The Prophets of Progress have arrived in Louisiana, preaching a gospel of beatitude via AI:
‘“All along the I-20 corridor, we’ve been calling this for sometime the ‘cyber corridor’ and now we have real, real opportunity with the advent of AI and the development of data centers and the new needs that are out there, north Louisiana and northeast Louisiana, specifically, is very well situated to maximize that potential and that opportunity,” Johnson continued. “We’re poised and ready. A lot of this is underway already but we believe there’s unlimited potential right now.” ‘ . . . Johnson noted he and other members of Congress who represent Louisiana have been meeting with large technology companies and prominent technology officials, including Elon Musk, to discuss the state’s future in AI and the expansion of the state’s energy industry. ‘“The other interesting thing about the development of AI is that you also have a great increase in the need for energy to power all that and Louisiana is perfectly situated for that,” Johnson said. “You need a couple of ingredients to make a large energy AI center and all these things, we have in abundance here.” ‘Memphis, Tenn., has been making great strides toward the development of AI data centers but Johnson argued Louisiana—especially northeastern Louisiana—would soon outpace Memphis. ‘“I was in Wisconsin a couple of days ago and they were talking about Monroe, La., as the place that might be becoming the center of this new AI data center revolution,” Johnson said. “So, we have a lot to be proud of. I think Louisiana is really going to be put on the map and if we continue the trajectory we’re on, it’s really going to be a game-changer.”’
How often have we heard this siren song? Embrace the newest technology with gusto, and all will be well! We don’t have to look too hard for examples to disprove statements like that. Smartphones are an excellent example. The all-in-one device promised many conveniences, some of which it has delivered on, but at a very high price: Social relationships between people have suffered terribly. Places where human conviviality used to take place – a checkout line, a waiting room, a playground, etc. – are now silent as people stare blankly at their phones. Children especially have been harmed. They have been so stunted by their fixation on these devices that they can’t communicate well with other children or with adults, amongst other problems. Sweden has become so concerned about this that her government is planning to severely restrict the use of smartphones by Swedish schoolchildren:
‘Flashback to 2017, where Sweden’s five-year digitalization strategy for schools stated that its main objectives were to “create further opportunities for digitalization, achieve a high level of digital competence (especially in the context of children, students, and younger people), and promote the development of knowledge and equal opportunities and access to technology.”
‘Now Sweden has the second-highest use of the internet in the European Union, after Denmark, and the government is worried there may be too many opportunities for young people to stay connected in the classroom. Social Affairs and Public Health Minister Jakob Forssmed is leading an effort to get students to rebalance real life and TikTok reels.
‘”Schools have a responsibility to prepare [children] for the world,” Forssmed affirms. “But my God,” he says, throwing his hands wide in consternation, “what we’re seeing now is something else.” Forssmed says Swedish students are suffering widespread disorders and a decline in physical and intellectual capabilities due to the hours spent online.
‘”They cannot cut with scissors. They cannot climb a tree. They cannot walk backward because they are sitting with their cell phones,” he told DW in an interview at the ministry in Stockholm. “We are also seeing things like diseases that usually were in old people and middle-aged people now haunting young people” due to lack of physical activity.
‘That’s why Forssmed is pushing for restrictions on personal digital devices in school to be enshrined in national law and made mandatory rather than just recommended, as is currently the case.
‘The government’s proposal for the new law would allow students up to 9th grade to have no access to their devices during the entire time spent in school, including breaks.
‘Their case is bolstered by new guidelines issued earlier this month by the Swedish Public Health Agency advising no screen time at all for toddlers below the age of two, one hour total for those aged two to five, two hours tops for those six to 12 and for teenagers, three hours maximum’ (Teri Schultz, ‘Back to basics: Sweden aims to de-digitalize youth’, dw.com/en).
Sweden and others are experiencing significant remorse over their eager embrace of earlier forms of digital tech. Louisiana should take some time to reflect on this before latching on to AI with all her might. The warning signs about it are already appearing.
There have been numerous stories about AI as a threat to various occupations from paralegals to doctors to stock market advisors. But for a political site such as this one, there is a danger that hits closer to home, the threat to conventional political practices like voting. Replacing the fickle, fallible human voter with a more reliable and steadier AI replica has seemingly begun:
‘In a closely watched New York Democratic primary in June, centrist George Latimer ousted incumbent Jamaal Bowman by a wide margin of 58.7% to 41.3%.
