These days I have a hard time writing unless I’ve had a few beers first. I think it's because being introspective has only gotten harder to do honestly as I've gotten older and have spent more time in the vampire castle. A friend told me journaling is extremely gay; he's not wrong.
I initially wanted to write a response to an AI-doomer podcast from Sam Harris that was shared with me. But I've come to accept that it's really hard to change people's opinions, especially when they're held strongly enough to send you podcasts about the topic and propose doing grassroots organizing for anti-AI activism.
I think I'm getting old enough where I've kinda given up on trying to convince people. I still try simply for the love of the game, but I don't think I earnestly believe it's going to change any minds. At worst I just hope my family isn't going to end up as forced labor in a bauxite mine one day because dad worked in tech, owned bitcoin, and had a real thought in public once. I try to have a policy of never-dooming; it's a seductively demonic behavior, to just let your mind grind on how everything is or will be fucked. I don't call it demonic lightly either; dooming catastrophizes something that has been a permanent condition for all human existence. Humans would not be human without a sword hanging somewhere over every age. One age had the Mongol horde at the gates; ours has podcasts in the group chat.
I was raised Protestant by parents with graduate degrees; church was the center of my parents' social life, and as a result of us moving a bunch, I spent time in a few different denominations: Calvinist, Baptist, Anglican. In college I considered myself an atheist, then an agnostic, and now I'm a disgruntled reprobate Christian. Christians (and Jews) love the Bible stories of Israel being held in slavery in Egypt or being taken into captivity in Babylon. It's a timeless narrative device: Frodo and Sam leaving the Shire for Mordor, The Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz. Paradise into darkness, or darkness into paradise.
I never liked the biblical allegories I heard in church. We are born into slavery in Egypt, and it's likely at some point we will be taken into captivity in Babylon. There is no anti-human future; it's always been anti-human. Most people in America have ancestors that had to leave very messed up situations, only to get to a place that exploited them until they were able to miraculously scrape together some semblance of a living. The globalized free-market economy is already an ASI that has no problem crushing as many humans underfoot as is necessary for NGU (number go up): towns gutted, families priced out, children raised by screens, workers optimized into paste. Without AI we're already looking down the barrel of demographic collapse, environmental destruction, geopolitical breakdown, the sovereign debt bubble bursting, and whatever current doom porn is dominating the news cycle. We left the Garden of Eden long ago; there is no rest, only the curse of an infinite becoming.
The AI-doomer and AI-optimist are both Faustian, both views from the Western soul. The doomer dreams of perfect regulation and control. The optimist dreams of forever-growing GDP or silicon-based life replacing carbon-based life. They look like enemies, but they are rival organs in the same beast. Neither view can achieve its goals because the goals are impossible: perfect regulation, infinite growth, an ensouled silicon lifeform. The worst thing you can do is give civilization AIDS: let one organ of the beast bludgeon the others into silence and call the corpse healthy.
In the legend, Faust ends up being dragged to hell after a brief bender of power and knowledge. Goethe's version of the story has Faust being saved from hell by angels because of a side bet God made that Faust couldn't be dissuaded from striving. I like the original ending better.
There is never any finality, only an endless battle against the Beast, generation after generation ground into dust cursed with an endless becoming. A better Christian might call this the burden of sin in our fallen world. Maybe that is why the AI-doomer framing bothers me. Not because the risks are fake, but because the posture is spiritually rotten. It's all the worst parts of religion. It turns fear into sophistication and despair into a credential. But Babylon is not the end of the story. It is where most of the story happens. People are born there, marry there, raise children there, learn there, pray there, sin there, repent there, and die there.