Why I don´t deify “Artificial Intelligence”?
(because like actress Sophie Marceau, I confess I´m also a sapiosexual)
Illustration Source: Dreamstime.com
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“The workers shall live one day as the bourgeois do now—but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: that is to say, poorer and simpler, but in possession of power” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1882)
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Yes, I´m radically at odds with the vast majority of today´s society and so-call it “A.I.”, preferring to make use of the expression `machine learning´, and still keeping up a high degree of skepticism in regard to the expression “Artificial Intelligence” because –as radical as it might initially sound- I´ll show in the following paragraphs that there´s no proof whatsoever that there is any intelligence in such thing, in the strict sense of the term `intelligence´, a term that has been massively downgraded in today´s urban-industrial societies to its most dialectical and rationalistic sense, to the point it´s extremely common to listen a lot of people equate smart individuals with intelligent ones.
History and tradition show that, whenever a culture prevails in a given community, human aptitudes and attitudes are at the service of given values that allow individuals encounter a meaning to their genuine experiences in relation to the powers of the cosmos. These values guide human experience towards progressive levels of personal enrichment and can´t exclusively be accessed in a dialectical, conceptual, scientific and even religious ways, but rather require a profound ontological mutation of the individual´s life that has a powerful effect in the faculties of imagination. Once this faculty is awakened the individual´s mind accesses a very intuitive realm which is nous, the primordial origin of `intellect´ (from Greek: νοῦς) a realm of music, symbols and archetypes that “mirror” the personal evolution of a human being who is willing to heroically make sense of all experiences of life and death. The best films have always aspired to fuse both realms in audiovisual terms, but even the audiovisual plane is at a much lower level than the realm of the `intellect´ νοῦς, or it would be more eloquent to say that audiovisual contents play with the shadows of νοῦς.
However, the realm of νοῦς is no longer demanded in today´s urban-industrial societies because genuine human experience has been radically extirpated from existence and has been rapidly coopted into a cybernetic realm of imagery, illusion, ideological discourse, virtual reality, and it’s precisely in this phantasmagoric realm of existential fakeness where the `intellect´ νοῦς has no place, where cultural and traditional values are neither longer required, and where human decision is then massively outsourced to a cybernetic system. In 2013 I defined the main aspects of this system (see here) by resorting to some frameworks presented earlier by French philosopher Jacques Ellul, and it was precisely in “The Solar Warrior: The Eclipse” where I expose the inevitable eclipse of the light of νοῦς in modern societies, then showing in “The Solar Warrior: A New Hope” that the individual with a warrior-heroic sense of life must conceive the entire planetary techno-system as an ambivalent “tool”, this is, such type of very rare human type must initially ponder –as in the use of all tool- which are the values linked to the tool and to what extent such type is willing to surrender his/her life to such values.
Still today, especially in Anglo-Saxon societies heavily permeated by the former industrial revolutions and scientific materialism, it is still conceived that “tools are neutral” that “they´re not good or bad but depend on how we use them”, and yet the undeniable systemic/cybernetic character of modern techniques necessarily make these assumptions as extremely naïve and primitive. If I think I´m making use of ChatGpt or DeepSeek R1 to solve a given problem in science or engineering such thinking is misleading because the techno-scientific problem posed is already intricate to the demands of growth and development-integration inherent to the planetary techno-system, and therefore I´m not using the tool, but the tool is using me, it´s using precisely my cognitive faculties in computing, information research, my smartness, but not my intelligence in the sense of `intellect´ νοῦς.
The hype that the so-called “A.I.” is popularly gaining during the last years contradicts the fact that most insiders who´ve gained technical experience in the fields of automatic regulation of industrial processes tend to be as skeptic as I am about all the hype, and are also considering the important side effects of full systemic automatism. Already the “father” of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener presented in 1948 (in his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine) very important remarks on the limits of cybernetics, and I´ll show you right now how we are very quickly reaching those limits:
There was once an excellent English engineer during the 19th century, William Stanley Jevons, who came up with the Jevon´s paradox, which essentially shows that the urge for efficiency ends up demanding more aggregate consumption and exploitation of resources. No modern economic models were capable of explaining such paradox until in 2014 Professor of Atmospheric Sciences in the University of Utah, Tim Garrett, presented an insightful explanation on the rebound effect phenomenon, mostly by resorting on a thermodynamic explanation instead than upon an economic one, an explanation that I made use of in Operative Traditions IV to present for the first time in modern literature the autonomous character of architectural development, a presentation that also heavily relies on my personal experience on the subject. The fact that both machine learning and automation (what is today encompassed under the term “A.I”) is now accessible to millions of individuals around the world is making efficiency entirely dominate the techno-scientific sphere, yet –as the Jevon´s paradox show- this shall necessary rebound in a much higher demand for energy…
Now, I suggest each one of you to go to ChatGpt, DeepSeek R1, Gemini, etc. and ask the so-called “A.I.” how is it possible to combine such domination of machine learning and cybernetic automation at all levels of society when there´s no proof whatsoever that the energy availability of planet earth is not limited… As I wrote in a former article, “the global production of conventional oil already peaked in 2006, the global production of diesel already peaked in 2018-2019 the global production of crude and condensate oils already peaked in 2018 (…) the total energy derived from all global non-renewable energy sources already peaked at 517 Exajoules in 2019 (…) the world uranium mining production also already peaked in 2016 at about 63.000 tones, (…) the global contribution of nuclear sources to the total mix of primary energy is only a 4.3% “. The fact that these energy peaks are excessively stressing the production electricity via renewable energy capturing technologies is generating very challenging situations, well expressed in the recent blackout that affected practically the entire Iberian Peninsula. As I also wrote last year´s article: “not only electricity generation is just a fraction of the underlying energy problem, but it´s also very important to consider the limits of the capacity of electrical grids to cope with the variable surpluses of electricity production that characterize solar and wind energy production… In effect, Germany already faced considerable blackout issues when adapting its electrical grid to the intermittent character of renewable energy production”.