‘Ahead of the vote, two 19-year-old college dropouts in Manhattan conducted a poll that accurately predicted the results within 371 votes. Their secret? They didn’t survey a single person. Instead, they asked thousands of AI chatbots which candidate they preferred.
‘Welcome to the future of polling, according to Cam Fink and Ned Koh, co-founders of a seven-person company called Aaru. They say they’ve cracked the code for predicting accurate election results, which have come under increasing fire since most public polls failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. The answer is ignoring the humans whose behavior they are trying to capture.
‘For election results, Aaru uses census data to replicate voter districts, creating AI agents essentially programmed to think like the voters they are copying. Each agent is given hundreds of personality traits, from their aspirations to their family relationships. The agents are constantly surfing the internet and gathering information meant to mimic the media diets of the humans they’re replicating, which sometimes causes them to change their voting preferences.
‘. . . The polls usually draw on responses from around 5,000 AI respondents, and it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 1.5 minutes to conduct. Aaru charges less than 1/10th the cost of a survey of humans’ (Reed Albergotti, ‘No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans’, semafor.com).
The underlying message is clear enough: An AI voting system would be cheaper and give more accurate results than the old fashioned, less efficient one in which actual people, who have oh-so-many faults, participated.
Replace actual voters with AI replicas? Could that really happen? It sounds outlandish, but it has nonetheless been on the minds of the elite ruling class. Two examples. The first is a short story by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, ‘Franchise’. In that story, the citizens of the United States of the not too distant future, having grown weary of the rigmarole surrounding local, State, and federal elections, have had built a super computer named Multivac that decides who should win every one of those elections based on an interview with only one citizen who would best represent the mindset of the whole electorate (The Complete Stories: Vol. 1, New York: Doubleday, 1990).
The second is from one of the creepiest snakes in Elite circles today, Yuval Hariri, a self-proclaimed transhumanist. His statements leave little room for doubt about the direction he and his friends want to take humanity:
‘Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self, and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self.
‘Liberal habits such as democratic elections will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than I can. . . .
‘ . . . Google wasn’t born yesterday, you know. . . . Google will therefore be able to vote not according to my momentary state of mind, and not according to the fantasies of the narrating self, but rather according to the real feelings and interests of the collection of biochemical algorithms known as ‘I’.
‘ . . . if Google makes enough good decisions, people will grant it increasing authority. As time goes by, the databases will grow, the statistics will become more accurate, the algorithms will improve and the decisions will be even better. The system will never know me perfectly, and will never be infallible. But there is no need for that. Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself. Which is less difficult than it may sound, given that most people don’t really know themselves well’ (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harper Perennial, New York, 2017, pgs. 343-4).
The ambitions of those behind the AI revolution, as one should have no difficulties imagining, go well beyond election systems:
‘He said the company has been hired to conduct polls for Fortune 500 companies, political campaigns, think tanks and super political action committees. One campaign in California is relying mainly on Aaru for its polling, he said.
‘ . . . The co-founders say they’ve purposely kept a low profile. “We’ve been very careful,” Koh said. “We don’t want to be seen as teenagers who meddle in elections.”
‘But Aaru is not shy about its ambitions. A white paper on its otherwise sparse website says “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore”’ (Albergotti).
In other words, AI is about control – of political systems, of economic systems, and of the minds of individuals who do not conform to the beliefs of the Elite:
‘A ‘scientific’ study published Friday detailed an artificial intelligence (A.I.) chatbot developed to suck on the brains of ‘conspiracy theorists’. The researchers go on to define ‘conspiracy theorists’ as those who are a ‘threat to democracy’ due to their disagreement with official government and medical narratives and those who believe what Donald Trump says.
‘“Beliefs in conspiracies that a US election was stolen incited an attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021. Another conspiracy alleging that Germany’s COVID-19 restrictions were motivated by nefarious intentions sparked violent protests at Berlin’s Reichstag parliament building in August 2020,” the study said in the ‘Editor’s Summary’ section.
‘The A.I. system the researchers developed allowed said conspiracy theorists to interact with a chatbot, based on large language model (LLM) technology, which aimed to remove their suspicious and inquisitive nature.
