Outsourcing Human Intelligence
Artificial intelligence, better known by its trendy abbreviation as “AI”, is on many influential lips as the ultimate tool that is absolutely indispensable in the progression of Mankind toward more and more happiness. Those of us who still prefer to use their natural intelligence are being frowned upon and disqualified as irritating and deplorable remnants of a past that has become irrelevant and burdensome. Still the obsessive drive to coerce us to accept and counterintuitively use something artificial instead of its natural version should make us suspicious of the reasons behind this heavily promoted campaign to outsource our natural intelligence to computing machines. After all, we’re dealing with people who use their intelligence to create and operate the computing machines with the intention that the latter shall eventually replace not only our, but eventually even their own intelligence. Our suspicion is especially warranted when we consider the fact that AI is at the top of the bucket list of people like the World Economic Forum’s founder Klaus Schwab. Most certainly, Dr. Schwab isn’t alone in showing this curious libido for turning the AI artifact ‒ an unwanted feature not originally present in Man’s natural intelligence ‒ into a highly desirable “wanted feature” of transhuman intelligence. But he’s a shining and prominent specimen of that small yet very powerful and influential section of the human race that belongs to or shows unconditional affinity with the ideas of what is also known as the globalist “Davos crowd”.
Artificiality and Artifacts
In the real world, when people have the option to chose between something natural and that something’s artificial imitation, most if not all of us intuitively prefer the natural version. Although imitations may be considerably cheaper and more durable, if we can, we try to avoid artificial sweeteners and flavors, artificial meat, artificial flowers, artificial leather or wood, artificial manners, laughs and smiles, artificial pearls and diamonds, artificial …. you name it. Without having to open a dictionary, most if not all of us have an inkling of the fact that the word “artificial” means “made by humans, especially in imitation of something natural” and “not arising from natural or necessary causes; contrived or arbitrary“. An “artifact” is defined as “a phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an unwanted feature” and as “an inaccurate observation, effect, or result, especially one resulting from the technology used in scientific investigation or from experimental error”. And, last but not least, “artificiality” is defined as “lack of sincerity, ambidexterity, disingenuousness, insincerity and phoniness”.
Natural trumps artificial
So, if the words artificial, artifact and artificiality mean what they mean and not something else, these terms don’t arouse much enthousiasm when used in describing the quality of a product or the feature of someone’s personality. On the contrary, the word “natural” is the magic word used in the marketing of natural versus artificial products. So it is that natural vitamin C easily trumps its synthetic version and that tap water is no match for natural spring water. Natural chemicals (such as “organic” foods) are heavily promoted as healthy and benign, while while Genetically Modified Food (GMO) and synthetic chemicals (such as the additives that keep processed foods from going rancid) are standardly positioned as dangerous and toxic. No need to add that when it comes to judging human behavior, someone who behaves “naturally” is invariably preferred over someone who behaves “artificially”. But now, when it comes to intelligence, we’re supposed to accept that Man’s natural intelligence must be replaced by AI.
Natural Intelligence
Human intelligence is mostly understood as Man’s natural capacity to think and reason. Some of us are convinced that natural intelligence is one of God’s endowments to Man. They also regard the Creator of Man as the source of Man’s unalienable rights. Others hold the view that “Nature” is the source of our innate capacity to acquire, create and use knowledge. They regard Nature as the source of Man’s natural rights as distinct from the legal rights that are the result of man-made legal systems. Still others are of the opinion that human intelligence mysteriously arose during the evolution of … Evolution. Yet, whatever the source of human intelligence might be, it is by way of this natural, inborn, intelligence that we are able to form ideas about our intelligence and its artificial version. Most certainly, we are capable of learning and improving knowledge through experience, but we can only learn from experience when we use and don’t switch off or replace our … natural intelligence. Which doesn’t mean that learnedness and erudition are necessarily a sign of someone’s superior intelligence. Quite some “learned” and “erudite” persons show no or few signs of natural intelligence. So does AI.
Artificial Man
Dr. Schwab’s World Economic Forum strongly proposes that we won’t be happy until we will own nothing. If nothing means what it means and not something else, we will be happy only when we will no longer own the God-given rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, when we will no longer own truth, and when we will no longer own the wisdom and knowledge that will lead us to the enjoyment of God. Most of all, we will no longer own our own person. We shall give up our ownership of the unalienable right to pursue happiness, because happiness will be given to us by the Forum. We shall give up our ownership of truth, because truth will be given to us by the Forum. We shall give up our ownership of the knowledge that paves the way to the enjoyment of God. We will no longer own our own person, because the Forum’s founder has stepped forward to lead us on the path to a new kind of Man, the transhuman Man, the “Transman”. This Transman was described by him as a fusion of Man’s “physical, digital and biological identity”. The Transman shall be living to the tunes of the digital algorithms and the artificial intelligence designed by those who seek to squeeze the Transman ‒ the transformed you and me ‒ into the Utopias and Second Realities that shall replace First Reality.
