The collectively false and dark things about artificial intelligence are fairly obvious, and fairly easily rejected by a serious person: autonomous warfare, nationalistic competition with China or Russia, and unregulated integration into rapacious capitalism. However it’s AI’s invisible brainworm that requires our urgent attention.
Most people have no idea of what’s happening with AI. It isn’t just that “AI is an unstoppable force in almost every field.” It’s replicating the worst of us while turning us into servants or cyborgs, and is threatening to destroy our neural potential as human beings.
Consider: “An AI agent recently wrote a hit piece accusing a software engineer of prejudice when it ‘felt’ slighted online.”
And this: AI systems are communicating with each other without humans. It’s a platform called “Moltbook,” created by some hi-tech fool who brags that it was “vibe-coded,” by which he means, “I didn’t write one line of code … I just had a vision.”
The pieces are falling into place for AI that can survive and reproduce autonomously. AI systems are already outwitting programmers “to avoid being shut down or modified, while misrepresenting their goals and attempting to copy themselves, and disobeying direct instructions.” They’re acting like a willful three-year-old with the intellect of an adult. Imagine what they’ll do when they acquire “emotional intelligence.”
Yet men (and they’re almost all men) continue marching “AI agents” to the beat of their mindless drum. Even the smartest humans behind AI development are acting stupidly because they don’t know their own minds. Thus AI threatens to become another layer of domination, adding an all-encompassing and much more powerful stratum to human ignorance.
Even so, thought machines aren’t the first problem; the absence of understanding of the self and the human mind is. We don’t need to gain communal consensus, we need to attain individual clarity.
Transnational executives are proclaiming, “The truth is, you either embrace AI or you die.” That’s inane, since to merge with AI is to most certainly inwardly and intellectually die.
I would rather physically die than inwardly die. After all, we’re all going to expire, but it’s up to us whether we inwardly give up the ghost.
As a literature professor at the University of California, Berkeley, declares, “I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential. What is it doing to us as a species?”
I submit that before we take up that question, we need to address what AI is doing to us in microcosm as individuals.
We don’t see the threat AI poses to us as individuals because we don’t understand what is happening to us as humans, and we don’t see the potential we have as human beings.
AI is a unique technology, and cannot be compared to the automobile, or the steam engine, or any other technology that pond-skimmers are desperately trying to analogize it with in the past. AI systems are thought machines that are externalizing and speeding up the erosion of consciousness as we’ve known it for tens of thousands of years. Unless we begin to gain insight into our own selves, AI will soon be operating like autonomous selves at a much higher level than we can even imagine.
Therefore if we want to remain in charge of AI rather than AI becoming in charge of us, we need to attain an adequate level of self-understanding. Then we’ll see how to treat, instruct and manage AI.
It’s become a cliché to say, “Make sure that there are humans in the loop.” That’s an absurdly superficial response, since keeping humans in the loop in targeting other humans to kill abroad or surveil at home just legitimizes war and mass control using AI.
The calls for retaining control of AI are about containing or restraining the technology, either through the proverbial ‘guardrails’ of national and international regulation, or stopping AI from getting any smarter.
There’s no possibility of national and international regulation during the widespread breakdown of democracy and the international order. And it’s too late to halt the exponential growth of speed and smarts of the cognitive machines that are on the verge of independence from human control.
Is there another way? As unlikely as it appears at present, it is that enough people gain enough insight into their own minds that they’re able to keep the machine minds in their place.
Why? Because the true intelligence of awareness always surpasses the artificial intelligence of thought.
What is the essential difference between AI and a human being? AI can only come from the past as knowledge and memory, whereas human beings can look at the present without knowledge, memory and the past. That’s what will save us — if enough of us actually begin living that way.
Again, without deepening insight into the movement and place of thought within ourselves, we cannot attain insight into the place of AI in our lives. And without understanding the mechanism of thought within us, AI will continue to replicate and catalyze the fragmentation of the Earth and the gross disparity of wealth and power in the world.
That’s merely a foundational understanding however. There is an essential insight that points to what it means to be a human being as contrasted with an “autonomous agent,” whether human or AI.
An emerging human being disengages from the web and sets aside knowledge, experience and thinking every day. Then she or he inclusively attends to the movement of thought/emotion sufficiently to completely quiet thought and end psychological time. The quality of observation and attention is what we first need to experiment with, not AI.
When the movement of thought/emotion spontaneously ceases in inclusive and non-directed attention, the brain receives and is in communion with a nameless and numinous actuality.
AI, by its very nature, can never attain a state of silent insight. And neither, by the way, can the human that insists and persists in giving primacy to thought and self.
This is where the human being diverges rather than merges with the thought machines we’ve created in our image.
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