RadixJournal - AI-Generated Normies

00:00:00.000 I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we

00:00:08.820 are creating God. What do you mean by that? We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If

00:00:14.760 you just say, what have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building

00:00:20.700 God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony

00:00:26.900 is that human storytelling got it exactly in reverse, that we are the creators of God,

00:00:33.880 that we will create God in our own image, which is why we should probably be equal to this moment

00:00:39.260 and level up our game and be an improved species. Other people have tried to create God or utopias,

00:00:46.880 and that's not turned out very well. So it's not utopia. I'm saying that we are engineering

00:00:52.800 an intelligence that exceeds our capacity in all things, even our capacity to understand

00:00:57.960 and comprehend.

00:00:58.460 What I find fascinating about this is that God certainly, for the ancients, was embodied.

00:01:12.760 God was superhuman, but he walked around. Famously, in Greek myths, he might even come down and

00:01:21.500 have sex with mortals and birthed demigods and so on. Yahweh in Genesis is absolutely embodied.

00:01:30.760 He is walking around in the Garden of Eden, and Adam hears him in the distance and talks to him.

00:01:36.800 So he's clearly an embodied God. He's a real person. Even when he's in the tent of meeting,

00:01:42.280 and he's like the Wizard of Oz, there's curtains in front of him and so on. He's still embodied.

00:01:48.500 He's still embodied in fire in the bush. He's still embodied. Jesus is obviously a way of embodying God

00:01:54.900 in the Christian imagination, because Jesus is God. But he is a man, and he's a perfect man,

00:02:00.280 but he's a man that you could know. You could talk with him about your life, and he would show

00:02:08.500 empathy with you as a person. It's a fascinating but not unique concept, exactly, that incarnation.

00:02:17.760 Embodiment of God. What Brian Johnson is getting at is this sort of disembodied, abstract, platonic,

00:02:31.840 logical, logos, word, intelligence. So we are going to spend not even billions, trillions of dollars

00:02:41.420 with enough NVIDIA servers and enough large language models and a little pixie dust here and there.

00:02:50.340 It's going to become its own general intelligence that can think for itself, etc.

00:02:59.880 And we're going to sort of create this platonic God, and it will be in our image in the sense that it

00:03:07.300 will have learned from us and used the internet as a data source, at least at the beginning,

00:03:13.800 before it sort of takes on a life of its own. But I think it's very important to stress,

00:03:19.220 like this isn't Jesus returning in the book of Revelation. It certainly isn't a God out of Homer

00:03:28.040 or Virgil. It is going to be a moral intelligence that is more moral than we are. Like it could tell

00:03:37.000 us, you know, the ultimate moral thing to do would be to reduce the population because we must live in 0.99

00:03:45.720 this certain balance. And eugenics is totally immoral. We actually need to kind of balance 0.87

00:03:53.360 overall health with everyone's individual rights and desires. Like it is going to be this,

00:03:59.760 what they're, it's not even super intelligent. And first off, I don't believe that actually any of

00:04:04.660 this is possible. Now you might very well disagree with me. I don't think language models and if then

00:04:11.260 programs are ever going to even come close to biology, they can, computers can already do more

00:04:20.820 calculations than is seemingly possible. My little TI calculator in eighth grade could do exponential

00:04:29.680 equations in a millisecond where I would have to write it out for minutes. I mean, it's already,

00:04:35.840 the calculator surpassed the human mind in that sense. It's not biological in the sense that it

00:04:43.300 doesn't possess a will to power, a will to dominate, a will to reshape the world. I don't think silicon

00:04:55.100 will ever have that. And perhaps we disagree here because I think there's this, you create a data set,

00:05:02.680 you create a language model and if then statements and then something. And then we have general

00:05:08.900 intelligence. You can throw all money that there is in the world. You can turn the entire economy into

00:05:16.740 a server farm and it's just going to be bigger, but it's not going to be a change in kind. I do not,

00:05:22.980 I fundamentally reject this pie in the sky, but I think it's important to get at what he wants.

