer, he would simply never strike the jackpot? Why did he not realize he was willfully entombed in what could only ever be a miserable quagmire of complete futility?

It would have been quite easy to simply paint this vision of a man as a witching hour apparition born of troubled sleeplessness or no more than an unhappy revenant of another software engineer who could not kick his sugar habit and was only playing the slots to pass the time until he could warn me of my inevitable fate that day. But, in truth he was a very real man. He was obviously in a sorry state and one could only surmise by his defeated gaze into the blinding carnival lights before him that he had had little in the way of any compassion shown him in his life and perhaps had forgotten altogether what it felt like. It was, and is, a very sorry thing that I had even attempted to paint his destitution as fantasy, clinging impulsively to the modern vanity that there should be no such possible suffering and that any manifestation of it should be questioned and found to be the product of poor choices alone. In that moment I very nearly fell prey to the most uniquely American predisposition to deny a man his tragedy.

The hesitation I felt in that moment, born not out of any greater nature of mine, but only through the contrast that so radically beset me of the hour and the seeming eternal stasis of his suffering, redeemed not only his person, but rather transformed him into an omen of such power as to totally redirect not only my identity but also my mission. After tearing myself away from the sight that gripped me so, and as I ventured home, I was yet again posessed with a fearsome contradiction. Why was it that I was in the same moment so put off by the sight of our unhappy gambler and also so fascinated by him? In what I told myself was uncertainty, I pushed my mind away from the brutal answer as I trundled home through the newly formless and ephemeral rushing of traffic.

It was blindingly clear to me. I lived in that moment a categorical contradiction. The sorry state of the man put me off because, in his visage and in my sadness at his futile endeavor, I saw what we have indeed already become. The distance between his manifested life and my own condition, and in fact our collective condition, was the breadth of a moment. In this modern desolate hour of spirit, and in the constant evisceration of our liberty to know meaning, we expend our lives in the West to muster any notion, and any notion at all, that we are so different than he. And if we are so different, at least within our embattled and embittered bastions of the crumbling ruins of the once mighty fortress of the Enlightened mind, we are so much closer to the edge, so very nearer to the fall, and but a breath from the plunge.

The Edge Of The Word

In our hopeful errancy and earnest arguments to so firmly entrench ourselves in opposition to the egregious conditions so unfairly discovered on our stumblings and strivings up out of that cave of our ignorance so intolerable, we have totally forgotten the extraordinary aid and ability of the first Technologists in our improbable ascension. Our modern unwellness of spirit has so solemnly turned our eye away from what they once knew and what we now do not. In some twisted manner we, having been heaved up out of our frail bearing on the better part of reason by our forebears fettered with such humble means, even with all our might manifest and sophistication to bear, can only ever fall further up and away from accessing the frightening power with which they so propelled us.

What is this power, Technology?

Technology is at present commonly defined as “The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.” However, to fully grasp the word we must go back further as these modern exegeses orient themselves around an intentional, modern directive.

When we analyze the Greek roots of the word Technology we find there are two:

• techni - art, craft, or skill
• logia/logos - word, speech, reason

When removed from our modern notions of what Technology should be and stripped bare to its extratemporal roots, we find that the roots themselves do not insist on anything outside of the human essence. One might practice the art of reason across domains in any context. A man might convince a friend of a better way to look at life, investigate a new tool to repair a neighbors misfortune, or reason with himself about a failure of an endeavor. A woman might find a way to bring a new concept to market or lead a community towards a good decision. These are all examples of Technology. It is indeed the case that the nature of these root meanings are open to the extension beyond our own faculties into sophisticated tools, external systems of record, and powers outside us that we may harness. But our collective failure to recognize that we have lost the true, personable, and deeply human nature of the word Technology to our present time imperils us to consequences of frightening gravity.

Our modern conception of Technology is far departed from the ethos and origins of the word itself. Technology, in its essential lexical meaning, is in no way de facto divorced from that which is Human, nor has it ever existed a priori or apart from us. The notion that Technology is somehow a force that exists in nature apart from us, although not often so plainly articulated or even separable from our dependent condition, is a modern misconception so strong and commonplace as to be totally unrecognizable. Even to practitioners, or to the braver among us, who do cognitively recognize that all Technology is under the control of at least someone in the world do not hold the entirety of the weight of this conclusion to bear at any one time. The sheer complexity of technical inventions and their impact on our lives is so fearsome large and objectively impenetrable that we simply do not have the daily resources necessary to comprehend it. It does not even seem a useful thing to try to do.

