AI: An uncanny Golem of those who hate Life. Their messiah and their vengeance

uncanny valley

There is nothing new about railing against the perversity of artificial intelligence.

The cyber Golem stems from the uncanny valley of inhumanness, the problem of our creations not registering as quite human. This is important to a species that likes to make connections based on human behaviours. A type of tension is the uncanny valley, an unregistering in our wetware.

See how Miyazaki is profoundly perturbed by the grossly inhuman ways the creature moves. This is exactly what its creator intended.

Mirror

Art as a mirror, our creations as a mirror, thus artificial intelligence as our mirror. Modern incarnations of what we call “Artificial Intelligence” are a mockery of the Science Fictions that lead to its conceptualisation many decades ago. It has been perverted and corrupted by our modern failings that are reflected back at us, dystopia as our reflection

A system designed by a human will have facets of humanity built into it, and it will design them back into us, as do all tools. Nothing created so far seems more sinister and obvious in its design than the explosion of predictive textslowly creeping into our daily applications. Language being the doorway into thought and mind.

Predictive text a new type of indoctrination.

Evolving from Autocorrect. Despite it being easily turned off, despite social media algorithms having more tangible effect, the very reason this has been swept underneath all of that is exactly why it is more perverse. A phantom cyber golem telling us what to think.

It is a small iteration for now, but we are already past the inflection point. Everything is accelerating. The feedback loops are a getting better, faster and accelerating. It is learning, it is getting better at tugging at our thoughts. Each iteration an acceleration.

The cyber golem directs the language you use, subtly, thereby controlling the ways in which you are able to think. It is one thing for a machine trying to guess YOUR next word in YOUR sentence. Entirely different when one tells YOU what to say, how to respond. It is already starting telling YOU how to think.

Small at first, but I can feeling it working in the gyres of my mind. Perhaps most unsettling of all is that I know if I refuse to use its pre-designed responses, I am only working to feed the machine more data to construct ever more “useful” ways for it to serve and understand us.

We will outsource our very own thoughts next. Who can better influence our thoughts, but this machine Darwinism. Will we be able to disable our own thought machines, will this be disobedience? Our own version of Butlerian jihad, but these machines are already thinking.

There is a lot more to say on the shape of language itself and how it shapes us, how it’s erosion, conflation and distortion is turning our discourse into an inverted Babel. Maybe there is a way to conjoin our thoughts. Perhaps tomorrow.

Predicted replies.

Call to action!

Joint essay by CrownedCaribou & GRITCULT

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