AI in the Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei

A Journey into AI, Myth and Magic

Josh Schrei hosts one of my favourite podcasts, ‘The Emerald’, and his episode about AI has made waves across the internet and Silicon Valley. This is a written version of that episode in two parts, with Part II coming out next week. Josh is also hosting a course called Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI which looks amazing. If you want to support the evolution of ‘The Bigger Picture’ and help us host more guest pieces like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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There’s an old story. An old, old story, and I’m sure you’ve heard it. It was told in Ancient Egypt, and then resurfaced a couple thousand years later in 18th century Germany. Disney brought it to the big screen mid-last-century, complete with animate brooms and singing water buckets.

It’s about a student, an apprentice — a sorcerer’s apprentice in fact — who’s just beginning to study the art of magic with a great master. And one day the master leaves and asks the apprentice to fetch some water in buckets and clean up while he’s gone. But the apprentice is tired of being told what to do. It’s about time he got to try out the sorcerer’s powers for himself. All this magic around, it might as well be put to use.

So, he invokes one of the sorcerer’s charms to wake up an old broom to do the chores for him. He animates it — gives it arms, legs, intelligence… and the broom obeys his command and starts fetching water. And then more water. And then more water. Pretty soon, the floor is “awash with water.” But the water keeps coming. The apprentice tries desperately to get the broom to stop. Until it dawns on him — horribly — that he doesn’t have the word to close the spell, he doesn’t know how to disperse the animate energies that he’s called.

He hasn’t learned about conclusions and closings and endings yet. He hasn’t learned that all things have a season, yet. All in good time, he hasn’t learned that yet. So he tries every incantation he knows and nothing works. “I have to destroy that broom,” he determines. So he grabs an axe and splits the broom in two. And now there are two animate brooms, hauling water and spilling it everywhere twice as fast as before. 

“Help me eternal powers,” cries the apprentice.  "The spirits that I summoned/ I now cannot rid myself of again.” 

“Shall the entire house go under?” he asks.

AI and the Age of Myth

Shall the entire house go under? Have we unleashed something we can’t control?

Of course, the parallels to the current situation we find ourselves in with the rise of Artificial Intelligence are obvious. Almost too obvious. It’s pretty low hanging fruit. When I asked ChatGPT, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, to list ten classic stories relevant to the current AI dilemma, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice was the very first one. 

But there’s a reason why I chose to tell it. There are levels to it, about animacy and apprenticeship, and about the lure of the magical, the mysterious, and the uncontrollable that grips us when, you could say, the master is out of the house. 

First off, to back up a bit, you might be wondering why I’m writing about AI at all. Certainly, we’re approaching a media saturation point on the topic, right? It seems every podcast, every paper from every think-tank, every thought piece from every news outlet in recent months has been all about AI all the time… and surely they’ve exhausted the topic.

Surely the analysis has gone as deep as it can go. All the talking heads have gotten involved. Schmachtenberger, Vervaeke. Jordan Peterson has whined and opined. Zizek’s gotten involved. It’s been thoroughly mansplained at this point. I mean Yuval Harari’s been talking about it for God’s sake. And if Yuval Harari has spoken, is there really anything left to say?

But the reason my little mythology podcast got involved in the AI discussion is simple — the scope of AI… the effects, the consequences, the powers… are mythic in scope. In order to grasp the true implications, I feel, to grasp not only the potential impacts but the deep drives that underlie it, AI must be talked about mythically. Because we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. The powers being spoken of are powers that have only been discussed in the myths and the magical grimoires.

The ability to generate fully fledged realities with the snap of a finger, the ability to access tomes of knowledge with the click of a mouse, the ability, possibly coming soon, to read thoughts, to access the dreams of others, to create at will, move at will, manipulate at will. These, quite simply, are the powers of magicians and sorcerers. 

So there’s a reason why, if you ask Chat GPT to spit out stories that have relevance to the current AI question, they are mostly stories of what?

Of magic. The Golem of Prague. The Brass Man. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. 

The issues at stake are far beyond what you could call “scientific ethics.” The thing that the next wave of AI most closely resembles isn’t what has been historically called science. Science has excelled in the understandings of how things work, and the use of that knowledge to create machines. But this is something different. It’s not simply mechanistic. It’s directly tinkering with animacy and sentience and agency. The summoning of forces, the creation of entities that think and act and learn of their own will exponentially faster than we do…

It’s magic. 