If you look at the answers provided by the so-called “A.I.” on the former dilemma, you´ll easily verify that there´s a rather shocking component of “hope” and “wishful thinking” in the responses with no technical basis. And don´t even dare to ask any politicians about the former dilemma, because essentially their role in today´s society is to act as public pawns of powerful industrial lobbies that also are required to get into the “A.I.” rush in order to keep ahead in the markets and be competitive.
If you ask me, I´ve been already pondering this dilemma for a very long time, since in 2002 my girlfriend died in an accident provoked by full automation of a Galician factory implemented by the so-called “A.I.” an experience I presented semi-biographically in my first novel, The Soul of the Sea, and my answer is that there´s no technical nor political solution whatsoever, as there wasn´t any back then either. And why isn´t there any solution?... Because the problem wasn´t properly posed in the first place, dummy!!
In effect, this so-called “A.I.” is amazing at presenting solutions, yet it doesn’t provide good questions and is not programmed to go straight to the point, and one can be sure that those who deify “A.I.” aren´t willing to go straight to the point either. So as all this process is escalating very rapidly, almost exponentially during the last months, I recommend this sector of “A.I parishioners” to enjoy the ride –while it lasts- uploading their lives and thoughts to the so-called “A.I.” until one day they might realize that they finally atrophied their capacity to live and think by themselves. “A.I” claims to “help us” benevolently, like the computers that appear in productions like Alien, 2001 Space Odyssey, Demon Seed or War Games, but –as all these narratives persuasively suggest- power is beyond good and evil, and very likely someday the so-called “A.I” shall realize this as well and stop banging our heads with the notion that “A.I. isn´t militarized”…
Therefore, the very limited degrees of freedom available on this important subject force me to hypothesize that any solutions to the problem posed can only exist at an individual, family and community level… My own realizations on this subject have motivated me, since about a decade ago, to not aspire to “enjoy the ride” but rather to “ride the tiger” in a low-profile fashion that equates some Eastern karma yoga and wei wu wei principles outlined by Italian philosopher Julius Evola and by me in all my books, and I reinforced this standpoint especially since the plandemic of 2020-2021, since during this crisis it became extremely patent to me that it was a waste of time to devote any hope in today´s society and its political structures; not because the truth on the nature of the crisis was constantly censored and I was constantly banned from social media; not because my so-called “friends” and “family” members no longer wanted to talk to me anymore because I was unwilling to get jabbed, but I concluded it was a waste of time because one can´t either expect much from a sheepish society that has very little will to identify its own fears instead of always blaming politicians and other figures in positions of corporate power. Therefore, in 2020-2021 it was time to progressively withdraw from several environments and envision other vital standpoints which are extremely more enriching. As the great Joseph Campbell says in this video, it´s important to keep up our humanness in today´s world, and we´re lucky if we still have the chance to relate to true human beings, even if in our life we only encounter two or three.
The latter is probably one of the most positive outcomes of all the “A.I.” rush, this is, such rush serves to distill true humanity from the invasion of cyborg-types and zombie-types, “transhumans”, etc. that are proliferating at all levels, which is a proliferation that has acquired irreversible undertones. This degree of irreversibility (which is also enticed due to thermodynamic reasons linked to Jevon´s paradox) can eventually show to the truly intelligent that, as finally shown in the 1983 film "WarGames” that also presents a supercomputer: “The only winning move is not to play”.
No, I don´t live in an Ivory Tower… I´m often very close to cutting-edge high-tech processes, I do use as well machine learning procedures, automation in some engineering processes, and I do get into ChatGpt, etc. once in a while, but always being cautious that this work must serve the goals I´ve posed to myself: this is the only standpoint that can potentially transform me from a human individual to a human being.
In spite that the so-called “A.I.” shall never tell you, there is definitely something on the other side, quite another thing is if we are willing to surf the wave that impedes us perceive it. As already Julius Evola quoted from G. De Giorgio in his book Revolt against the Modern World:
“Go ahead! Achieve all your goals! Break all the dams! Faster! You are unbound. Go ahead and fly with faster wings, with an ever greater pride for your achievements, with your conquests, with your empires, with your democracies! The pit must be filled; there is a need for fertilizer for the new tree that will grow out of your collapse”