The Übermensch
There is nothing new in Dr. Schwab’s pneumapathological world view. The Transman, or Transmensch, is the reincarnation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, now dressed up in 21st century clothes. Nietzsche had to murder God to put the Übermensch, in casu himself, in His place. A formidable task and a rare accomplishment. One and a half century later, with God and His Son Jesus Christ done away with, Man is now being prepared for being groomed and controlled by the artificial intelligence developed by the wizards who regard themselves as the “fulfilled” Nietzschean Übermenschen whose task it is to definitively transhumanize their underlings. We, the new chattel, will all be placed on a forcefully intubated digital ventilator that will replace our natural capacity to inhale and enjoy Life and Liberty in our Pursuit of the Happiness that we strive to accomplish. What the Forum’s ventilators will pump into our system will be beyond our influence and control. There won’t be any need for us to know what we will inhale and we shouldn’t ask any questions because we don’t have a choice in what is brought to us as the inescapable Fourth Industrial Revolution. But we will be rewarded when we forfeit everything including our God-given right to pursue eudaimonia in liberty.
AI is an Attack on Man’s Soul
What all de- and reconstructors of Man have in common is their obsessive hatred for Man’s spiritual nature, his imago Dei. Although God was murdered a while ago, Man shall now be wiped clean of what might have remained of His image. This drive to effectively de-divinize Man is routinely accompanied by the promise that Man, after having been completely deconstructed, can be reconstructed or, to put it in the terminology that is now in fashion, “built back better” and become “transhuman”. Lecturing his audiences and the readers of his books, the darling and pet child of Schwab’s WEF and its entourage of Western “Leaders”, the Israeli “historian and philosopher” Yuval Harari, misleadingly promotes the Transman as “Homo Deus”, which is also the title of one of his bestselling books. Harari sugar-coats his deconstruction of Man with the vision that Man can become God. This vision, though, is empty and rather disingenuous because Harari’s “Man can become God” scenario is to take place without the real “Deus” playing any role in it. You see, Harari’s God isn’t the God Who informed Moses that His name is “I am”. If that were the God of which the Jewish Harari speaks, the promise that Man can become God would be quite in line with what Jesus Christ prayed for: “That they may be One even as we are One.”
We are Pigs
Harari turned the Creator of Man into a creation of Man. Man’s Creator became Man’s createe. In his book Homo Deus, Harari shared with his readers the idea that “… it is far from clear that we should be aiming at immortality, bliss and divinity. Adopting these particular projects might be a big mistake. But history is full of big mistakes. Given our past record and our current values, we are likely to reach out for bliss, divinity and immortality – even if it kills us.” When it comes to the search for the human soul, Harari the philosopher lays his scientistic cards on the table without a shadow of hesitation, reservation or doubt. “For thousands of years people believed that all our actions and decisions emanate from our souls. Yet in the absence of any supporting evidence, and given the existence of much more detailed alternative theories, the life sciences have ditched the soul.” Concerning that lack of “supporting evidence” and the “alternative theories”, Harari reports how “[s]cientists have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments, and looked into every nook in our hearts and every cranny in our brains. But they have so far discovered no magical spark. There is zero scientific evidence that in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls.” We’re as soulless as pigs and so are the King Pigs who try to make us believe this kind of nonsense.
Happiness means physical Pleasure
It is Harari himself who offers us a glimpse of his totalitarian world view as he dealt with that outmoded idea called Man’s Liberty. In his book Sapiens, of which Homo Deus is the sequel, Harari asked “… Liberty …?” His answer: “There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree. And what about ‘happiness’? So far biological research has failed to come up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it objectively. Most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure, which is more easily defined and measured. So ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ should be translated into ‘life and the pursuit of pleasure’. […] We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.” That’s what you get when you replace reason, natural intelligence and knowledge by belief, especially by the belief that turns genuine science into the belief in science, also known as scientism, which is Yuval’s stock-in-trade.
AI and Utopia
In the context of my book Liberating liberty, out the window go the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, the Creator of Man, self-evident truths and unalienable Rights. Harari/Schwab/WEF-type Governments shall no longer be instituted among Men to defend Man’s unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. No, the “Hararian” Government shall now be instituted among Men to provide pleasure and whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of the end of providing nothing but pleasure, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their biological pleasure. Since pleasure is, according to Harari, “more easily defined and measurable”, the result of his narrative will inevitable be that it will be relatively easy for Governments to gauge, provide or withhold pleasure, especially when everyone’s biological and intellectual “data” can be tracked, computed and molded by the algorithms of AI. Pleasure can thus be defined, redefined, tweaked, steered, withheld and simultaneously given by Governments that will no longer run the risk of being abolished as long as they provide at least some form of pleasure in sufficient quantities to a politically sufficient number of “voters”. AI has thus become the indispensable tool for governments and their supra-government handlers to stay in power. Give a little, take a little. In the Utopia where you will own nothing and where more in particular you will no longer own your soul and your natural intelligence, you will all be happy consumers of AI-designed pleasure.
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