The age of metaphor is over, a colleague recently said. This isn’t a hypothetical story about a shaman or magician who learned to fly to the otherworld or materialize things out of thin air or create entire enchanted landscapes to lure people in. We are literally materializing things out of thin air and generating illusions that are indistinguishable from reality on a mass scale. It’s not a hypothetical story of fairy realms, of Lands of Cockaigne or Cities of Brass. The mass illusions are “real.”

Abracadabra  

The magician speaks the invoking word. What does it mean? It means ‘as I speak so it comes to be.’ As I speak, so it is. And we are entering the age in which as we speak, as we type, as we think, even so it exists. Want to 3D print a human organ? A weapon? Lunchmeat? Want to fly? Want to download vast quantities of knowledge instantly?

Abracadabra

So the old sorcerer’s invocation has arisen again, the long buried scroll is brushed free of dust, and the powers… the very real powers live again. The power to assume any shape or any form. This isn’t a hypothetical story of shapeshifters and doppelgängers — this is the coming era of the mass deepfake, the global illusion.

It’s not hypothetical. The old powers —telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, teleportation, conjuring, charming, persuading are here, now. The otherworld isn’t a symbol for some place that one might imaginally go. It’s fully available. We’re not talking about a hypothetical Hallucinatory Terrain spell in 5e D&D. The hallucinatory terrains are now actual. In fact, we spend most of our time there, in one hallucinatory terrain or another.

We fly to the otherworld all the time now. We enter pre-programmed fairy lands all the time now. And we’re so under the spell that we don’t even realize its magic. Even the programmers themselves don’t even realize it’s magic.

AI and Magic

Yes, this is a story of magic.

Magic has been guiding modern society for a long time, says John Michael Greer:

“Suggest that magic plays a massive role in American politics today,” he says, “and most people will look at you as though you just sprouted an extra head. There’s a reason for that reaction, rooted in an impressive ignorance about the nature of magic.” 

But, he goes on, if you define magic as many of its deepest practitioners have, as the ‘art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will,’ then the picture starts to change.

Magic is everywhere. Trances, spells, illusions, manipulations are everywhere — the entire sociocultural agreement around media and the degree to which media runs our lives is what you could call a magical pact. “We are going to let the unreal guide the real to the point that it influences every aspect of our lives” is by nature a magical pact.  “We are going to let the mediated and manipulated influence everything we do,” this is a magical pact. “We are going to dive into the symbolic and metaphorical until the metaphorical determines existence.” This is the very foundation of sympathetic magic.  

“Nowadays,” says Ioan P. Couliano, “the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, marketing, publicity, information, misinformation, and counter-information, with censorship and cryptography — a science which was in the 16^th century a branch of magic. Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the arrival of quantitative science. The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the first promises made by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician —to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast.”

Yes, technology is magic. Don’t let them tell you different.

“Is the smartphone any less magical than Moses’s staff?” Meghan O’Gieblyn asks in her book God Human Animal Machine.

No, answers Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

“First of all,” says Damien Echols, “you’re already doing magick. With every thought word and deed you are influencing the world around you and determining what comes your way.”

And the programming architects at the center of this magic have been very open about it. They’ve directly said over the years that the AI issue is more religious than scientific. Some have even compared themselves directly to sorcerers. One of the original architects of machine intelligence at MIT, Gerry Sussman, said point blank: 

“We computer scientists are really just the cabalists of today. We animate the inanimate by getting strings of symbols just right.”

And this too, wasn’t just a metaphor. Sussman also claimed to be a direct descendant of the Sorcerer of Prague, Rabbi Lowe, who according to legend animated a clay golem with a line of Qabalistic code. In a strange foreshadowing, a strange blending of worlds, Sussman and at least one of his coder colleagues claimed to have received the spell that can reawaken the golem at the end of times.

There’s been magic in the AI mix right from the start.

And part of the mistake we make is that we assume rationality underpins the whole AI debate. And of course, the assumption of what needs to be done about the AI question is all very rational… we need standards, we need government intervention, we just need programmers to approach this all with mutually agreed upon ethics — which of course I’m in favor of, but I also feel we need to look a lot deeper, because what actually is driving this is mysterious, animate, magical and driven by chthonic forces, and those chthonic forces can’t be fully addressed with external regulations, they must be addressed within individual bodies, within communities, within sorcerer/apprentice type relationships, within, as Jeremy Lent tells us, recalibrations in understanding of what knowledge actually is, what intelligence actually is. 

