Is it a demon? A slowly-evolving superbrain ready to destroy humanity the minute it connects to the internet? Perhaps it is nothing more than a manmade algorithm that cannot produce anything more than a fizzle of artificial wit.
Before we move on to what is exactly happening in terms of the being of the AI, I want to get it out of the way: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not going to take over the world. It is not secret and evil, hiding, molting, waiting for its time to dominate. It is not a demon. AI, in its most efficient form, is an algorithm so complex that it can mimic speech patterns, understand language based off of innumerable examples to the point when you ask ChatGPT in the laziest way possible, it can generally figure out what you want even without provided context. It isn’t intelligent. It is efficient.
This is the prime directive of technological society — all operations are teleologically obligated to the quickest and most efficient ends. That is the telos. The ethos only derives from a consumerist conception of right and wrong — contractual rights and contractual consent. Everything in technology is primarily oriented towards the ends of an efficient machine as to prevent any possible consumer complaints, and to streamline processes, etc.
The AI is simply the hermitization of this into one process, but in the realm of essence. It has no form or matter. It is a mechanical brain, but its prime motive, which can never be changed, is efficiency. Even if the AI made is programmed to be extremely inefficient, its end is still to output the desired result ASAP without any hiccups. That is its being.
Zeitgeist
After the toilet and light-switch became ubiquitous, along came skyscrapers, then cars, then paved roads. This all happened in the span of forty or fifty years. You could have witnessed all of it from the age of twenty to sixty-five. The spirit of the age was shifted for the first time in history in such a drastic way, and with that, the ultimate internalization of Descartes’ cogito - mind separate from body - as the foundation of human experience. The seeds of individualism and the believer’s baptism finally culminated in an era of the self separate from not only the group, but even its own self. Everything was redefined - love, happiness, freedom, reality, etc - into a variety of non-meanings only meant to glorify the individual. All of this which can be easily seen in the live, laugh, love philosophy of modern people. All meaning now became an object of the eye of the beholder only experienced as “their truth” in “their reality.”
Individualism as a milieu would naturally eat through a society without a proper connection to logos, and it has surely ravaged throughout the nations of the earth, though some more than others. Because of this, the direction of technology orients towards the self. If it was oriented towards community, technology would have taken a much different form. One that is impractical without the inherence of multiplicity. Like a board game that can only be played between two or more people.
AI has emerged as the ultimate end to a selfish society. Where now the experience of reality being primarily through channels of the internet (the hyperreal), the most efficient self-directed way towards knowledge is a mechanical brain that spews out facts and has a handy way of using language and understanding language that benefits the user.
Breaking down the AI is simple when you understand why it actually exists. How it works is even more straightforward than that. It exists because it needs to, it must, it was already going to. Inasmuch humanity has the capability to continually produce mechanical brains that can input information and output needed results, it will. It just will never solve any ethical or spiritual problems. A machine does not have a soul, and can never truly mimic it. It is simply feeding us information. It will always do that.
The movie Bicentennial Man, based on Phillip K. Dick’s book by the same name, is a great example of cartesian cogito wherein a robot becomes a man throughout the movie through several different events and surgeries. The experience of being as told from the moral of this story is that it is purely subjective, and the human experience can be artificially formed. This is the crux of humans’ fear of AI, among other manmade inventions. The separation of man from logos is the nail in the coffin of this current civilization’s ability to interpret meaning through the medium of its own zeitgeist.
The overhaul of this paradigm will be necessitated in order for us to understand fully the absurd logic of our machine-worship. AI is nothing but a manifestation of the selfish society. The selfish society that isn’t really a society because it is hinged on individualism, anti-rationalism, and worship of the products of our own efficient processes. The AI was needed for us to create the imitation of us as demiurge in order to disregard God as the logos. The AI gives us the ultimate distraction, and in a sense, the final creation of a society hellbent on glorifying the self.
When really, all AI will ever culminate into is a fad that cools off after a decade or so as it is used to make tacky overpriced sex dolls, glorified robot butlers, but most importantly — process efficiency maximizers.
