By Martin LeFevre
A mainstream American commentator, not given to hyperbole, recently wrote, “We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about AI. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in occult texts … the coders believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.”
People who have no understanding of evil should not speak about it in figurative terms. Is he being metaphorical or not? In typical American fashion, he’s trying to have things both ways.
The chief executive of Google, Sundar Pichai, a tech executive also not known for overstatement, says, “A.I. is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire.”
Really, more profound than fire, the domestication of which is the foundation of not only all technology, but the enlargement of the human brain? (Cooking meat allowed a much greater caloric absorption. Along with the communal nature of eating and warming around a fire, there was an evolutionarily rapid growth and complexity of the human brain.)
So, what are people talking about when they say AI is “more profound than fire?” Is a “new form of intelligence being ushered into the world,” or is AI essentially higher thought externalized and on steroids?
We are standing at a juncture as a species, where consciousness, self-made darkness, and this new form of thought in the world converge.
Below the surface level of dead end individualism, and the deeper level of bygone tradition, human consciousness is a single movement. What has always been true at the core level of consciousness is now apparent at the manifest levels. We aren’t separate selves, but synaptic nodes that are converging and speeding up, with AI mashing all the cells of selves and contents of consciousness together.
Man-made hell is already physically and metaphysically manifest in the world; AI threatens to completely unleash the underlying darkness that has been suppressed and somewhat contained in consciousness for millennia, whether as dogs of war or the bogs of control.
We all know that families pass down their pathologies, and those members that exhibit them, or try to break free of them, are called “black sheep.” Even when the term is applied to a miscreant son or daughter, it always involves scapegoating. When applied to one who dares to speak the truth, it’s evil.
Of course, the darkness that runs through family lineages doesn’t remain in family lineages. There’s a silly show on PBS in the U.S. called, “Finding Your Roots,” which traces celebrities’ ancestors back hundreds of years, revealing hidden details from recent progenitors and unknown facts about early family history in America and beyond. The host often asks questions like, “How does it make you feel to know that your great, great, great grandfather owned slaves (or was a slave)?”
The show is emotionally voyeuristic, like so much else in American media today, though it is at times moving. At the end, the host surprises the guests with the picture of a well-known cousin 10 times removed, usually also in show biz.
The point is if you go back far enough, we’re all related, a conveniently unspoken fact in the hyper-personalized show in this hyper-personalized culture. The absurd over-emphasis on the personal allows Americans to see and feel no relationship to the mass murders that have become normalized in this culture and to blithely refer to the evil without looking any deeper or wider for its roots.
Of course, evil is as old as man, though not any older. However, we are even less clear than previous ages on where it comes from, how it operates, and what its endgame is.
To my mind, evil is concentrated and intentional nodes within amorphous and inchoate collective darkness. It is the spiritual death wish of man.
Children are not born evil, but they are often born into evil. Evil cannot be psychologized, or rather, current psychological models are wholly inadequate to understanding and dealing with evil.
Darkness is cumulative in the individual and in human consciousness. There is more evil in the world now because there is more unaddressed darkness within and between people, irrespective of country and culture. And since darkness is increasing, so is evil, which has become normalized on one hand, and the source of endless titillation in the entertainment and media industry on the other.
Therefore, a working understanding of darkness/evil within us has become imperative to our inward and intellectual survival and growth as human beings.
The more one believes “I’m an individual,” the more one is a conduit for collective darkness. There are countless dividuals, but very few in-dividuals, just as there are innumerable humans, but very few human beings.
What has been invisible has become visible; what has been metaphysical has become physical; and what has been occult has become a cult. The urgent question now is: Is consciousness as we’ve known it for thousands of years synonymous with darkness?
With true humility and self-knowing, one turns the tables on evil, because the last thing our demons want is for us to learn by remaining with our own inseparable portion of darkness, and thereby transcend it.
Doing so, another order of consciousness altogether emerges, immeasurably beyond the thought-based consciousness we’ve known, which now belongs to AI.