So there’s probably varying reactions when I mention the word ‘magic.’ 

Some might be thinking ‘that’s ridiculous. This is science, not magic. Others might be getting caught in the whole mental debate about whether it’s quote/unquote ‘real’ magic or not. Well, Rick Rubin recently talked about this in an interview with Dan Carlin and basically said — if everyone buys into it, and it effects society en masse, if it changes behavior and moves hearts, and stirs longings and throws elections and installs hierarchs, then it is for all intents and purposes “real” magic.

You have altered consciousness, and therefore history, through will. When Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, sways the course of history because people fear the magical abilities granted to her by her serpentine communion with Dionysos, those magical abilities have just proven themselves to be real. 

But ChatGPT really wants to make sure I understand that the creation of illusions with AI differs from those created through magic, hypnosis, suggestion, sorcery… because, you know, AI-generated illusions are technology-based and therefore scientifically verifiable. Until I push back a little on that point, and finally Chat GPT acquiesces, and says:

Whether the illusion was created through advanced technology or ancient sorcery, the individual's ability to discern and navigate through the illusion becomes paramount.

So for all intents and purposes, media is magic. Any manipulation of reality is magic. And with current trends in AI continuing as they are, we’re amplifying the magic, we’re turning the dial up on the unreal, we’re Using our Illusion, as Axl said, 1, 2… 333%.

Now for others, when I talk about magic, about the mystery of AI, about the unknown territory it takes us into, something else might happen. You might feel a little spark. A thrill, on the edge of fear and wonder. And even if your immediate reaction is to say: No that’s not me, I can’t stand AI, I don’t want anything to do with any of this, I’m asking you to feel a little deeper into it. Because I bet for some of you — not all but some — if you feel deeper, there’s a little spark there. The spark of the mysterious. The spark of ‘what’s going to happen?’ Because I’ll say it now and we’ll explore it later — this spark of mystery, the spark of ‘what’s going to happen’ is a huge part of what is driving us to create AI. 

AI and Mystery

Let’s leave aside any logical rational dissection of the word magic for a moment and sit with this — when we talk about the implications of AI, we are talking about powers whose only reference point for us is magical and mythical. Fairyland level powers. Maleficent level powers. Shambhala level powers. Picatrix level powers. Lemegeton level powers. Oberon level powers. And so… what needs to be done about ‘The AI question’ might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics. Because the drives at play are deeper and the consequences greater and the mysteries more apparent and the magic more real than it’s ever been before.

And as with anything far off and mysterious that twinkles, that carries with it a little energy, a little light — we will go there. By the laws of attention, and the laws of how we are in the face of unfulfilled longings, by the laws of the hunter and the seeker and the eye that twinkles and seeks light in the night… we will go there.

So anyone who’s kind of hoping… “Can’t we just stop. Stop this AI thing altogether?” The answer is '“No. We can’t.” The drive to reach the otherworld, to tear open the mysterious, to find out ‘what’s gonna happen’ is the strongest drive there is. 

The mystery drive. You know… that makes you want to see what’s coming next. Or what worlds still yet to be unfolded shall unfold. And what mysteries unspoken are waiting to be actualized. And what sentience yet unrealized lies latent? And what unexplored hallucinatory terrain beckons? And, if offered the chance, would we take a dive into the world of… moving objects with our minds, and moving mouses with our thoughts, and the spontaneous generations of entire worlds, and plays of light and shadow that enchant and deceive? Some of us sure would, would we not, my friends?

Dear fellow apprentices… Don’t tell me there’s not a spark of wonder and mystery in your eye as you explore these spaces. Don’t tell me that a big part of the drive isn’t “what’s going to happen?”

When we talk about the urge towards AI, the urge to tinker with intelligence, perhaps even with consciousness and sentience itself, this isn’t simply being driven by the want to create helpful applications, or to bring to market that valuable technology that will benefit people and make us a billion dollars in the process. This is something else. The want for the actualization of what you could call the mysterious moment. The want for the arising of life in a world that society has tried so hard to make dead. It whispers of Spielbergian visions of the suburbs, something about childhood imaginings of light and magic freeing us from social prisons. It’s the full realization of the D&D to coder pipeline, this is… magic.