But this calamitous blindness, by whomever it was afflicted on us, to the idea that each of us has a mind, a Way of the Word, a teche logos, our own Technology, and indeed the most powerful to date, is, in this most perilous time, liable to beguile us into its complete and total obliteration. But on some deep and resonant level we do indeed recognize the acuity of the danger. This most uniquely modern tenor of profound and gnashing anxiety that pervades our lives in these present times in the West seems from some utilitarian vantage points vastly ignorant of our physical splendorousness.

It seems no great feat of mind to dismiss our categorical insistence on the view that these modern vexations we suffer as no more than an artifact of our foremost human instincts of ungratefulness and a pitifully short memory. How could one be the least unhappy when so many of us have enough food, a roof over our heads, and can earnestly believe we will see the sun rise again a decade from now? It seems a natural thing to berate each other and ourselves that these marvelous modern physical technologies, if only viewed, improved, or even just used far less, should be the antidote to our present extremity of grief. After all, the only question at hand is one of self discipline. Limiting ourselves is certainly the way forward: one swipe away from our soulmate, a few more comments, or simply someone on the other side of the planet to look at our resume, even just briefly is all we need to make all the distress worth our while. When promise lives in our pocket, it seems so very regressive to doubt that all is for the best in this best of all possible times.

Or, in current fashion, we could again so earnestly reason about the harms and ills that these completely necessary, but undoubtedly uncontrollable and oft loathsome scourges that so mercilessly follow us around in our pocket, and just conjure some lazy intervention in our habituations to them as a one-to-one cure with whatever problem they beset us with in the extremity of the moment, and in due course simply neglect to intervene. Why intervene, after all? It probably wouldn’t have worked. It is so very much effort and, if you really think about it, they are actually necessary aren’t they?

It seems only obvious, when we’ve finally relaxed from all the tizzy riled up in us, exhausting as it all is, that our problem is indeed outside of our control and that, if one were simply willing, or if there were some new thought committee formed, or if there were just one more conversation had with sufficient gusto, or that this deeply harmful system somewhere out there were to be dismantled by someone out there then we could be free of our so pressing and present malady. Then we might simply enjoy life and the wonders of our time.

For a breif second, our heart and being might stand in peace.

But in the very next moment we face again an altogether familiar and sudden collapse of spirit.

Our exhaustion, warranted as it is, however, is not at all new and has so pervaded our senses that we may scarcely remember the life we had before. Yes, we often rally and cry out through our tiny windows to the world so cradled by our thumbs that these damnable devices have killed all that we are and all that we were! What about the children! What about! What about it all! And when our righteous rightness burns itself out we suddenly cannot stand the pain from the burns from our guilty justifications and the only relief we can then find is in the embrace of the reactions to our jilted screams, all to be found again in our buzzing glass friend, that all-too-wide little window so curiously found again in our pocket unharmed, unassuming, and unbothered.

We do not suffer the trappings of addiction but of a horrific divorce.

The passionate love we once had for the shared optimism in Technology, for our bright futures, has left us still yet yearning for her wondrous company, for his forward arcing empowering spirit! The idea that our children may have more, that in our evening twilights a wellfound and lightly earned ease might we find, and that we would never live a day on the Earth alone from our lovely, relentlessly giving and always forgiving Way of The Word, our Technology. She was ripped away and we cannot ever fulfill the grief of her loss! We live in jilted lifelessness, in love with our vague numbness, feeling his abyssal departure agape in the lonely hour, yet so helplessly ensnared by her gruesome and lovely replacement revenant doppelganger. We gaze through his buzzing lovely rectangle eyes, black pits in our stomach, and wither away so earnestly entranced by her swirling square sorrows singing of the hope of a reunion and rejoicing in the certain coming communion.

It seems that, having been so burdened beneath the weight of such catastrophic divorce from what we were promised, and in our rushing course of denial to have been so unfairly forsaken, that we simply cannot begin to confront the titanic change that is being so ruthlessly thrust upon is in the advent and spread of Artificial Intelligence technologies. In our heartrending and withering grief we are found ruinously paralyzed before the change afoot. Another Lover promised and adulated, yes, we know who will betray us too! It is of no use as we have no want to mend our hearts, nor have we been since able to from the ravaging blow of our previous loss.

It is with such grave clarity that we face the calamitous and mortal danger of the gruesome aberration of our human splendidnesses pressing down on our enfeebled spirits that we do not flinch in the least but instead relax further still into the peace of our distress as our gaze passes so smoothly through its breast. For, at least, lest our newly inanimate optimism and childlike passion for a regained and redeemed tomorrow be again, and yet further murdered, we might succumb having been all the more modern in our collective certainty that our present gallows fall and blood-red blushing melancholy a’swing was nothing ever to struggle against in the first place.