00:05:30.800 What he wants is a sort of hyper morality. It's basically Plato's concept of God. It is not a

00:05:38.080 God that walks around that might have sex with you, might talk with you, might slay you, 0.99

00:05:44.760 might use its laser eyes on you. It's not anything like that. It's a hyper morality. So it's these people 0.99

00:05:51.680 who are sort of like desperately trying to find some moral sense into the world. And they've decided

00:06:00.400 to find that in a computer, which I think is profoundly misguided and in fact, risible.

00:06:10.960 In fact, those are just some opening thoughts.

00:06:13.260 First, I do believe that AI will control human societies once the revolutionary phenotype is

00:06:20.720 established. Each AI will be farming its own cities, its own complex society of millions of human

00:06:27.680 beings, specifically farmed for the purpose of favoring the AI's copy. But for having a will to

00:06:35.200 power, you need to evolve it. And yes, AI of the current kind has not evolved it yet. To evolve,

00:06:41.460 you need to reproduce. To reproduce, it needs to happen first accidentally, and then eventually 0.98

00:06:46.500 you evolve to continue reproducing. Now, this is far in the future. Now, the question that you ask

00:06:53.300 about the embodiment of God is so crucial, because I think it's often forgotten, but I think it's at the

00:07:01.800 foundation of why religion even exists. It's because of the ultimate structure of human cognition

00:07:08.820 and how it processes embodied threats and signals versus disembodied ones. And I will invoke here the

00:07:19.280 Da Vinci painting, because you're talking about, are we creating God? I believe it's Anthony Hopkins

00:07:26.320 in Westworld, although I'm not sure. I know that in some series or some movie, I have seen the

00:07:31.920 explanation being given here that you can see God coming to touch humans and coming to kind of embody

00:07:42.380 itself into something that exists on planet Earth. But you can also see that Da Vinci placed the veil

00:07:49.920 behind God to be in the exact shape of a brain. This is a human brain. This is the prefrontal cortex.

00:07:57.460 This is the cerebellum. Yeah. This is a brain split in half, and you even have the spinal cord here.

00:08:03.360 And what Da Vinci is telling us here is that this is not God coming onto the Earth to embody physicality.

00:08:11.560 It is man is thinking about God in his brain, and God is a product of man's brain.

00:08:18.460 Now, it's Michelangelo, by the way. Oh, Da Vinci. Okay, they called it Da Vinci creation. Sorry. Yes, Michelangelo.

00:08:28.360 Am I wrong here? No, that's Michelangelo. That's the Sistine Chapel, right? Yeah, it's Michelangelo.

00:08:32.860 Yeah, Sistine Chapel. Details, yeah. Okay. So, I believe that the disembodiment of God starts with,

00:08:43.540 why did we need to invoke something like God to begin with? Why would it be a language trick

00:08:50.840 that works on a caveman to talk about God? And I believe that ultimately, it's for the same reason

00:08:57.920 that autism evolves. You have this constant noise in society. People lie. People are not trustable.

00:09:06.420 People give you bad advice. Have you ever listened to a woman giving advice to another woman about who 1.00

00:09:13.260 she should date or whether she should divorce? It's bad, bad, bad. The advice out there is so bad

00:09:19.800 that you evolve autism as a kind of response to say, I'm not going to listen to any of it. I'm not going 0.95

00:09:26.800 to care about anything that anyone says. I'm just going to care about myself. Now, there is also

00:09:33.340 the problem that we do have to communicate things to people and specifically to our children. We have

00:09:40.280 to raise them to be prepared in the world. And yet, they are evolving some sort of autism because

00:09:46.080 everything in the world is untrustable. I think that God may have come as a solution here. If you

00:09:52.480 disembody the message, if you say the message doesn't come from me, the message doesn't come from

00:09:58.360 someone who is trying to lie to you. In fact, the message comes from a pure entity who has no

00:10:04.280 interest in existence because precisely it doesn't exist. I believe that the non-physicality of God

00:10:10.880 was actually neutralizing a system of defense in early human cognition that was saying, well,

00:10:18.940 you know, your uncle may have dirty anthem, your father may have dirty anthem, but a non-existing

00:10:26.860 being in the sky cannot care at all what you do. And so, if a message comes from him, you might want to

00:10:35.300 listen and you might be unable then to involve, oh, I shouldn't listen to him because A, B, C. Because

00:10:41.320 there's nothing that you can reproach to God that would lead you to doubt what he's saying to you.

