Musk, Harari, and AI

The age of transhumanism is now upon us:

The world of AI is now fully part of our lives, and whether it becomes our ruin or our salvation remains to be seen, but many, including myself, tend to back the former option. It is developing at exponential rates, and it seems there will be no stopping it. A piece penned 10 months ago might already be obsolete, but it tells us of the exceedingly rapid pace of things:

Jensen Huang, the CEO of tech titan Nvidia, has a message for the world about artificial intelligence: You ain’t seen nothing yet. Speaking to a standing room-only audience at the 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit, Huang predicted that in as little as five years AI will be able to pass every test a human takes — not just the legal bar exams that it can complete today, but also highly specialized medical licensing exams.

 

In about 10 years, he said, the computational capabilities of AI systems will be a million times bigger than they are today. Systems synthetically generating data will have greater capacity to continuously learn, infer, and imagine. Instead of only instantly answering questions, forthcoming AI systems will also have the ability to think critically through problems over longer periods of time.

 

“In the future, the way you interact with AI will be very different” from what can be done with ChatGPT and other AI models today, said Huang. https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/nvidias-jensen-huang-incredible-future-ai

And AI is part of the bigger (and badder) world of transhumanism and the like. All this is making brave new world scenarios a present-day reality, not a potential future worry. As such, there is now a regular supply of books coming out on these topics. Last year I discussed 22 such volumes: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/02/27/top-22-books-on-transhumanism-ai-and-the-new-technologies/       

I will soon add another 18 books to that list, again briefly annotating each volume. But one excellent volume is worth highlighting now. I refer to Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen (War Room Books, 2023). Allen knows his stuff, and he is a clever writer to boot.

In some 500 pages he offers us a comprehensive and detailed examination of the AI world we are now becoming, for good or ill. And given that Elon Musk and Yuval Noah Harari are such major players in all this, it is not surprising that Allen spends a fair amount of time discussing each one. Chapter 7, “Homo Deus – A Man of Wealth and Taste” discusses in detail both Harari and Musk.

Both figures can be rather ambiguous, sometimes praising the AI future and sometimes warning against it. Allen says this about the Israeli historian: he is “so put off by the old gods, he fears what will happen when they’re replaced with digital gods, or when tech oligarchs make god-kings of themselves. It will be a pharaonic era of AI wizardry, priestly wire heads, and robotic slaves—a world ruled by cyborg millionaires like Elon Musk and his counterparts in Silicon Valley and China.”

Allen looks at the extensive portfolio of Musk in this area, not least of which is Neuralink, which aims to fuse human brains with AI. Allen examines both men in terms of their threats and promises:

People hate on Harari like he’s cooking up nanobots in his basement. But if you listen beyond the selectively edited sound bytes, it’s obvious he doesn’t exactly promote radical technology. Certainly not like Musk does. It’s more that Harari turns these ideas over like a child inspecting a loaded handgun. You never know when he’s going to point it at you.

 

Harari’s writing tends toward neutral observation, with flashes of sincere aversion to the Machine. But in lectures and interviews, he often sounds like a true believer in the power of tech and the inevitability of its advancement. If the human race is destroyed in the process, well, that’s just history repeating itself with ever increasing volume. At his day job as a professor, I bet the guy’s a thrilling lecturer. But God help you if he corners you at a faculty party.

Both men recognise the eventual obsolescence of human labour, if not humans themselves:

We evolved from apes, Harari explains. Now we’re handing evolution over to the machines. It’s really a matter of mathematical intelligence. Our bodies are genetic algorithms. Our brains are neurological algorithms. Computers are electronic algorithms. Historically, the superior algorithms dominate the reproductive landscape. Evolutionary competition is a brutal game. As this plays out in human culture, Harari openly acknowledges the eugenic implications. It’s a familiar story.

 

After multiplying all the factors, he warns that with machine intelligence added to the stream of history, most humans will probably be subtracted. Once the races are divided up, “unenhanced humans” will be a meager remainder, becoming “the useless class.” And if our employers have no use for us, or if the soulless Machine is simply indifferent to us, we may be subtracted down to zero.

 

“Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness,” Harari writes. “However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.”