‘“Amid growing threats to democracy, investigated whether dialogs with a generative artificial intelligence (AI) interface could convince people to abandon their conspiratorial beliefs. Human participants described a conspiracy theory that they subscribed to, and the AI then engaged in persuasive arguments with them that refuted their beliefs with evidence. The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change. This intervention illustrates how deploying AI may mitigate conflicts and serve society,” the study said in the ‘Editor’s Summary’ section.
‘The researchers complain that those questioning official narratives are not willing to conform to the hive-mind groupthink the establishment desires when confronted by classical propaganda techniques. The researchers thus believe the use of generative A.I. will force ‘conspiracy theorists’ out of the ‘rabbit hole’ and suck their minds clear of any unauthorized thought’ (Sean Miller, ‘AI Chatbot “Mind-Sucking Machine” Developed to Change the Brains of “Conspiracy Theorists” — Study’, Infowars.com).
And once control is achieved, destruction isn’t far behind:
‘What struck me about all this is an interview I did last year with a former occultist who claimed that these higher entities — to him, demons, which he worshiped for years — disclosed that they intend to merge humanity with machines as a precursor to humanity’s destruction. I did not know what he could be talking about. Now I do. He’s talking about a kind of spirit possession achieved through AI’ (Rod Dreher, ‘The AI Ouija Board’, roddreher.substack.com).
Louisianans must beware. They ought to keep AI at a safe distance for now, keeping its use limited until all of its downsides are known and well understood.
In order to keep from falling into the temptation of accepting the trade-off of more dangerous technological development for a higher standard of living, we should keep in mind a group of men and women whom we have mentioned before: the Christian nuns and monks. They live in voluntary poverty, often with the most humble of technology, but are amongst the happiest people in the world because they have the one thing needful: God Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Not only this, but some have also achieved what the anti-Christian transhumanists desire so badly to attain through technology but cannot – the transcending of fallen human nature, through union with God Himself. Without AI, but by God’s Grace, they are able to see the future, to heal human illnesses, etc. These examples are from the lives of two Georgian monks, Sts George and John, who lived in the harsh times of the Soviet communists:
‘Fr. George was endowed with the gifts of prophecy and healing, but he was careful to hide them. When constrained to reveal them, he would pass them off as though they were nothing extraordinary. Once a certain pilgrim arrived at the monastery and was surprised to discover that Fr. George knew him by name. Sensing his great amazement, Fr. George told the pilgrim that he had attended his baptism some thirty years earlier, thus concealing his God-given gift. Fr. George knew in advance when his nephew was bringing his sisters, whom he had not seen in forty-eight years, to visit him at the monastery during Great Lent.
‘Enlightened with this foreknowledge, Fr. George prepared fish and a festal meal in honor of the occasion.
‘The prayers of Fr. George and Fr. John healed the former’s nephew, who was afflicted by a deadly strain of meningitis. They restored hearing to a deaf child and healed many others of their bodily infirmities’ (‘Saint George (John) of Georgia’, oca.org).
‘Many of the miracles performed by Fr. John are known to us today, though he was wary of receiving honor for his deeds. Frs. John and George healed the deaf, and many of the terminally ill were brought to them for healing. After spending several days in the monastery, the infirm would miraculously be cleansed of their diseases’ (‘Saint John of Georgia’, oca.org).
The acquisition of these gifts of the Holy Spirit comes not with the mechanized ease of technology, but with the hard striving of the soul and body in acts of self-sacrificial love:
‘Fr. John disciplined himself severely. He worked hard all day and slept on a single piece of wood. He would spend entire nights praying. Many wondered when he rested and where he had acquired such a seemingly infinite supply of energy’ (Ibid.).
‘Once a twenty-year-old girl arrived at the monastery, complaining of incessant headaches. She had been told that the water from Betania Monastery would heal her. She remained there for one week and was miraculously healed. When she left to return home, Fr. George-John walked five miles to see her off, in spite of his physical frailty’ (‘Saint George’).
AI isn’t our greatest need here in Louisiana. The True God is our greatest need. Thus, our attitude to artificial intelligence, and every other form of technology, and every other earthly thing, should be the same as that expressed by the Holy Apostle Paul: ‘”All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be enslaved by anything’ (I Corinthians 6:12, RSV, orthodoxchurchfathers.com).