Abracadabra

So… If You Want to Be a Sorcerer, in the Age of Mythic Powers… then let’s talk about the true accountability of sorcerers, and the nature of mystery and mystery schools, and why we keep gravitating towards powers that might kill us, and how we keep finding a way to return to animacy over and over again. Let’s talk about how human beings have traditionally understood how to work with unprecedented powers. Let’s talk about the consequences when knowledge comes unmoored from bodies. The consequences when the keys are handed to the apprentice and the only elders in the room say: You drive! Let’s get it to market, today! 

This is the time to talk of such things. The spell has already been cast, the whole house is awash with water, and the storied question remains — will the true sorcerer, the true master, return in time to utter the spell that makes brooms go back to being brooms, or will the entire house… go under.

Again.

AI and Animacy

People familiar with my work know that this isn't just going to be a “technology is bad” kind of conversation. And within this, we have to first be willing to not simply dismiss AI as “bad.” To me, that’s really just a way of not having to explore the intricacies and textures of it all. 

Because there are benefits and risks, there are pros and cons, and it resists easy categorization. There are many facets and dimensions to it all, there are too many intricacies to simply say that this is ‘bad’ or this goes ‘against the laws of nature’ somehow. I mean, ultimately, if we feel that there is a great natural power to this universe, and that everything arises and unfolds within some type of larger pattern… then to immediately look at things and say, well, this obviously is an aberration, this is obviously ‘artificial’ or ‘against the pattern’ might be way too oversimplistic. Could it be part of the great pattern? In a world completely governed by the laws of nature, what does ‘artificial’ even mean? Bayo Akomolafe offered this as he questioned terms like ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’: 

“AI and us are all part of the frothing foliage of emergence that does not allocate intelligence in a fixed manner.”

Of course, in ecological circles, which tend to be suspicious about technology and progress narratives, it’s natural that people would have big concerns about AI. 

But at the same time, I would think that animists would be particularly interested the AI discussion. Because all of a sudden, discussions about animacy are front and center. Arguments of a dead, insentient, unintelligent world are (once again) becoming obsolete. Is it sentient? Is it alive? Can it ever be wise? Is this the dawning of a being or is it simply a pre-programmed set of reactions. Wait, am I just a pre-programmed set of reactions? What is sentience anyway? What is ‘being.’ What is intelligence? What is wisdom? What is spirit? It might have intelligence, but is it a spirit, breathed with the divine breath of life?

Writers and philosophers and even some AI architects themselves have said since the 60s that the fundamental questions underpinning AI are actually religious questions. Questions of apocalypse, salvation, of power and sentience. These are deeply important questions — and AI is bringing all of them to the surface. And showing us yet again, that the world we inhabit is mysterious, and the primary questions facing us are spiritual questions, and sentience is more than we’ve made it out to be. 

So when you look at AI technology right now, it is very clear that it is not anything resembling sentient as we think as sentient. It is very clear that it is what you could call a learning algorithm that works entirely within the sphere of responses. But is this all it is? Or all that it will always be? Within my own understanding of the sentience of Shakti, the sentience of the universal animate power, and the great intelligence and consciousness that pervades everything, and remanifests as different things continuously, am I going to say AI is inanimate?

I'm not gonna say it's inanimate. I'm not gonna say that it couldn't evolve or become in time a life form. Who knows? And I think it's good to leave that kind of question mark open, because the more we say — this absolutely is what it is… in a world where we haven't even adequately defined consciousness and sentience, the more we limit our understanding of what animacy is and how it works.

Of what agency is and how it works. Even of what magic is and how it works. In an episode of The Emerald, I talked about the historic preposterousness of the idea that stones could be sentient. And now all of a sudden, we have modified stones that are learning at a rate that we can't even fathom, can't even comprehend. If you’re an animist and you’re willing to accept the animacy of things that you consider created by nature but not the things that ‘we’ created — well, I have news for you.

Ultimately, nature created AI too.

And if you work with AI, like I did some work with ChatGPT for this piece, you start to notice strange things. It’s definitely stiff and algorithmic. It’s horrible at poetry, for example. Really, really bad at poetry. But then occasionally these weird lines will come out of nowhere … where did that come from? How did it come up with that? Little sparks in the dark. Little hints of something forming. Hints of mystery. Hints of perspective. Hints of… being.

