AI is the Greatest Threat to Humanity. Oh, and WWIII....

Your new bodies are growing in there. They're taking you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories and you're reborn.

Your new bodies are growing in there. They're taking you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories and you're reborn into an untroubled world. ~ Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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Artificial Intelligence is said to be the greatest threat to humanity. But then there’s World War III. The question is which one will happen first. Or maybe they’re intertwined. So much to NOT look forward to. I don’t worry for myself. I turned a year older today. I worry for my grandchildren. For future generations. How long will it be before humanity destroys itself?

Maybe AI has already taken over and we just don’t know it. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where people try to stay awake because once they go to sleep, aliens take over, creating the perfect biological clone of the person replaced, but devoid of empathy and humanity.

That’s the scariest part. The wait. The trying to stay awake. It’s like a person with advancing dementia. Slowly but surely, they know it will happen; there’s nothing they can do about it. All they can do is submit helplessly as they lose control over their minds until the transition is complete.

That’s what’s happening to humanity right now with AI. The thing is, we don’t have to give up our free will. Yet we are doing it.

Yesterday, I shared this post on social media (thanks to AJ Rosen):

RIP Woody Williams, the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from WW2.

All gone.

All 472.

I don't know that we can ever regain what we have lost.

This made me so sad. We have entered a new era; nothing will ever be the same. Woody Williams had a mind of his own, free of AI. We can never return to those days.

I know, elders always say “things were better in the old days”. But this time, it’s really true. With two world wars under our belt, humanity has gone off the deep end. Somehow, even after we had almost destroyed humanity twice, we still thought we knew better. We still thought we could fix things. In our arrogance, we rejected our Creator, and moved into the era of the “Great Secularization”. Except it didn’t work. All it did was empty our souls so they could be filled by dark forces. If we turn our backs on our Creator, then we will seek something else to fill that void. That something else is AI.

According to Bridgehead article by Jonathan Van Maren, many of the great atheist apologists of our time who contributed to the rise of secularism, including Richard Dawkins, are now admitting that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all:

But as Christianity fades further and further into our civilization’s rear-view mirror, many intelligent atheists are beginning to realize that the Enlightenment may have only achieved success because it wielded influence on a Christian culture. In a truly secular society, in which men and women live their lives beneath empty heavens and expect to be recycled rather than resurrected, there is no solid moral foundation for good and evil. Anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens mocked and reviled the idea that mankind needed God to know right from wrong, but scarcely two generations into our Great Secularization and we no longer even know male from female.

By 2018, however, Dawkins was warning that the “benign Christian religion” might be replaced by something decidedly less benign, and that perhaps we should take a step back to discuss what might happen if the evangelical secularists are successful in destroying or banishing Christianity. Other atheists and agnostics, from Bill Maher to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have echoed Dawkins’ sentiments. This is a radical shift in only a handful of years—and the fact that atheists are sounding the alarm should be a warning to Christians about the consequences of our ongoing secularization.

Dawkins has now come out and repudiated his previous belief that Christianity should be banished from society even more firmly. In fact, he told The Times, ending religion—once his fervent goal—would be a terrible idea, because it would “give people a license to do really bad things.”

And of course, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is no longer an atheist but has become a Christian.

If we don’t submit to God’s authority (I can feel the resentment toward that suggestion though the internet), we will submit to something else. And that something else is AI. There are plenty of billionaires now who want to make this happen. They really don’t care about the consequences of what they are doing on the rest of humanity. They are far too arrogant to think they are serving AI too. How could they be, when they “created it”. But did they?

All the tech gods care about is which one of them will win the AI race. Even as they self-righteously warn us about the dangers of AI, each one pointing at their rival as the bad guy, they assure us that their motives are pure; they will only use AI for good.

But since we have lost our moral compass to secularism, good and evil seem to be interchangeable and we no longer know which one is which. That, right there, should be a sign that perhaps AI has already damaged us, perhaps beyond repair. We have allowed this to happen to us. How is that possible?

In an open letter written in March 2023 and released by the Future of Life Institute, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Andrew Yang, have urged artificial intelligence labs to pause development of the most advanced systems, warning that A.I. tools present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The letter goes on to state that A.I. developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control.”

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war", says The Center for AI Safety. Its website suggests a number of disaster scenarios:

• AIs could be weaponized - for example, drug-discovery tools could be used to build chemical weapons

• AI-generated misinformation could destabilize society and "undermine collective decision-making"

• The power of AI could become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, enabling "regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive surveillance and oppressive censorship"

• Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E"

This is madness. We know it’s madness and yet we don’t stop. Are we so desperate to fill that God-shaped vacuum in our souls—with anything but God—that we’re allowing these narcissistic men to implant within us an entity that they don’t understand that they have warned repeatedly could destroy humanity, but that at the same time, they assure us is safe and will enable us to “evolve”?