 

An autonomous taxi won’t feel anything, he notes, but it will make money more efficiently than a human driver. The same goes for bank clerks, travel agents, stock traders, cops, lawyers, teachers, doctors, soldiers—all slated to be replaced by robo-serfs. “And it is sobering to realize that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional.”

 

Imagine a world run by logic bots who have no sentience or feeling. There’s no soul behind their camera eyes as they herd you into your luxury cage. It’s like a futuristic airport where the planes fly themselves and the microchipped luggage never gets lost—and by the way, you’re the luggage.

 

Musk is on the same page. “AI will make jobs kind of pointless,” he told a Shanghai audience in 2019. “Probably the last jobs that will remain will be writing AI software. Then eventually the AI will just write its own software.” One big difference, though, is that Musk is actively developing artificial intelligence and robot slaves, while Harari merely critiques them. “We’re gonna have to figure out this Neuralnk situation,” Musk continued, staring at the stage-lights. “Otherwise we will be left behind.”

Image of Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity
Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Allen, Joe (Author), Bannon, Stephen K. (Foreword) Amazon logo

Allen notes how the World Economic Forum folks love Harari. Harari spoke about the “twin revolutions of infotech and biotech” at a January 2020 WEF meeting. He said that heaven or hell was just around the corner. And it was – certainly the former. Writes Allen:

When the Great Germ Panic was unleashed a few months later, the infotech and biotech CEOs in the WEF audience, as well as the high-level politicians beside them, would shove their subjects through the red door to techno-hell. Lockdowns. Biosurveillance. Nasal swabs. Contact-tracing apps. Quarantine camps. Police drones. Mandatory mRNA injections. Vaccine passports. Zoom calls. Maybe it looked like heaven to their eyes. And if “free will is an illusion,” you really can’t blame them either way.

He goes on to speak about Hackable Animals:

The twin specters of surveillance and total control haunt Harari’s work. Along with his occasional advocacy for gay rights and regular condemnation of animal cruelty, the digital invasion of privacy is one issue he takes a real stand on. Again and again, he warns against “digital dictatorship.” The major problem, he believes, is one-way transparency. When governments and corporations have access to your digital behavior coupled with your biological profile, they can “know you better than you know yourself.” From there, you are putty in their hands, or a lump of clay beneath their feet.

Our browsing history is a case in point. We may have forgotten most of our digital footprints, but the internet never forgets. As Harari states, as humans more and more reveal all of themselves to the Machine, “then you can control the person, manipulate them, and make decisions for them. And we are getting very close to the point when Facebook and Google and the Chinese government know people far better than these people know themselves.”

As mentioned, both men are a bit too ambiguous here. Harari, says Allen, is “notoriously unsentimental about the greater Replacement” of man by machine. And Musk is now the darling of most conservatives. I too greatly approve of him when he sticks to things like resisting the woke agendas, the trans agendas, the radical leftist agendas, and so on. And he may be of some real help to Trump in his work in draining the swamp.

But his passion for most things AI and transhumanist is very scary indeed. When he speaks glowingly about things like human “upgrades” and “whole brain interfaces” you know we have moved beyond even 1984 and Brave New World.

Allen goes on to speak of the techno-religion of transhumanism and posthumanism, what Harari calls “Dataism,” the belief that “the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.” Says Allen:

Deeply embedded in this worldview is the belief that all organisms can be abstracted into algorithms, or information, and that all information should be free—including your personal data. As Harari points out, this cosmic ideology “has already conquered most of the scientific establishment”—with deep roots in the capitalist ethos of free market decentralization—and its currently invading powerful corporate and government institutions. In this belief system, the greatest virtue is to maximize data flow. The greatest sin is to block data flow, as that would impede the divine will. . . . This is Scientism rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues.

Yep, this is scary stuff. I encourage you to get and read his entire book. In the meantime, we need to keep our eyes on folks like Musk and Harari. Indeed, the whole transhumanist/AI project needs to be closely monitored. And as these technocrats and posthumanists seek to fully control and determine our future, we need to ask, “Who controls the controllers?”

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6 Replies to “Musk, Harari, and AI”

  1. Are there any books you can recommend on how to combat this frightening, and now seemingly unstoppable, trend? Obviously by prayer and trust in God — but I mean what practical steps we can take in our daily lives and ways to combat it in the political sphere.

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