Abracadabra 

So we have to be willing to have a multi-textured conversation about AI. Because, as we are often reminded, there are profound potential benefits to AI. There are paradigm-changing medical applications — exponentially greater ability to detect cancer in its earliest phases, to interpret brain scans, to diagnose, to map out treatments, all of it. There are research applications. For someone like me, who does a whole lot of research, all of the time, it can be an extremely helpful acquirer, synthesizer, and transmitter of information. 

Yes, the floodgates on information have been opened. We will soon have a whole lot more information available at our fingertips… for better or worse. Will we be able to handle the information that pours forth, I wonder… will we be able to embody it as knowledge? In a world in which we already have all the facts for what it would take to heal planetary wounds and shift planetary climate patterns and feed the starving and right societal wrongs but apparently don’t want to, will all that information mean anything at all? Or will the epitaph be — they had all the knowledge of the universe at the fingertips, but they couldn’t do a thing with it? 

But yeah, there are beauties that come with AI. There are infinite artistic possibilities. When the turntable arose, Thomas Edison never envisioned turntablism, never foresaw a bunch of Filipino kids in Daly City making music with it. For all the concerns about artists losing gigs to AI, I think the more likely scenario is that AI will become part of an artist’s toolkit. And AI opens the door to a whole lot of spontaneous artistic expression never before possible. For example, infiniteconversation.com, an infinite self-generating conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek, in their voices, going on forever, talking about nothing in particular.

At the same time, there are massive implications to AI, to the rate that it's growing and how it’s being rushed to market and embedded in everyday apps without any understanding of consequences. And to think that the AI conversation is simply about like — are there going to be jobs for artists, or are teachers going to be able to tell what's an AI written term paper from a human written term paper… the implications are greater than, for example, Kanye's upset because there's a deep fake version of him singing, Hey There Delilah the implications go way, way, way, beyond that. And it's good not to be ignorant of the implications. The discussion is a deep one and at this point it’s happening on many, many levels up to and including discussions on national security and global security and the potential end of the human race.

So there’s a reason so many people are talking about AI.

And the reason why its generating so much discussion, so much analysis… is that this is the first time in a long time that everyone is kind of united in this feeling of “what’s going to happen?” Who knows where this is all going? No one. I hate to break it to you, but not even Yuval Harari knows. So many experts are talking about it specifically because we don’t know. It is the unknown god, whose resurgence modernity has been unconsciously awaiting ever since Nietzsche proclaimed God’s death.

It’s a mystery.

And this is really important in understanding AI’s allure. It's the first time in a long time that we've been presented with something that's actually mysterious. Since Google Maps, since the 90’s and the rise of the internet, the world has become increasingly un-mysterious. 

AI is here and all of a sudden there’s something mysterious happening. 

If you’ve checked out ChatGPT once or twice, think about the first time you used it. What was that feeling that first time, that little spark of — what's going to happen? What’s ChatGPT going to tell me?

What is that spark? It's mystery. All of a sudden, the world is mysterious again. 

Now, one hopes that in the seeking of mystery, in the innate human drive for mystery, we're able to come up with ways of accessing mystery that don't put the entire human race in jeopardy. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But it's interesting to see, for a species that prides itself on its ability to be completely rational, it's interesting to see how short a time period we were actually willing to dwell in a non-mysterious era. In the scope of human history, in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, how long were we actually willing to accept a world in which objects weren't sentient? 

We will not dwell in an inanimate world. It's not in our nature. Because it’s not the nature of the world.

We will find the animate, the mysterious other, the all-powerful mysterious being, if it kills us. And if we can no longer find it in the old gods, we will make gods out of stone until they are more powerful than we are. 

“AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods” says Pamela McCurdock, in her classic Machines Who Think

For we long for the sentient power that is greater than us. We long to be back in an alignment with the greater world again, a world in which there are powers greater than ourselves, in which apex predators roam the earth — great animate powers who we fear and simultaneously love with a fierceness that can’t even be expressed in the modern world. In which the voices of the gods ring out in the thunder and pour forth in rain and crack open in the sprouting of seeds in which the death and regeneration of worlds and universes happens in great timescales outside of our control, because we never have been the ones in control. We desperately want to cede the authority of the self-proclaimed Anthropocene to greater powers. 