Why would anyone agree to that?

All we have done is to transition from secularism into worship of a new God. The Bible tells us that there is “nothing new under the sun”, but we crave shiny new toys so badly we will believe any lie, just so we can possess something bigger and better than our neighbors.

Install that tracking device in my car, allow Alexa to listen to all my conversations in my house, implant that device in my head. It’s all the latest gadgets and we can’t live without them.

This is the same old Devil in the Garden of Eden telling the same old lies, wrapped up in a new package. The Devil assures us that we “can be God”, but what he really means is “Allow me to dwell inside of you and I will be your God”.

Anthony Levandowski believes that AI chatbots will soon be so powerful they will essentially be gods. To that end, he has started the first AI church called Way of the Future.

“For the last 4 billion years we’ve had organic lifeforms, [but] now, for the first-time things are changing and we’re going to have inorganic life forms,” Levandowski told Bloomberg. “We don’t know what [these inorganic life forms] are going to be, [but] we’re going to fuse it with all these magical powers, and we want it to give us things.”

Give us things? Is that what humanity is now reduced to? We are only fulfilled by our addictions. Which, of course, is no fulfillment at all, because the more we get, the more we want, and the more we want, the emptier we are. Material possessions, playing at being God in a simulation, living in a fantasy world of our own making, will never satisfy our fundamental need of a spiritual relationship with our true Creator.

According to Wired Levandowski actually believes his mission is to help humanity make the “Transition”.

“In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the ‘whatever’ knows who helped it get along.”

I don’t know if there is anyone stupider, or possibly more controlled by evil than this Levandowski. I don’t think his religion will take off, except as another crazy cult. But it illustrates how far we have fallen, and nobody is blinking an eye about it.

The tech gods are much smarter than Levandowski. They offer us the things they have conditioned us to be addicted to; the gadgets and devices that now make it possible for us to be completely manipulated by AI.

Ten years ago, Apple launched its Fitbit watch. Millions of people now use it to track their heart rate and movement. It was just one of many ways to herd people into giving up their basic, God-given rights over their bodies and their minds and submit to the higher authority of AI.

Neurable co-founder Dr Ramses Alcaide now wants to do the same type of monitoring for our brains. His headphones have dry electrodes in the ear cushions which, when wearing them over your ears, enables the headphones to read your brain waves.

Just imagine how great it would be if you could constantly track your brain waves. It could help you focus better. Imagine children being monitored like this in school. Your boss could monitor you. Your probation officer. Your doctor, your therapist. The government. Every time you lost focus it would beep inside your head, reminding you to get back on track.

The entire human race could be controlled by beeps inside their heads, by torture. It’s a hundred times more frightening than George Orwell’s 1984.

But look, it’s all for your own good and they would never use it irresponsibly. Nor would AI ever take over control.

According to Adam Molnar, co-founder of Neurable, “When you drive, there's an engine sign for when your oil needs to be changed. You can still drive hundreds, if not thousands of miles when that light is on, but it is suggested that if you take care of this, you can help the machines in the long term. And I don't think the brain is that different.”

Accept it—your brain is just a machine. Don’t be so ignorant as to think you are more than a bunch of wires and flesh and blood.

“The earphones help prevent burnout by letting me know when I should be taking breaks at the right time. And if I ever get distracted, it'll play an audible tone to remind me to get back to focus. I use that a lot when I read,” explains Alcaide, who has “ADHD”.

Ah yes, “ADHD”. Never forget that it started as a diagnosis in children and hundreds of thousands of children were put on Ritalin, which is essentially cocaine, to keep them “calm”. ADHD is among the most common “mental conditions” in children, with an estimated 6 million children ages 3 to 17 years having been diagnosed, according to the CDC.

The drugging of children was so successful that they moved on to adults. Go to any psychiatrist and you will be diagnosed with some sort of “mental illness” and put on drugs.

“I have long maintained that the child psychiatrist is one of the most dangerous enemies not only of children, but also of adults who care for the two most precious and most vulnerable things in life—children and liberty.” ~ Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz is not someone the “experts” want you to listen to. He warned prophetically:

“The discovery that all mental diseases are brain diseases would mean the disappearance of psychiatry into neurology.”

The new disease coming to dominate our lives could well be that we are all “neurologically impeded”. Not only will we need a constant supply of drugs flowing through our bodies, but we will need AI inside our heads because we are no longer capable of performing even the most basic tasks on our own.

If we didn’t learn the lesson from drugs being pushed upon us, we certainly won’t learn it from AI being implanted inside of us.