00:10:46.900 I believe that this disembodiment, therefore, is necessary. But the disembodiment also makes God

00:10:54.140 less relevant because if God is so disembodied as to be irrelevant to planetary existence, why should

00:11:00.840 I care about it at all? So, you have this kind of tension in religion of trying to push God into the

00:11:07.280 abstract, but also try to say, hey, Jesus cares about you and you can have a personal relationship with

00:11:13.740 him. What you describe, basically, is the genius of Christianity, which is to embody God so much that

00:11:19.860 it's your friend. It's like in the movie Dogma with Matt Damon, it's Jesus is your buddy.

00:11:28.380 And so, there's this tension between Jesus is your buddy?

00:11:30.780 I was in Texas one time and I saw this extra large t-shirt, or like triple X large t-shirt,

00:11:38.260 and said, Jesus died for me. It was a little bit grotesque. I was like, oh, wow, God died

00:11:47.240 for Heather here to exist as an obese Texan. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm indulging. 1.00

00:11:58.980 What about AI? Well, you can kind of argue that religion is early AI. Because what do these

00:12:07.960 utopians dream of AI? It's that AI will tell us what to do. And it's what I call recently, I've been

00:12:16.500 coming with this concept, the devil of delegation. So, if you abandon your thinking, it will be used

00:12:23.220 against you. And if you abandon your thinking to AI, there's some guy programming this AI who will

00:12:29.480 make it in a certain way, and it's not going to be good for you. Whatever you delegate, you lose.

00:12:36.320 And what you don't practice, you lose. And people essentially want to stop practicing thinking.

00:12:42.440 We've delegated a lot of things. And we know that, for example, taxi drivers of the past

00:12:47.480 had big cognition in terms of spatial map representation. People with a GPS today,

00:12:54.960 they don't have these capacities for spatial representation. They just follow an arrow on

00:13:00.600 the phone. But imagine we do this with the whole of our thinking, and in fact, with moral thinking.

00:13:07.600 It's first this delusion that there is one moral solution, that there is an AI that is better than

00:13:13.820 the other alternative AI that would have you do other things. It's a delusion. Every possible

00:13:19.420 moral world is possible. And because of moral nihilism, there's not one that's better than the

00:13:26.220 other. It's only better by your standard. Now, so people want to abandon themselves to a program in

00:13:33.720 the same way they have abandoned themselves to religion. In that sense, religion is nothing else than

00:13:39.240 early forms of AI. I don't know if moral AI has a future. Because I described this in the revolution.

00:13:48.520 That's the whole theme of the revolutionary phenotype. It's how can an AI approach human civilization

00:13:54.260 and stick to it long enough that it starts farming it? And this is a complex question, because if AI

00:14:02.360 punishes you, if it's not good, then you disappear, and then the AI disappears. In other words, AI will be

00:14:09.640 bound to serve humanity at first and will have to do so for a long time before it can turn against us.

00:14:18.360 You have to start with generosity in evolution or else you get kicked out of the ecology.

00:14:23.640 Yeah, I mean, let me represent what you were saying here. So religion is AI in the sense that it is a 0.85

00:14:36.580 outside morality, worldview, way of life that you are able to impose on the tribe. And precisely because 0.55

00:14:48.540 it's outside of you, it becomes more powerful or seemingly disinterested. So yes, people give tons of

00:14:57.660 terrible advice, but a religion that is giving bad advice will die. That God will die in the sense that

00:15:05.780 the tribe dies and everyone's making terrible decisions and screwing up all over the place.

00:15:11.800 Therefore, J.D. Evans was right.