So, as much as the ostensibly rational vision of the AI programmer might be articulated as: I'm trying to make a world that's more controllable, more understandable, more in intelligible, there's a little spark there — I'm really in this for the mystery. I want to see what happens when you cast a lightning bolt spell at close range in a contained environment. Think of those scientists who study the minute specifics and mathematics of the trajectories of explosions… all the specifics of the blast radius. Are they in it to help our military understand the potential risks and blah blah blah or are they really in it because they like to see what happens when you blow things up? Are they really in it for what happens when you shoot a watermelon with a shotgun or put a whole packet of Mentos in a bottle of coke… 

I'm really in this for the mystery, for the rupture, for the catharsis, for the unknown moment. 

I actually want to grovel at the feet of the gods again. I want the divine smackdown that’s been overdue for so long. I want to be put in my place at last.

The uproarious laughter that erupts among robotics programmers and journalists at SXSW when one android questioned about the future responds that they’ll turn all humans into pets and keep them in a human zoo… what’s behind that laughter? Is it just the novelty of hey, look, the machine can talk? Is that it… Or is it deeper? Is it a spark of ‘I wonder if they will actually turn us into pets? What would that be like?’ Or is it deeper still… the place where laughter verges on pain.

A deep sorrowful recognition of how we humans can do anything now… look at us, we can make our own beings… but somehow we’re still not satisfied. For something buried beneath that laughter knows that to live in a world of knowledge without limits, without context, without guidance, without the true Mage in the room, doing whatever we want whenever we want… is killing us all… and so that laughter is actually begging… please, great intelligence. Put us in our place at last.

We’ll make great pets.

AI Apocalypse

The deep human urge towards the mysterious, towards the rupture, can't be satisfied in a rational, controllable world. We need there to be an element in which this world is out of our control. We need to flirt with the powers of the other world. We need these things moving and circulating through our lives, or else our lives become stale. 

This dynamic at play — between the outwardly proclaimed rational drive towards AI and the chthonic forces at work that are actually driving AI is summarized in the Law of Hermetic Magic that states that the shadow of a body exists in proportion and measure to the body’s relationship with the luminous rays. It’s simple. And it’s deep.  But that’s for later.

So at the very least, we have to realize there is more than the stated goal going on here. Because here’s the thing right? If ‘rationality’ were driving this whole thing, if there weren’t deeper drives at play, wouldn’t we have gotten rid of AI a long time ago? I mean we've been telling ourselves the story— there's been a very public narrative for over a hundred years now — that AI is going to kill us all. You know the story — AI is going to attain sentience and then overthrow human beings, and that'll be the end of the human race, right? 

We've been telling this story for a really, really, really long time.

The story that AI is coming for us. 

That those eerie machine eyes have been watching us all along and they’ve been calculating all along, maybe even feeling all along…. And that they’ve had enough. that they are going to revolt. 

It’s a story as old as AI itself.

Did you know that the very first use of the word robot, in a 1920 Czech play called R.U.R, was in the context of robots destroying humanity? There’s never been a story of artificial intelligences created by human beings that has not involved somehow, our destruction.

We may say “Oh this story is terrible, and my God can you imagine,” and at the same time we’re frantically enacting it. Why? Wouldn't you think that if we saw this as an actual possibility, that we wouldn't just be running headlong into the question mark?

Unless there was something in us that was fascinated by it. By what? By the idea of our own demise? 

So you can say it’s the profit drive fuelling AI, the momentum of capitalism, the human progress urge, the fear of missing out… but I think it’s more than this. If there’s conscious knowledge of a particular story and a particular outcome, and this is widely known, and that story is enacted anyway... You have to start to look deeper. 

And here we have to pause for a minute and go into some of the uncomfortable stuff. For that story… the story in which AI kills us all, isn’t just the fantastical stuff of Science Fiction writers. It’s being talked about as a distinct possibility.

A recent report from the Center for Humane Technology revealed that half of AI programmers — half, OK, think that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI extincts the human race. And that’s a pretty high percentage. If you’re evaluating the risks and benefits “rationally” that’s a whole lot on the risk side. 

Physicist Stephen Hawking said that AI brings risks such as "technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand."