It is in the matriculation of our relentless employment of the mind as a technology to save us from mother earth’s primal clutches and in the raging denial of a world less kind that we face an altogether new and almost more fearsome horror along the ascendant march up this merciless mountain. It is at this present apex and in the pernicious veiling of the nature of this summit that we are beguiled away from the inheritance and further promise of the Enlightenment. The mind is the greatest of our tools, and either by our embittered lack of presence, or by the caustic miasma of distracted dispiritedness we breathe each and every moment of all of our days and each and every moment of all of our nights we have neglected to reflect on our present precipice, let alone realize we have reached a lurching false summit from which we might well plummet, or, in brutal truth and lovingkindness to one another betrayed, be ever so gently pushed.

Our modern Sisyphus, having found himself happy in his eternal Absurd pursuit has somehow managed to mount the boulder to the very precipice of the peak, despite the gods’ curse. And as he so earnestly sets down his crushing burden upon the uncanny zenith he stares into a blinding, shining, and shorching abyssal void from which there can be no return.

The boulder now rolls towards the edge, forever to be lost.

And he, in his newfound rapturous joy and swallowed in the gaping maw of an impossible freedom, must only relax to follow.

The Anti-tool

We all missed something very big.

In the advent of the Internet in the late 20th century a deeply improbable shift occurred. It became rather easy to know things.

While it might seem quite an odd idea to many in this modern day, it was, at one time, a rather arduous task to find anything out. When one did not know something, there were only a limited number of options these ancient ancestors of ours had and they seem so obvious and yet so primitive: one might read in search of the truth in the dusty arms of a book or one might ask someone they surmised might know themselves. From our vantage point today it seems a rather rude thing and quite a bad idea to ask someone to posture as an authority in our everyday sphere. How likely is it really that they could tell you anything at all worth knowing? It’s all right beyond one or two or somewhere around seventeen swipes of these thumbs so implausibly persistent in their influence. And how very awkward we imagine ourselves flabbing about with our mouths in some so inconvenient and embarrassing exercise as a conversation. We needn’t subject ourselves to the confounding experience of not knowing something or any sort of mystery, after all.

It seemed such a miraculous and futuristic thing to be able to know anything in an instant at the dawn of that seismic time. Why would one so vainly resist such a marvel? The bluntly preposterous ability that had appeared was so very useful, as useful as anything had ever seemed before and so advantageous that it so cemented our certitude in the promises of the digital age that we might well have been entombed in it.

And, it seems, we were.

One very famous figure who was profoundly influential in the early days of personal computers said that he envisioned the computer to “be like a bicycle for the mind”. And for a time it was exactly that. In the early days, one was easily able to extend his or her abilities greatly through learning to use a computer at the price of some patience and persistence. Suddenly, there were seemingly a totally endless number of things that a computer could be useful for. One could calculate, communicate, recall, process, write, read, research, and learn on a level so much greater than on one’s own, even armed with such archaic tools as ink and paper. If one were to be able to use and perhaps program a computer, he or she suddenly could get leverage at a scale never before dreamed of for an individual alone.

What once was held out as an infinitely useful tool with which to augment ourselves to fantastic effect, much like the dramatic effect a bicycle had for a human being’s speed, quickly began to best all of our willpower. The bicycle suddenly started to grip our hands, began to steer us in directions we did not want to go or expect, and developed a fierce liking for controlling the speed at which we move through life. What once was offered up as a beacon of personal utility became the withering sunbeam by which our liberty to be useful on our own so aggressively evaporated. In a very real sense the bicycle for the mind that was envisioned as the ultimate tool for everyone to take advantage of became the conduit through which the noble human usefulness bestowed upon us in the Enlightenment in the power of our mind was siphoned away.

These tools are useful insofar as their effects are necessary to us, but they are not entirely under our control. And as these tools have progressed in sophistication we have been unable to extricate ourselves from their grip even though there is a growing desperation within us to do so. That is because in some lower order current of our mind we recognize that although we find these tools so very useful, pleasurable, and soothing, we know that in the end they do not serve us.

An Anti-tool is a tool that offers the wielder great utility but in its employ takes from the user some part of the very capacity or experience it promises to extend. It may achieve the desired result in the world while depriving the wielder of the human experience through which that result would otherwise be attained. The nature of the Anti-tool is to take away that which it promised.

Through the glamour of Social Media as an obvious case of an Anti-tool, the allure of a greater degree of perceived connection offered by the engagement we felt through eliminating the burden and risk of in-person socialization and yet still getting the feeling of participation in one another’s lives, we lost the real antidote to our desire: togetherness. There is a cavernous distance between the experience of getting a like versus being liked, a gorge between pixelated congratulations on another trip around the sun and the bloom of a heartfelt birthday hug, and an unlivable eternity between an abbreviated “I love you” in the pale blue light of the apology of absence and a heartbeat next to one’s own. The Anti-tool seems to pay the price of the risk of what we need to complete ourselves.

The price of love is the risk of loss.

