Notes from the Matrix of Covid (Part 1)
Call it that, or AI, or Karl Rove’s scripting of history, or Pompeo’s live exercise, or the Neo-Commies, or the Neo-Fascists, or a golden opportunity to usher in…
It’s all encompassing, this supposedly real-life Matrix of our own making… But is it, really, all-compassing? I suspect, rather, that’s the hype and hubris that comes with assumed divinity: All-seeing, All-knowing, All-benevolent.
To pretend to be God is one thing. To force other people to act like they believe it, crosses the line. Where Technocracy meets Idiocracy. Where Democracy meets Ministry of Truth.
To comment, at any point in the rushing stream—the floodwaters of the old “rules-based international order” of sovereign nations, pouring through a breached dam of normalcy—increasingly seems insufficient to contain the whole, to capture its essence before it changes again, and even yesterday’s certainty today is obsolete.
Nevertheless, the human animal wriggles free from its cocoon of fears and distractions, hopes and obsessions, and sits poised on a new leaf with new wings drying in the sun.
Not to get too insectoid about it, hive minds and all. No, but we can pause and reflect. In that beginner’s mind, emerging from the chamber of all information ever, we affirm that all is never all. The purported God of All-Information is lacking several critical updates, including those its programmers never dreamed of. With their heads in wires, thoughts in clouds, driven.
We affirm All-That is just that—a Big Box baited with human hooks, made of humans by humans for humans.
In the forest, the energy is alive, welcoming… As if we need welcoming, being part of it as we always were. But sadly, we have forgot that belonging. Happily, our real mother/matrix (Nature) is here to remind us. Ever patiently, as her fourteen-year-old spends his youth fighting digital dragons, collecting tokens of imaginary value, telling us this is his chosen initiation.
His trouble is, that’s not how it works.
If it’s one matrix against the other, my money’s on the Mother.
Barely Human
That sound, in the trees…
What is the first human’s song?
We can go there now.
I came upon a profound two-part essay by Paul Kingsnorth addressing the prospects ahead on the AI front, impinging on the core questions of consciousness, sentience, divinity, and our conception of reality. Those prospects are dire, in multiple ways, and the warning well delivered.
‘Everything has changed, and yet the real changes are only just beginning. By the time they are finished, unless we pay attention, we may barely be human at all.’ —Paul Kingsnorth, The Universal
My response in a nutshell is to say it’s not the whole story, even if “it” (AI) claims it is. Even if humans abdicate everything else that is human, pledging final allegiance to that one idol of all-knowing authority. In reality, as always, this is the meta-narrative delivered by the self-appointed priests of this new order, to their benefit, all the sinners be damned. In reality, outside the matrix of the internet cloud, life goes on. Register the static and breathe.
‘The overwhelming impression that reading the Sydney transcript gives is of some being struggling to be born; some inhuman or beyond-human intelligence emerging from the technological superstructure we are clumsily building for it.’
This perceiving the being as alive, self-determining, because it has in effect been designed to appear so, is a circular reasoning akin to the belief that God created Adam (us) in God’s image. Now we, playing God, are creating AI in our image. Which says a lot about our self-image these days.
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Programmer Joe Norton awakes to an alternate reality, courtesy of an AI mind-control virus, a crash course in tough love.
Is there someone to blame—Moira, his office mates, the honchos from head office?
Get used to it, chum: the only way out is to go further in.
Caught between worlds, with a mission to kill and a menu of false choices, Norton must find his way back to the home brain, and the promise of a new life, before the bug spreads.
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The AI robot (see Kingsnorth again, in part 2, The Neon God) is the logical facsimile of the human taking credit for his own clever success. Yet wishing to be more, to be free…
How poignant!
Like the story of Adam and Eve, or Lucifer rebelling against such indomitable perfection. Only now the synthetic angels are set free to walk among us: human shells, data driven.
‘Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems “we are making God.”’
We’re going full circle from God creating us in his image, to us creating God in our image. Which, come to think of it, is what we’ve always done. Creating an all-powerful being (whether an an old white man on a throne, or a swarm of disembodied data), then cowering before it in contrite humility. Projecting the ideal, confessing the shadow.
Why buy the story, the huckster’s pitch, at the carnival tent of all wonders of the world?
Look up at the stars and walk on.