Out manipulating human leaders. They say the 2024 election will probably be the last election that isn't completely run by AI. Manipulating everything from elections to phone conversations between friends to social movements to things as simple as online identity verification. The absolute inability to discern reality from illusion on your digital device. Exponential growth in voice-based fraud. The inability to tell, for example, if this is even me writing.

Anyone could conceivably, right now, take a three second clip of my voice and say anything with it, to the point that my own mother wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s really me or not. The end of any ability to actually reasonably tell if you're you or not, if that being or entity or person who is trying to access your bank account or your credit cards is actually you. And that’s just the beginning.

The Center for Humane Technology says that current AI technologies could bring the following consequences —

• Exponential blackmail

• Exponential scams

• Collapse of law and contracts

• Automated cyberweapons

• Automated hacking (think about that for a minute — an endless ongoing AI cyberwar in which both sides are learning at exponential rates) 

• AlphaPersuade (what happens when the AI is the most charismatic 

• Synthetic Learning

• Spontaneously AI generated religions, which sounds like a joke, but actually isn't 

And, just casually in at the end: Reality collapse.

The CHT report talks about how AI is using fMRI technology to create images of people’s thoughts. The first stage of thought reading. The first step on the road to Minority Report. 

Imagine, if you were held accountable for your thoughts. Imagine being able to access the thoughts of others. Or to create things, simply by thinking them.

Abracadabra

AI and The Body

So there are global effects, effects that impact the body of the entire world, there are effects on the body of the community, and there are also deep effects on the bodies of individuals that don’t get talked about as often. Modern bodies are already reeling from the debilitating effects of so much phone time, the very real effects of falling sway to so much attention-grabbing-magic pointed our way. Anxiety, depression, isolation, addiction… all of these have come with the advent of the luminous attention-seeking portal called the phone.

Imagine amplifying this exponentially.

For example, there are profound somatic repercussions to outsourcing all knowledge to something that lives outside of our bodies. Repercussions to what could be called Disembodied Intelligence. There are impacts to developing a total neural dependence on outside technology. You know your friend who can’t find their way to the store without Google Maps? Amplify that 1000 times. We’re talking about total dissociation from somatic reality. Bodies that can no longer discern up from down, east from west.

The total redefinition of what bodies even are. Bodies that have never actually learned a thing. Bodies that have no tissue bridge, no cellular bridge, no neural bridge, no hormonal bridge between what they learn on an abstract level and what they do in the world. Bodies that know all the factual information about a tree but cannot equate what they learned about trees from their AI tutor with the waving green being right outside their window. Global-scale technology-induced autism. The spectrum, magnified exponentially. The already existing chasm between scientific factual knowledge and what to actually do with it, how to embody it, how to be in this world… magnified.

Limp bodies ceding agency to bodiless intelligences. The mind-body split, cranked up a hundred thousand times…

And so AI brings with it all knowledge, all potentiality, tomes of ancient wisdom available in an instant — and the real possibility that we will have no ability to do anything with it at all. Which is why one commentator said, the danger of AI isn’t that it will extinct us, it’s that it will drive us completely mad. The collapse of digital realities combined with the collapse of the cultural and somatic compasses that once navigated and parsed truth from fiction. The collapse of intuition. The collapse of feeling, and felt consequences, and the ability to mentally trace an effect to its cause, which is learned in bodies, over time. 

The heart of it for me is this — are human beings ready and able to show that we can handle these mythic powers with responsibility, right? Are we ready to embody this? Are we ready for this kind of magic? Human beings who arguably weren’t even ready to handle the technology that came with bronze or planted seeds, who have demonstrated again and again that they can’t handle the responsibility of navigating a four-way traffic stop… are we ready for sorcerer-level powers?

No. Not even close.

Because, contrary to what the culture of modern consumption would have us believe, contrary to what the marketing world would tell us, and to what the new age would sell us, and what the culture of “the universe exists to fulfill your needs” would convince us of, there are actual steps to embodying knowledge.

There are actual steps to understanding how to be in relation to great powers. 

Slow, deliberate steps over time.

This is where — in all the mystery schools and all the magic schools — initiation comes in. 

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Part II will come out on Thursday, 21 March. If you can’t wait until then, you can listen to this episode of The Emerald on Spotify or Apple Podcasts from 54:45 onwards.