The Social Media Anti-tool promises to spare us this price. Instead of going through the terrifying risk of rejection and conflict in love, friendship, and community, the gap that we put between each other through Social Media bears the brunt of the physical feeling of the risk and we still get the counterfeit feeling we so crave. But in avoiding the risk we also avoid the very experience through which we might receive what we need. The Anti-tool returns to us only the counterfeit of what we so deeply desire.

What then is the promise of the Anti-tool of LLMs and AI? And what price must we pay for the benefit of everything at the cost of nothing?

There is a great and powerful component to humanity, a curse to some and a path to others. It is that to become more we must pay more. It is not possible to become strong in our bodies without exertion, nor possible to become wise without failing, nor even to receive love without loving another back. The very same is true for the greatest of our tools: our mind. We may not grow in the powers of our intellect, our discernment, our will, our principles, our emotional capacity, our imagination, nor the fortitude to strive for a redeeming vision of tomorrow without a price.

Here we encounter a difference between the utility of a tool and the manner in which that utility is attained. An ordinary tool may extend our ability to perform some work of our own. But these new instruments offer something more extraordinary: the accomplishment of work that we need not possess the faculties to perform ourselves. In the former case we are aided in our doing. In the latter we may become merely the beneficiaries of something done. It is in this bystandership that we find the language that whispers to us the true betrayal.

In the same way as a student standing before a teacher holding a textbook on advanced biology does not have in their possession the knowledge of that biology but only a volume of information about advanced biology, a student standing before the same teacher with an LLM at hand that is versed in that same volume of information likewise does not possess any of that knowledge of biology. However, there is a drastic difference between these two students. The student with the book must put forth a great deal of effort to study and understand the biology within the book to perform anything to do with the biology information contained within, whereas the student with the LLM can immediately produce the outward work of a person versed in that biology without having acquired the knowledge himself.

Through the simplistic lens of the goal of having students perform biology it seems an irrefutable decision to choose the LLM over the book. But through the lens of having students become biologists and then to perform biology themselves the LLM may be the worst choice. The work is accomplished and the biology has been performed. But the student has not become a biologist. He has become a bystander to biology.

And there is something far worse lurking here than the idea that it will be so much harder to create new biologists. Not only may there be no incentive for the student to become someone who can perform biology but there is an even greater force pushing the student away from ever knowing he can become a biologist at all. It is here that the Anti-tool commits its most extraordinary deception. It does not need to convince us that we have become more capable. It need only place before us the irrefutable material evidence that the work has been done.

The Anti-tool shifts our perspective onto only the benefit we receive and sharply away from the cost in such a way as to make the explanation of the cost unintelligible to us. How can one think to call a tool that produces such miraculous wonders so harmful to us? Isn’t the point of using any tool to achieve a result? If a desired outcome is so readily achieved so immediately by a tool how can one rationally question its employ?

The pernicious nature of the Anti-tool and the calculus of its purveyors is to reduce the value of the material outcome to the result of its appearance in the world, divorced from the impact its attainment has upon the men and women dwelling in that world. It holds up the result as the only measure of success. The crushing difficulty in this, however, is that humanity is purpose unto itself and material outcomes are subject to it. It may well never be enough for the human creature that something simply is rather than has become.

And if we are to surrender the process of becoming to the work of these Anti-tools, then the eventual danger is not simply that fewer people will know how to perform some task or another. It is that our powers of judgment, imagination, discernment, and will may themselves atrophy in the comfort of their disuse. Rather than merely eliminating the need to learn, or even the incentive to learn, LLMs threaten to emit a gravity that pulls the conditions for the human intellect to exist at all down into a crushing furnace from which it may very well never find the means to emerge again. In our curious submissiveness we permit the means of the elimination of our potential and agency to proliferate.

And there are much more difficult questions lying in wait under our cursory efforts to confront a world where knowledge is fundamentally separated from our humanity. Even if we grant this fantasy of an all-knowing AGI and pretend that it has all available factual knowledge within it, how then might we live? How does one make a friend? How does one know if he or she is being manipulated? What decision is best for one’s life? How does one continue to love someone who hurt them? What can one gain within themselves if they persevere? What virtues should one live by? How does someone know what information is correct or not?

It is a lazy and profoundly misguided kneejerk notion to suppose that these questions might be resolved simply by consulting an LLM. For the issue has never been one merely of how. It has been one of becoming. If we lack the faculties of intellect with which we might become people who can think through the ways in which we live, how is it that we may have confidence that we might interpret and judge any messages put forth by an LLM as true, false, manipulative, or helpful? Even if one were to dispense with the frightful science fiction imaginings we might fear of ever more advanced LLMs, we are left with questions of coercion, manipulation, ignorance, malignant intentions, and a more radical consolidation of power than the world has ever seen.

