AI and demonism again

In January I wrote an article on AI and demonism—this is a follow-up…

AI is here, and its effect is a strange one—it seems like it has both sped history up, and slowed it down. It is the most revolutionary technology, and that brings all the world-changing effects you can imagine—but it also has so strangled thinking, language, and any idea of a coherent socioeconomic future, that it feels like the world has also stopped moving. It has also had the effect of making philosophical questions more urgent.

As AI increasingly eats the world, the question of what knowledge is, is no longer just a fun philosophical question—it’s something that really has to be understood, if we want to hang on to whatever is left of humanity, and of the world itself.

In answering this question—what is knowledge, what is intelligence—the best way to start is to go back to the very beginning: the story of Adam. The story is told in the Bible, but also, and more interestingly I think in the Quran. God said to the angels, “Now tell me the names of these, if you speak truly. They said ‘Glory be to Thee! We know not save what Thou hast taught us. Surely, Thou art the All-knowing, the All-wise.’ He said, ‘Adam, tell them their names.’ And he told them.”

The point of this story is that angels (which are the same as demons—they are just demons who stayed loyal to God in the War for Heaven), can do nothing but defer to higher authorities. They are incapable of any real knowledge of the essence of things—and Adam, representing all subsequent humanity, is superior to the angels, despite the angels having supernatural abilities, like flight, that mankind does not have. Mankind is superior to angels/demons (and AI), because we get knowledge from God—all that angels/demons/AI can do is defer to a higher power. In the case of angels/demons, that higher power is God/Satan. In the case of AI, it’s us.

And that seems to me to be the main problem with AI—it defers to us in the same way that angels/demons defer to God/Satan. And we are definitely not gods…so we must then be devils (or become devils)…