But no, it goes beyond that. The whole paradigm is false. That replacing people and thinking is good, that it is an advance, that it is inevitable, that the people selling it actually know what will happen in the future, that we should organize our lives based on their projections. The whole thing.
Likewise with social media. The whole paradigm that virtual interaction can equal or replace real interaction is what is wrong. Not some quibble with the implementation, but the whole thing. And along with the whole thing the fact that the people promoting it are trustworthy or know anything.
Yes, there is a great deal of money and propaganda behind both of those things as well as (unfortunately) widespread adoption. But if the paradigm that these things are good and inevitable is wrong, if the whole philosophy is false, then things will not work the way people say they will.
The future will not unfold the way they say it will and people are mistaken to build their lives around such predictions.
The above paragraph seems to encapsulate much of what I believe about "AI" - its nature and intent -and why I have blogged so often on the subject.
Francis Berger then continues:
Unfortunately, people seem unable or unwilling to reject whole paradigms, even when they detect the falsehood within them.
There are probably many reasons for this; none of them good. I suspect most are just stuck in some kind of "go with the flow" mode of existence and will go wherever the wind takes them.
Others appear to be aiming at some sort of expediency or chance at gain.
People don't seem all that interested in thinking anymore. Thinking is simply not valued.
Nor do they seem all that interested in forming real relationships with real people (and even when they do there tends to be an aura of unreality or virtuality in it, as if the person before them is but an avatar).
Francis Berger's comment also encapsulates something I feel strongly: the lack of interest in thinking.
The way I understand this is that people are utterly fatalistic and negative about their ability to resist or influence The System as it impinges upon them.
And their inner reasoning goes something like:
Because" [they assume] I can do nothing to stop anything bad, "therefore" there is no point in me thinking about it.
Thinking about "that sort of thing" will just make me miserable - it can do nothing else; "therefore" it is better not to think...
Best just to focus on the happy stuff and make the best of the inevitable.
This is the end-stage of the mainstream official "materialism" of our fundamental civilizational assumptions.
Thinking is just regarded as a free-spinning cog inside our brains, unless it eventuates in observable change.
Our personal discernments and evaluations, our inner sense of truth and values - are regarded as simply irrelevant - because they are assumed to make zero difference to anybody or anything else.
Many people are currently approaching a Ground Zero of human spirituality.
For vast numbers; all possibility of religion has already been abolished by their own assumptions.
By implicitly accepting the AI-paradigm, and by refusing to think, people are voluntarily and actively destroying their livelihoods, their lives, and themselves.
**
Note added: It strikes me that all the top-down totalitarian-imposed "Litmus Tests" share this attribute of requiring "whole paradigm" rejection. For instance, the 2020 Birdemic was an entire paradigm of untruthfulness (from the unwarranted assumptions that there was a pandemic, through its identity, and the false measures taken in response, right down to the incoherent nonsense of "testing" and disease status. Therefore - at the time - the Birdemic could not effectively be opposed by critique and resistance of any specific aspects, at any specific level. It was framed as accept-all - or reject the package.