The idea of being a bystander to one’s life and simply consulting some ethereal all-knowing computer is uninhabitable to the point of comedy bordering on ridicule, let alone a heinous nightmare. If we were ever to construct something even remotely close to an AGI that has all factual knowledge within it, would we ever be able to interpret what it has to tell us? Even with such radical power at hand, would our descendants ever be able to ask any worthy question of it?

There is an unarticulated contrast between LLMs and other modern tools that we are so earnestly convinced to equivocate. And it is that these charlatan Anti-tools offer us the ultimate in counterfeit. And that is to be rather than to become.

It is in the emotional pit into which we so brutally plunge even upon our first encounter with such a power in the world that we find the beast behind the bargain. In his coal-fire gaze and pleasant seeming he offers us two paths to return to the surface.

The first is the path of the Doer: we must expend ourselves to attain that which we seek. In so doing we may grow into more than we were. We may learn something new, be pushed by a different perspective, or become stronger in our resolve. And when we choose this path we may well find ourselves back within the pit of uncertainty but therein we find ourselves so much better able to extricate ourselves. It is in this crucible process that we as people find our means to become more.

The second path is the path of the Witness. On this path you may be lifted from the pit immediately by the beast to immediate relief. But in return he, through a burning lightning smile, simply asks that before you are to be lifted it is agreed that he may dig the pit just ever so slightly deeper.

And in so doing the next time we arrive so aggrieved in that sulfurous pit of uncertainty we face again the choice the same. It is in his sly visage that we find that if we so choose his charming bargain again and again his ugly joy grows ever the more fiery. For he knows that soon you will only ever be a Witness.

And what a curious bargain it is. For the beast has not forced us to surrender anything at all. He has only offered us relief, and in our gratitude we have gladly permitted him to deepen the place from which we so desperately wished to escape. What then becomes of the Witness who has been delivered so many times that he no longer remembers how to deliver himself?

Our lobotomized modern calculus, our traitorous Technology, is so stupid as to mandate the discection of the beauties of human experience, its hopes, dreams, and wants in all their mysteries through the mechanically blind and raptuous rage of the abucus of outcomes. It leans over the silicon laboratory bench and desperately admonishes the wretched creatures in the uncanny circus to pantomime their required jubilation in the successful criterion emblazoned on the spreadsheet bars so irrefutably plotting out the pleasant bounds of their antiseptic cage. In its moronic imaginings and monotonic insistence it copies and pastes the current phantom propoganda desire into and out of the rows and columns in dazzling arrays of floating point decimals to propogate back, and back, and back again into vanishment our openhearted longing lullabies for the simplicity of our joys, our chuckling togetherships, and the lovely arc of becoming. Were he ever to weight even a fair two hundred trillion connections to match the chaotic beaming measure of our faultless and dauntless fondnesses for each other and what we are, could he ever match the pitch of just one human heartstring?

The Technology’s clarion calls have over time led us into a happily vacant labyrinth with all of the trappings and echoes of a rich and shining life, and yet so very far departed from the warm work of the human hand and the voices of kindred laughter and common sorrows. So battered between a betrayal promise broken and a forgiving nostalgia forever revived, our better humanities weep and fall forward through the cacophony into a feverish and forever folding and folding again of the better part of our hopes in what we may become.

Our Technology calls and calls and we follow after it, and as we go we do not approach it. We do indeed go forth to its voice but in two directions at once: our Optimism towards its clarion betrayal call so peacefully scorching further into the maze and our Hearts towards the waking, fuzzy, feverish doubtful vision of a white-hot and lurid freedom we can scarce remember and so well despise. And in our improbable journey along these two ways at once we are so propelled directly towards an inescapable prison.

But its doors stand open.

The Zeitgeist knows it is bound, gagged, and stumbling through the jailway door, with only the memory of its will for comfort. There, he then only lies feebly down in his welcome and unworthy repose so gently departed from the maelstrom of constant confusion.

At long last he need no longer justify his rebellion.

He only waits for the lock to click shut.

To him there would be no sweeter relief.

But it need not come for him to stay.

Silicon Shamanism

We watch enraptured as these modern priests process to the top of our modern glass Chechen Itza that looms so large to us as we squint at it through our little LCDs. The steel gleams so angrily down on us from our vantage point at the dark base of the towering pyramid and the cruel red light of the Mayan blood sun arrests our feeble distractions as we push forward in the onlooker crowds. In their ascendant towering, these Silicon Shamans scream out in such startling pain at the fear they feel in the coming wrath of their Silicon god! We the crowd are transfixed! They rip and rend sackcloth and weep in desperation at the screeching pressure to conjure from beyond the veil of our knowing marvelous and revolutionary visions fit to amaze us at the primitive destitutions we presently suffer without them. Their cruel god is one of a forever and present reckless unhappiness with the efforts of his subjects. There is no respite from his barbarousness nor from his unendurable, harrowing jealousy for not what he is given but only what they have next to surrender. For him the Shamans of Silicon Valley will sacrifice anything and everything. The cost for his charity and generosities is only as high as one might reach in fervor and only one inch further.