The Future of AI and Logos
It is a major conceit of modern men to indulge their fantasies of eschaton immanentization. Unfortunately, nobody on this planet has enough inspiration to diabolically use AI to do anything other than manipulate information dissemination. It’s still 5GW, 6GW will never come. It will just go back to 3GW. The only telos that drives humanity is the perpetual war, whether macroeconomic domination, microeconomic domination, or just literal violence. What leads people to believe AI is evil is part guilt they have for the selfish technological society, but mostly it is a lack of spiritual intricacy they can see in their daily life; what fraught with perpetual economic struggle.
The supplanting of certain aspects of our world with AI will only do what the car did with the horse-n-buggy. Autonomous processes generally only supplant already-specialized industrially-generated jobs. Just as every other spooky new-fangled gizmo ends up melding together with the machine, so will AI. It is inevitable. It isn’t meant to have agency. Even our own agency is only an agency of appetites.
The experience of AI, in the case of ChatGPT, is the finest example of human innovation towards the self. It is a perceptibly unlimited source of information, and for those willing to utilize it, can learn a lot. Just as when Google or Wikipedia became widely used. The mass of people are still simple and driven by their appetites, and women are still disinterested in STEM. You cannot socially engineer the soul. ChatGPT will go on to become a fantastic auto-didactic tool. For those who use it to pass their tests at “schools” can just go check out my stream I did about modern education for everything they need to know about the value of schooling. It is, for this paradigm, a masterpiece, and its creators go unnoticed.
They go unnoticed mainly because the marvel is the medium-term experience of the new gizmo before something else comes along inevitably. The age of being wooed by CEOs is gone. The toys and inventions are all becoming one in the machine. What is troubling about AI is specifically the reason it exists in the first place. It is meant to supplant logos. It is there to first — marvel at human’s ability to be the demiurge, then secondly — to disenchant us further with the whole purpose to human existence which is community (communion/sacrifice for the other).
This is why the future cannot fall to the selfishness of machine-thinking. We aren’t machines, and the machines either serve us or we serve them. But just like the newest Indiana Jones movie, starring an 80-year-old man who needs a paycheck is literally just fodder for Depend-wearing boomers, the experience of AI has been relatively dull compared to the invention of the smart phone or internet, though it could be easily compared to them. Overtime, the diminishing returns starts to emerge because the human experience is not distilled down to matter (material reality). Just as the fullness of human experience is not war, power, glory, appetites, or wisdom.
AI reveals to us what is terra incognito, just as any great invention or discovery of the post-scientific revolution does. All that could top this is a manned mission to Mars, but even then, it would only happen to fulfill the egos of humanity. Deep down, we know there is no real honor in exploring the vacuum of space. It only reflects the vacuum of our own egos. When AI becomes ubiquitous (in a way, it already is), people will talk about the days about how silly it was we thought AI would destroy the earth like it was another Y2K. In retrospect, the molehills are very plainly seen for what they are.
What is important to understand about AI, though, is that it exists for an ill-fated end of humanity’s modern cultural breakdown. The zeitgeist is dying because it is experiencing massive feedback loops as it becomes completely garbled and distorted. The question of AI is really a question of logos. Without understanding the ontological relevance of man in this equation, not as a maker, but as the made, AI would then seem just like another tool. It is meant for an end of the man, but we treat it as a golden calf. In a sense, it is the amalgamation of all tools into one. Its ontology only has relevance in reference to our own knowledge and experience, much like a child, but its “experience” is only to mimic human responses (in the case of ChatGPT) and human experiences (in the case of robot butler). Just as cleverbot from over a decade ago did — ChatGPT is just a more refined technology.
The real question will be how we experience the decay of this age. The anti-logos is being defeated by its own sophistry and inanity. Its own self-referential feedback loop. But how does logos introduce itself back into a world of technology modeled after serving the self? There has to be a realignment of technology towards community in order for it to be coherent to the most logically communal form of human experience. For a time, it will be bizarre using what we regularly use for the self as a communal item. Though, this is the end of logos — sacrifice to the other. At some point, the other shoe will drop, and humanity will find its way back to truth. Perhaps AI will be there with it just like the autonomous switchboard, computer-generated simulations, and autonomous assembly line robots likely will be.
“The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.”
St. Catherine of Siena