One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.
Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.
It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.
Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.
That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”
The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.
In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.
Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.
in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.
Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.
Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.
Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.
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Coming soon domestically. Whether through something like CBDC, and/or AI controlled killer drones, no resistance to the regime will be permitted.
First rule or weaponry: Measure begets countermeasure
First rule of Cheap Chinese Sh, I mean Stuff: If they have it, we can have it.
That may have been true in the 1700s but it isn’t today. There is a huge list of weapons the regime has that we don’t have, and would be imprisoned for possessing.
They won’t need drones once they force Neuralink on everyone.
This is because all Neuralink units will have a small shaped charge explosive that the algo in the data fusion center can trigger via Starlink.
Wouldn’t take a large charge to go through say, a spinal cord.
Altman is saying this very thing. To paraphrase him, a world with advanced AI is a well-behaved world. Indeed.
Call me old fashioned, but I read these entries on immortality and Artificial Intelligence and I keep getting this vibe:
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
While fusing neural intelligence and electronic intelligence sounds promising, who provides the electricity to keep the computers going? 😏
Whitey
I’m speculating but perhaps ideas like the ones Richard Morgan floated in his trilogy (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) have some traction with the Tech Bros — a future where consciousness itself has been digitised. As for the trends in AI and other massive computing projects, they leave me disturbed. To my mind they are anti-life. These projects require a massive amount of electricity and mineral resources at the expense of the biosphere. We already know this from bitcoin mining. There’s a good recent essay at NLR on energy and mineral consumption which is quite revealing: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/exponential-abyss Trump himself… Read more »
It’s possible that our much discussed schism among the “elites” is nothing more than a squabble over who will control the AI
That’s an impressive theory and possibly what is actually happening. It would be wonderful if the camps were divided over how to use AI but if this is the point of friction you are right, it boils down to control.
My grandfather lived to 97 and thought he had lived too long. His last two years were not pleasant ones to say the least. I have never read anything from these people on how to reverse aging joints. What good is curing cancer if you are stuck in a wheelchair at 125 because all your joints are worn out and you can’t handle anymore replacement surgeries?
“The Golden Years,” of retirement are one of the biggest lies in GAE culture.
That is because, for most people, there is a huge range of activities that are no longer physically enjoyable, or even possible when they hit 65+ years of age.
The purpose of the lie in part was to encourage hard work and productivity with the incentive of enjoyment afterwards. Given the change of circumstances, you have to wonder what myth follows. Arbeit macht frei…and?
Lost in looking to the next life, trying to be an angel, is the fact that discipline makes you a human being in the meantime. Hedonism makes one an animal, and after the fun is over, the animal is back to scraping out an existence.
At the other extreme is the self-styled best living the good life thanks to slave labor, but that’s a different matter.
In all things, seek the golden mean!
One of my grandmothers, who lived to be 96, had a health crisis in her 80s which required hospitalization. After which, her mind went, and she was without it for her final decade. I’ve always had the idea that medical science extended the life of her body beyond what it otherwise would have been, but was unable to do so for her mind.
My dad turned 86 last September.
Last year he did a full kitchen rehab with my help. Sometimes he couldn’t hold a drill.
He said it was his last one, but as a hard headed Bohemian, we shall see.
He is afraid that the minute he stops “doing things”, he’s toast.
Life is work.
As long as it is not wage slaving…
They’re transhumanists, they want to upload their minds into machine bodies.
Indeed, we will boldly steal the secret of Life from the Gods and use it for sexbots and AI sports referees to end the dominance of the KC Chiefs.
Will it replace grilling, though?
No. The only “value” I see coming from AI is increased surveillance and ability to be spied on.
Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. It was and, in many ways, still is the point of life, yes. In a world where those who are worth remembering no longer procreate, gadgets are employed. In a world that no longer values and produces worthy art in all its forms, gadgets are employed. A world where you watch your son become a man is a world worthy of life. A world where painters, composers, authors, and the creative thrive is a world worthy of life. A world where Sam Altman is the ideal is one that distracts itself… Read more »
The Norse/Germanic mythos of Valhalla and Ragnarok and the final battle encode the wisdom that these megalomanics in their ignorance miss. The end, yours and even the universe, is inevitable. This is not a cause for sorrow. It is a fact that must be greeted heroically and honorably – side by side with your people making the most of the time you have. Of course it also encodes the wisdom that we must do battle against entropy. Looking at Larry Ellison and Bezo’s new tail are instructive. And as always our host hits on a subtly related point. High interest… Read more »
Thought provoking post. In my opinion, not a single person who ever drew a breath, wants to die. That said, I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to understand suicide. No one ever wants to die; what they want is whatever is happening in their life, that is overwhelming, to stop. I’ve had a good life. Not perfect, but a hell of a ride to say the least. The thing that is starting to overwhelm me is the suffering that is on display every day. It’s in our face. And the people dishing it out, are doing it with… Read more »
I’ve been a Zen “adept” (as practitioners are known) for more than 60 years and what might be called your “third result” is that your individuated self experiences a combination of A & B. To wit: your individuated identity consciousness is dropped, either voluntarily or through extinction; if the former, consciousness survives in a transcended but non-individuate manner, in the latter, well, lights out or maybe reincarnation. The ground belief behind this is that all simply IS, individuation is illusory as is time.
Talk about maximum hubris! The human body is orders of magnitude more complex than anything produced by these tech boys, and really, it shouldn’t work…Trillions of operations are going on each second in your body, and any significant failure rate would kill you..Based on my past life regressions, and millions of others, the soul is immortal and we do have a choice to reincarnate…But for the atheists among us, the question is why you would want to live past 100, in a worn out body often confined to your bedroom…Because entropy (2d law of thermodynamics) is constant, and everything wears… Read more »
I have to say I don’t think you can be too cynical about AI and silicon valley in particular. I really don’t believe that Altman believes for a minute any of his bulls**t hyping of AI. One thing he’s trying to do is keep the AI hype high in hopes of cashing out on stock options in an IPO of OpenAI. He’s also hoping to sell a bunch of computing resources and software to a bunch of gullible corporate types before everyone realizes ChatGPT is just a glorified auto-complete that plagarizes content from existing webpages. Here’s an interesting video discussing… Read more »
Altman drips sleaze. Someone with that jack should be able to hire better PR people and a fashion adviser. “Siri, how do I not sound like a used car salesman?” has been available a long time now.
How can an ugly little and unhealthy looking troll like Ray Kurzweil be selling life-extension ideas?
‘Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever’ Only the greatest of fools — or of salesmen — would want to endure such a horror, a horror almost beyond imagining. Me, I can’t wait to get this evil orb in my rearview mirror. Not one minute more here than is absolutely necessary. But the tech idjits eventually will get their way: ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find… Read more »