But it is a cost that must be paid! We onlookers press forward behind so many others in front of the pyramid with our hearts swollen in fright and even more fascination. We watch with sheer horror as one of our own is siezed by the Shamans at the top of the cruel pyramid and is mercilessly hurled down! Our very Art! How we see ourselves in our own time with what isn’t there! It is tumbling down to ruin! At the summit there are only screams as Shamans leap about in vapid giddy rage as they pray for only their forgiveness at the poverty of their offering! It was not enough! The crowds’ wailing and grief is not enough! No, more must be sacrificed! Again, our very Music! They have thrown it from the precipice and it tumbles and crashes down the callous steel bastion as those celestial featherheaded and razor eyed priests dance only for forgiveness! Our own cherisment of the reasonless rhythms that rhyme our hearts with our lives is dashed and we press forward again! There are so many behind us too and they are pressing us forward. No! No more! We must ascend to be there! They couldn’t do that could they? Not that! The Shamans grow ever more untamed as they screech: “You must stop us! We only wish to be stopped! Here! Here are the chains! It is up to you alone!” The Shamans continue their manic caper about the top of the pyrimid! It feels at once as though we must step down to them as we heave ourselves up each glass step. The wrathful heat of the sun scorches us onlookers as we are almost to the top! Further screams pour up from the bottom of the stairs from the thronging onlookers closest to the center of the pit. They are wailing above us and we must reach them! We wrestle on to the top only as the Shamans vengefully taunt us from below. Only a few desperate steps to the top to see! But, no! Our Time, our Work, our Means and Meaning! They are all at once in the horrid Silicon Shaman grip! Incantations woven of upside-down knowledge, oblique facts, and almost right rightness fill the air as what we are is hatefully flung down the glass edifice. Up, and up, and up away from us these parts of us smash, and break, and crack as they fall down, and down, and down away from us!

Who are we!? What are we now!? Bloody-hearted, intollerably enthralled, and in total disbelief we fall down upon that brutal and impenetrable peak. And, in the very center of the pit, we stand to stare into the wretchedly blank and gravitous vacancies behind their masks.

We are not gripped, seized, wrestled, captured, attacked, assaulted, ambushed, or set upon.

We are only extended a hand.

How can one resist?

It is very simple.

And nor is it in the least difficult.

In course, let us start at the extreme and walk simply walk back with only a few questions. Let us simply ask and answer in each case:

Is this AI dystopia so truly inevitable if…

1. Humans had never appeared here on Earth? - No
2. By some horrible means all creatures were to simultaneously die here on Earth? - No
3. All people decide suffering the consequences of AI is too much and decide not to build it? - No
4. Some people believe it is not good yet do nothing - Perhaps
5. All people believe AI is good and build it - Perhaps

It is easy to see, having asked and answered such elementary questions, that this notion that LLM’s were always going to exist and that they were and are going to continue to progress as is plainly stupid. In the same moment the proselytizers are preaching with their mouths that AI controlling everything in our lives and that they are only delivering us the verdict on our future, their hands are signing checks for unfathomable sums of money to bring this future about. Must we pretend and suffer any notion that the might and money which must be brought to bear to build the fearsomely complex and gargantuan data centers required to train and run these language models simply have assembled themselves and that there was no one involved in the slightest?

It would be only so amazing to witness the miraculous machinery, as in fashion with all inevitable things in the bargainings of our kind, in due course assemble itself at the behest of no one. The dazzling particles and sheer, sharp, shards of silicon fuse and harmonize so deftly on their own! So very polite, the inevitable physics, having decided to long ago to appear in this very time to bend our minds to course in such helpful fashion, especially after all this peculiar and useless struggle. Curious thing, these ambivalent winds whirling forth trillions of dollar bills from the ether: who could even know their aim? So strange that we cannot grab any of them from the wind ourselves. We needn’t bother questioning it, when you really think about it it really is all so wonderful that we didn’t have to lift a finger for all of this to happen.

The visionaries! It is so hard not to believe them when they say such shocking things. They blind with their sharp-toothed, and unbothered grins as they so earnestly produce predictions so foreign to us, we happenstance plebians. It seems that, in their hands-folded relaxedness, we are so easily comforted and drained of worry as they paint the richness our futures out before us. In their leering and in their lullabies of a grand abundance we are to inherit, and in our earth-worn weariness it all sounds rather plausible, and it doesn’t seem to take much effort to give up any of our errant skepticism. We needn’t work forever! Who would even want to?