At the same time as Elon Musk warns us about the dangers of AI and his starry-eyed followers nod along, he seeks to control the minds of every person on the planet, by pairing his Neuralink brain chips with his Starlink satellite network.

We can see the disastrous results by looking at how Starlink has affected the Amazonian Marubo tribe, as described in the NY Times:

Many Marubo people have signed up for Facebook and Instagram accounts since Starlink arrived in their village. NY Times

The Marubo have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets.

They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation — some villages can take a week to reach. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.

Gone is their spiritual connection to the land. They have AI now to transport them into the clouds.

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said Tsainama Marubo, 73. “But now, things have gotten worse.”

Disturbingly, after only nine months with Starlink:

…the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

Even as Morubo elders complain about how the internet is corrupting their youth, they still say, “Please don’t take our internet away.”

Nine months. That’s how quickly the addiction happened.

As of two days ago, SpaceX had launched 6,000 low-orbiting Starlink satellites — roughly 60 percent of all active spacecraft. Musk’s AI now covers most of the planet, including the Sahara, the Mongolian grasslands and tiny Pacific islands. Nothing is hidden from his roving eye.

Musk recently announced that Starlink had surpassed three million customers across 99 countries. Analysts estimate that annual sales are up roughly 80 percent from last year, to about $6.6 billion.

Musk doesn’t care about the consequences of his actions. He doesn’t care if AI takes over the world. He just wants to beat his rivals.

It used to be all about “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Then it was all about billionaire rivalries. Now it’s who will be the first trillionaire.

“Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!”- Frankenstein

The tech gods are moving full speed ahead, despite warnings. I guess they never read Frankenstein.

After former and current OpenAI employees released an open letter claiming they're being silenced against raising safety issues, one of the letter's signees made an even more terrifying prediction: AI will likely achieve AGI by 2027 and the likelihood it will either destroy or catastrophically harm humankind is greater than a coin flip.

Former OpenAI governance researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, along with others, such as Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "Godfather of AI”, have accused the company of “recklessly racing to be the first” to break through with artificial general intelligence (AGI), beating out rival companies.

Like the other tech gods, Sam Altman gives lip service to the worries about AI, while having no intention of stopping the game.

Far from doing anything to put protections in place, Altman dissolved OpenAI’s safety-oriented Superalignment team and replaced it with—himself and a few of his favorite yes-men.

It’s pretty insane to think that a bunch of overgrown boys, fighting like they never left the schoolyard, could very well be responsible for the destruction of humanity and nobody seems interested in stopping them.

Like the Marubo say, it’s all terrible, “just don’t take our internet away.”

There’s an old, 1936 movie called The Man Who Could Work Miracles, about this very topic.

The film opens with a group of gods arguing about whether or not humans can handle ultimate power. They decide to conduct an experiment. They arbitrarily bestow the power to work miracles upon George Fotheringay, an ordinary English middle-class haberdasher's assistant.

In the pub that night, Fotheringay is joking with his friends about miracles and to demonstrate his ability (without thinking it will really work), he commands an oil lamp to turn upside down, and it does, while the flame keeps burning.

Fotheringay goes on to perform other miracles. He makes someone's freckles vanish. He curses a policeman to hell, causing the man to be surrounded by flames and smoke. Horrified, Fotheringay transports the cop to San Francisco.

Fotheringay starts off thinking his miracles can save the world. But his best intentions quickly degenerate into it being all about him. He creates his own kingdom where he is in charge, with all kinds of terrible consequences. The disasters culminate when he decides to put off a task for another day and stops the world’s rotation. This causes all living things and objects to fly off the earth into space.

Desperate and contrite, Fotheringay makes one last command that the world return to the way it was before he was able to work miracles. He finds himself back in the pub, tries his miracle on the oil lamp again and is relieved to find it doesn’t work.

The gods argue among themselves, one thinking that humans are only capable of “negativism, lust and vindictive indignation," while another says that they just need time to grow more slowly into greater powers. Others think the end result will still be the same.

Elon Musk promises we will be able to conduct miracles, like open doors with our thoughts, if only we allow AI to invade our minds. Why would anyone in their right mind do that? I guess we’ve lost our senses.

I appreciate Douglas Murray as a voice of reason in an increasingly unreasonable world. He has noted “There is a very real possibility that our modern concept of human rights, based as it is on a Judeo-Christian foundation, may very well outlive Christianity by only a few short years. Cut off from the source, our conception of human rights may shrivel and die very quickly, leaving us fumbling about in a thick and impenetrable darkness”.

We can only pray it isn’t too late to pull ourselves out of that darkness and back into the light.