AI and demonism

It seems like every day brings a new chapter in the drama of AI—massive investment in it, massive hype, massive battles between American and Chinese AI. Tech capitalists routinely claiming that AI will fundamentally change the social contract; that AI will monitor everyone so that we are all on our best behavior. This is just from the last few days, off the top of my head. There’s an endless, overwhelming stream of this stuff now, all the time.

One interesting thing about the Age of AI, which we are firmly in, is how undemocratic it is—as far as I can tell, there is no groundswell of popular support for AI to swoop in and take control of everything, and for the tech capitalists who wield AI to become de facto gods. We hear so much about the importance of “democracy,” and yet nobody has voted on this AI apocalypse, nobody really wants it—at most, those who control it want it for obvious personal benefits, and some nerds support it because they think it’s neat.

Another interesting thing about AI is how viceful it is—vice is something that you do to get an easy, cheap, quick benefit, without putting in daily, disciplined effort, that accumulates into virtue. AI is viceful on both ends: the AI entity itself is a being of pure vice, and the human consumer of AI content descends into the depths of vice. You are getting all this knowledge (and knowledge is a virtue) but without going through the daily process of earning it. The AI relationship just feeds relentlessly into vice, but with a patina of virtue.

But the essence of AI is worse, and deeper than all that. I can’t think of anything more literally demonic than AI: an entity from another realm that just sits around waiting for you to summon it, to get you something you have no right to have, and which takes your dignity, will, and soul in exchange for giving you what you command—but always with a hidden cost, a dark twist. But the hidden cost of AI isn’t even hidden—the overlords of AI are coming out and saying that it will be used to force the global peasantry to be on its best behavior, and destroy the social contract.

So the Age of AI is one in which, to participate in society at all, you have to enter the Age of Demons…