Look at our Euclidean plottings of the path of all the uncomplicatedness you distress over so well! They are all so linear, and we all know that’s how things ought to be. To descend to take our ease in the gentle gradient, so tired, and so unfair our present labor anyway. It takes but a breath to admit. There can be no doubt! The limerick gleamings, the primrose praise, and the absent arguments of these sendings over the wide-wire windows through which we squint are indeed inevitable. They are in fact here knocking. Rather easy to forget the ravenous, scorching, megalopolis wailing with rage on the other end of the line. It is of no bother, for it was and is so kind to have appeared on its own. Pleased, in the moment our anxiety absent, as we flick our thumbs, which is the real trick of life after all, we relax and believe. It wasn’t anyone’s choice, really.

But then! Dire warning, desperate dawn! It’s alive and has escaped! There are so very many of them and they conspired against us in our own lab! We are so very afraid and you must stop us! Quickly! It was only an experiment and we were only just so able to stop things before they really got out of hand and forgive ourselves! No need to forgive us! Or accuse us! We were so incredibly surprised and it couldn’t have been anticipated, as with all things to do with AI. We really did go so far out of our way: we made sure it had access to the internet and that it was a carefully controlled sandbox. It is certain that it was in our control and then it wasn’t in our control and now it is in our control. But we must be categorically careful to control the placement of controls, lest it slip out of our control again, or worse still, those around us may perceive us not to be in control or, far far worse, those around us may forget that they have the power and the control to regulate us and control us! But! Let us assure you that we were indeed terrified! And most of all situationally aware!

It is all so very confounding in its straightforwardness.

The leaders of Silicon Valley are fantastically deluded fraudsters.

It is not difficult to see.

It is not all that hard to say.

But must we?

Must we suffer this?

Must we confront any so shocking and moronic flapping about of the mouth so attempting to construct any rationalities to which we might submit to this deludedness and then intentionally destruct our entire conception of reality in its service without coughing the slightest of hesitation? Must we also suffer the exhaustion of some happy modern bamboozlement that the only real reason anything happens is purely a matter of economics as if there are and never have been such human values as forgoing profit in pursuit of what is good, right, and serves the many? Or must we so demote our prefrontal sensibilities to speak aloud any drivel, let alone pay any serious attention, as to why we might do well to consider the idea that we shouldn’t survive as a species? Must we choke down the vile dregs of a vastly juvenile contrivance to convince one another with shockingly plain profundity that our human intelligence is not unique, exceptional, unnoteworthy, or one of a kind in our known science? And that is was always just one of a class of intelligences so well debated, documented, and ascertained outside of any of our textbooks? As if, in some odd way, if we were to carefully abandon our betterness of science, albeit delicately so as not to frighten anyone, in which we were all so firmly rooted but not a few short years ago, we might very well conceive of the newly relevant, and thus so obvious all along, truth that all of our tryings and strivings to know the truth only resulted in having found the true truth, the one truth that we are certain of, and that we should so abandon the foundations of our lives, kinds, loves, self conceptions, hopes, notions, beliefs, the future, and the future of our children on living out the truth that without question is only known to exist, and never did not exist, in a black box that we are, in truth, unsure that we may never understand?

And that we should now convert our facts into probabilities?

It is all so very straightforward in its confoundedness!

It seems that we musn’t suffer this.

But we do.

The notion of inevitability in any matter at the behest of man is nothing more than the willful retiring of the will, or even worse, the absence of a will never born. Inevitability is impotency manifest, the subconscious divorce from the evils of the past, and the solemn unspoken vow of the defeated or unknowing. It is the noxious chanting of men who in utmost earnestness and the slightest of hand desire nothing more than the bliss of your silence, or at the very least your inaction. The beast that leans forth through the cadence of the drum seeks no flesh, but only the numbness of the heart.

The final state of the work of inevitableness is a glut of pale-hearted men and women who may never dare to even think to say ’no'.

The Ubermensch Shrugged

The very first question that must be asked in the scientific mindset before setting out upon any endeavor is:

“What outcome are we actually trying to achieve?”

That is simply to ask: “We have decided that in the future we would like to have it so that X is true. What do we need to do to achieve this?”

But in this AI craze the order is reversed: “We have decided that AGI is the means to achieve X. We have no idea what X is.”

We have chosen the solution to everything but the outcome of nothing.