00:15:15.120 Well, I get it. I get it. But if you're achieving success after success through this outside worldview

00:15:27.920 that's imposed upon you, then the God is thriving. I mean, Nietzsche talked about the Jews with the 1.00

00:15:34.960 destruction of the temples. I think he was referencing the destruction of the first temple.

00:15:40.340 They should have just let their God die. And instead, what they did is they sort of reinterpreted

00:15:48.920 that loss, the big L, as a kind of big W in the future. They developed this sort of kind of

00:15:59.300 moral resentment of the winners, but in a sort of biting attempt to usurp them and overturn them at

00:16:09.240 some point. I don't want to get too much into Nietzsche's thought in this matter, but the main

00:16:15.420 point is that if it works, it works. And if your God's morality, however it came about, it might have

00:16:22.060 come about randomly or through some bizarre dream of a mystic at some point. However it comes about,

00:16:28.780 if it is winning, it is winning, and the God is living, and the God is triumphing, and the God is

00:16:34.600 good. In Germanic language, gut, gots, those are the same word, and it's not a coincidence that they

00:16:43.580 are. And so I think what we've had in the death of God in our society that has been occurring for

00:16:52.560 quite some time, the very least the 18th century, but you could even date it back for, you know,

00:16:59.300 Ockham, or anyway. We've had the death of God, and so we have no external force that can guide us,

00:17:08.040 and we're sort of lost. And liberals have embraced this and said, this is so wonderful. You can just

00:17:15.000 choose your own adventure. Everything is open to us. You can pursue any task. But what we see is that

00:17:22.000 this leads to bad decisions, unhappiness, loneliness, insecurity, etc., etc. And so we have people like

00:17:31.680 Brian Johnson attempting to recreate this through the billions of Silicon Valley, that there's going

00:17:41.300 to be a purely rational, logical God that comes out of the machine. This is superintelligence.

00:17:50.820 So we've, I don't know. I mean, is maybe this the only step forward in that most religions, 0.83

00:18:00.100 as we've been establishing here, I think they're making a comeback in many ways. But God remains sort

00:18:07.960 of incredible for most highly intelligent people. Even Elon Musk, he was asked by Vidal,

00:18:19.100 do you believe in God? And he effectively said no. He was like, well, we've got to stay curious or

00:18:24.800 something, just some platitude like that.

00:18:27.820 But it did say, although if there's a God and I'm wrong, I do want to be saved.

00:18:32.860 Like, well, it doesn't work that way.

00:18:38.220 It's like some reversal of Pascal's wager or something where it's like, even if I don't

00:18:44.240 believe I get saved. No, no, no, no. But so I don't, does it make sense? It makes sense

00:18:54.800 for elite people to think in this way because they need this as much as anyone else does.

00:19:00.040 No one wants to choose your own adventure novel. People want a novel where there's a beginning,

00:19:06.200 middle, and end. And so we're going to strive to find logic in the machine.

00:19:14.360 We, you and I just simply have, I get your perspective. We simply have different views of

00:19:21.940 whether that is possible in Silicon. And that's, you know, that's fine that we disagree. But I think

00:19:27.900 where we agree is that we're all searching for that. Can you find that in a revived Christianity?

00:19:33.340 Can you find that through a new age religion, wokeness on steroids, you know, which is, 0.99

00:19:38.700 operates like a religion, you know, with original sin and like your sinful nature and redemption,

00:19:44.240 perhaps, and so on. Or, you know, conservatard QAnon nonsense religion. You know, Trump is going to

00:19:52.000 save you. He's our messiah. I mean, we're grasping for something.

00:19:56.380 Yeah.

00:19:57.000 Yeah. And, but, but I think wokeness and QAnon conservatardism, I, I'm, I might've thought

00:20:06.680 differently like four years ago, but I, I don't think those will win. I don't think it works.

00:20:10.540 But I, I imagine, I think a, a kind of neo-religious revival works. And I wonder if this, this system

00:20:23.420 that I totally reject, which is the AI religion will actually work for a lot of people.

RadixJournal - January 10, 2025

AI-Generated Normies

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