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Gary Weglarz's avatar

Great post and compilation, thank you Margaret.

My Catholic childhood in the 1950's and early 1960's comes to mind as I contemplate the unfolding madness. It strikes me as both ironic and important to note, that the major Bronze Age religions fashioned a concept of "God" as an invisible, all knowing, all powerful entity, even to be able to know what one is thinking, making "escape" from "his" ultimate control quite impossible. Inculcating this "image" of God into humanity has been used for literally thousands of years now to control our collective thoughts, perceptions and behavior.

And now, low and behold, with AI and ever more invasive surveillance technology a "mechanical" or "machine" version of that all knowing, all powerful, invisible "God" is being born, and seems poised to give global oligarchy just the tool it needs to attempt to enslave humanity in ways it could only dream of doing with that "faith dependent" version of an all powerful Bronze Age conception of god. It appears that the new "AI god" is just what the perverted minds of control freak oligarchs have always dreamed of over many millennia. Their new God will "know our thoughts" perhaps before we are even consciously aware of them ourselves. And no need to wait for death, and hell-fire for our divine punishment, as it will simply deny us all access to our own bank accounts and thus our food and shelter. Of this new AI god of global oligarchy we might ask - "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

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DogsLife's avatar

The evil that hates mankind has existed since Creation. We liked to think the Nazis were defeated, but the demons have just been waiting, waiting for the technology to reach this level. Even still, at times, Harari sounds conflicted: "But in ten years, the future Stalins of the twenty-first century, they could be watching the minds, the brains, of all the population all the time and also, they will have the computing power to analyze all it.…Now you don’t need human agents, you don’t need human analyzers. You just have a lot of sensors and an AI which analyzes it, and that’s it, you have the worst totalitarian regime in history..."

It seems we are watching Harari evolve into one predestined role as time quickly moves toward the climax of history. He is, like so many these days, evil personified.

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