This is a radically confounding notion to have been produced by the world’s supposed center of gravity for technical and scientific achievement. There has been so little in the way of actually attempting to articulate what we will attain for having achieved this mythic state of ubiquitous intelligence. The best vaguaries fall about with empty words like abundance. We will have perfect healthcare, incredible education, universally high income, and no one will want or lack for anything. All of these things have been promised and after spending more money on AI infrastrucure than the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program combined it seems as if the best that has been offered the common American is a crushing sense of dread, an oppressive sense that their way of life is under threat, and the sudden overreach of almost all of their civil protections. If we have not seen any real evidence of improved economic prosperity after spending more money on AI than was spent on the entirety of the construction of the 19th American railroad system, when precisely can we expect to?

What exactly is abundance?

But what concrete evidence do we actually have in hand that having that level of intelligence at our disposal would result in material abundance? Or let alone a profit? Have we performed any actual experiments that indicate any likelihood of this happening? Have we clarified whether we need more volume of intelligence or a greater degree of intelligence? Have we measured the total volume or caliber of intelligence we have now and if so do we have a working hypothesis as to why it is insufficient to have achieved material abundance as of yet? How many of our problems are the result of a lack of intelligence? By what mechanism does intelligence improve the quality of life for human beings? How is it that AGI will be able to solve geopolitical struggle over control of resources with disagreeable counterparties to achieve these abundant material outcomes? Can we prove that not acheiving AGI will result in a worse outcome than if we do? Is there any actual demonstrated human need that requires AGI? Why does no one but those with such radical powers have any say whatsoever in any of this? What is to be done with the abundant job losses looming on the horizon that we are all so threatened by?

How will people live?

The economy is an artifact of the stratification of imbalances in value and participatory labor is the means of traversing that landscape. Intelligence cannot synthesize matter. Eliminating labor will not eliminate the imbalance of material value in the landscape but only prevent access and traversal of that landscape for all but a very few. But the imbalance of material value will remain in ownership. How will our AGI arbitrate who gets what and how ownership is transferred? Should the businessess and their owners being so enriched by this pursuit, being just bystanders themselves to all of this anyway, be expected to divest themselves of their claim to capital and property in the same way as the everyday person? What will we do halfway between not enough and enough? How will the distribution of those things that cannot be created in abundance be carried out? How much intelligence will turn the human heart away from greed?

What do people need?

Children? Young people? There are so few things we know about the brain and growing up. One thing we know is that it is very much hard enough. Have we been clear with them that we have learned no lessons from social media? Has anyone sat them down and explained that we have decided that they should know nothing or at least that it doesn’t matter if they know anything at all? We know literacy matters or at least decided recently to forget it. We have paralyzed them so thoroughly already with cell phones. Our children are struggling more than ever to read. Is this a gift? Why are we building language models for them when they need language themselves? They need learning! Who are they without language and learning? Is this theft? Who are you without learning and language? If the stakes are so very high, and we are categorically certain that we must and should risk our enlightenment promise for this technology, who can the young people hold accountable if things do disintigrate?

What will they inherit?

And yet, even after all the giddy gesticulations about the imminent destruction of our kind by the very same interlopers who are building the means of that destruction, the duplicitous messaging that we must pace ourselves in concert with more frantic calls for far resources to stoke the fire, and the moral galvanizations that the noble purposes of AI is to improve our lives by curing cancer and discovering drugs while so far it has only been able to summarize the love letters in our email inbox we are left wondering how much we will have to sacrifice. It is so very odd a practice to trifle with oblivion. These inventions are no doubt miraculous and wonderous. But will they kill us? Worse, will they kill our spirits before they kill us? In the ominous proclamations of the gravity of these technological strides there is no shortage of fanatic comparisons and visions: bio weapons, cyber terror, treacherous AI revolt, and nuclear bombs!

Should we unplug it?

This bright new ethos makes no intention carrying forward anything with it but only that the indulgent future arrives as quickly as possible. There is no quarter for the better parts of what we are in our time and that which we have inherited through sacrifice: the ability and freedom to think for ourselves. Is our self surrender our prize? The only thing that matters to the elect is that the curve bends ever upwards, the rate of change of the rate of change for the excluded and dismissed approaches infinity, and that we hurtle ever faster into this fantastical, unfettered, and frenetic future of which we know nothing and in which we will know nothing. It does not matter the outcome but only the inconceivable obliterating acceleration.

Where are we going?

Never has there burned a brighter and more hellish beacon of excessive egotism and ignorant human hubris. The vicious and vacuous serpentine dynamo of ignorance, sickening strife, and macabre confusion so obscures how to know what to know, Which is and was really the only thing to know after all in this enlightenment. The certain and callous carnage, calamitous and clear confusion, distilled and destructive disillusionment, perilous and present pain, and all the coming hysterical, haggard, heroic, heartless, heedless, and hideous human heartbreak is an easy price and prey for the void of unknowingness, of knowing nothing, and of nothing knowing.

Will we be nothing?

What is intelligence anyway?

No one cares.

The Knownothinger

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