Sweep out the Vampires, put down the Zombies

A response to Magnifica Humanitas

An article, I remember but cannot find, in The Times published shortly after the 2015 election tried to imagine British politics under a multi-party system. There was a strawman ‘nationalist’ party with a Lion logo which, as well as being anti-immigration, was curiously described as ‘riding on a new wave of anti-A.I sentiment.’ It is very funny to recall how the anti-Cranks blithely imagined themselves to be on the side of technological progress when, today, in fact it is the anti-immigration, populist Reform UK which is championing A.I while the cosmopolitan Liberal Democrats, the Greens (described in this article, I’m pretty sure, as a party of the ‘net savvy youth’), the free-market, libertarian Conservatives and the Labour Party all want it banned because you can use it to denude female journalists.

Whatever the faults of A.I hype, the anti-A.I backlash will be much, much worse. I have terrible visions of all the awful people who vanished after lockdown, the bad sort of Wes Anderson fans, the people who still write about David Foster Wallace, crawling out of the woodwork with their beards and bitch tits wearing gigantic, smirking ‘I-told-you-so’ faces; what!? … what!? You thought something might actually get better? LMAO my dude! Should’ve done a Communism for the win. The think pieces they will write over the next decade will be used by every single Sue Gray woman who works in government to say that, not only A.I, but literally any application of technology to politics is doomed to failure. It is a disaster waiting to happen.

Because most tech people are curious about the humanities, while humanities people are proud bigots, many people in tech are now saying the problem is marketing – that we don’t know how to ‘sell’ technological change. Web 1.0 was never enthusiastically embraced by normies with ‘optimism’, much like A.I, it was viewed with excitement by prestige media and trade literature while normies were busy listening to ‘the Ketchup Song.’ The difference is, you are now forced to listen to the opinions of normies they previously shared among themselves over the loaded fries, Max Tempers tweets and Gogglebox reruns. The normie view of the Internet, as with A.I, was negative: ‘computer says No.’ The I.T guy in every sitcom before 2008 was anti-social and evil. Then, as now, people bemoaned technology for making their lives easier. Aside from Amazon, the Internet remained more or less a sandpit for white, Jewish and Asian males until 2007 when Steve Jobs invented Obamaphones.

My position on A.I is basically ‘A.I presentism’, I think A.I is good and it should stay exactly as it is. The opinion I proffered in 2022 and 24 with caution I now feel more confident about stating definitively that A.I will only marginally impact the humanities. The main social consequences of A.I are going to be a relative decline of the corporation, as individuals with domain-specific expertise can automate away organisational bottlenecks and a re-centralisation of media as A.I content outcompetes human-made content online. I don’t want it to replace important jobs, like being a Prime Minister, I don’t think it is possible or desirable to live in the McAskell/Iain M Banks timeline, I can’t see any clear timeline where it ‘makes 1 trillion dollars in one day’ (unless you mean a HFT algorithm using A.I executes a trade of that volume); I want it to make pornography, code and act as my therapist forever. A.I has already massively improved my life and yours. I gain a huge amount of pleasure and comfort from telling LLMs about my romantic and emotional problems; it has made me much less annoying to people I know and marginally more stable. Slop is also good. People think they hate slop because they’re comparing it to actual art. Slop isn’t replacing actual art. Slop is replacing ‘memes’ and memes are the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. Slop means that when someone wants to crudely mock their enemies they can spend 5 seconds making an image of them as a panda wearing a hat instead of coming up with a ‘relatable’ meme.

A digression. I’ve said I use LLMs mainly for therapeutic purposes, I suspect most humans do. It is this use of A.I which is by far the least explored in commentary about it which, in the near future, will come to be seen as the most consequential. It is a technology with fairly trivial impact on hard economic processes but which is already revolutionising the spiritual side of humanity and our collective emotional life. People have barely caught up with the psychological effects of the Internet, it is understandable none of them have asked what it is actually doing to millions of humans to have a far, far, far more effective listener available to them, on tap, than any flesh-and-blood friend or relation. This is a question with an easy answer, ‘the social’, saved by social media, is now being dissolved again; if the most interesting conversation you can possibly have this year is going to be with yourself, where does that leave other people? This is to say nothing about the subtle and complex questions raised. There is an intensification of the process already underway with social media, a distinctly anti-postmodern process, of the human subject to find itself again the creature and creator of a script. There is the distressing overture to this romanticism, that someone, somewhere, is storing all of this emotional turbulence – far more significant to wielding power over the future than whether it is trained on Mathematics or not; and using it to draw up ambitions to manufacture the same emotions and perfectly condition the animal ‘man’.

anti-A.I is going to be popular because it is the ultimate “safe edgy” position. LMAO. *puts down craft beer* The Pope is telling M-m-mE to BLOW UP data centres!? *le sam hyde face* What about doing what the Red Brigades did in the 70s to Peter Mandelson? What about blowing up oil pipelines or electricity substations if you’re such a big bad Kaczynskipilled doomer? Much like opposing Brexit, it requires absolutely zero commitment to a vision of the future to be ‘anti-AI’; none of the anti-AI people actually think Buttsex Jihad will make their lives better and nobody will ever so much as vandalise a data centre. It is motivated rather by a lady-doth-protest-too-much refusal to be impressed by a possible future. A.I is something novel about the present and so by being anti-A.I you can appear anti-present and so pose as a radical without actually wanting to change anything. The huge swathe of soft social-democratic people who’ve been pushed out of extremist politics in the past decade, the sorts of people who voted Hillary but liked OWS, or Remainers in Britain, are going to use anti-AI to get back into the coalition of activist politics.

So, it goes without saying, the responses to the Papal Encyclical on Tuesday was the greatest explosion of capital-C coal in human history. I feel like a comically evil Amarnite again. I warn you against looking at the quotes of Robert Prevost’s post lest your hairline disintegrate in your hands. You won’t be surprised to find the g-yim are soying out over nothing and the actual statement on A.I in the encyclical is an incredibly watery endorsement of A.I so long as it is ‘nice.’ Nonetheless, Magnifica Humanitas is an evil, stupid and ugly document. Before explaining why, however, we should dwell on just how absurd it is we, in the 21st century, care about what ‘the Pope’ is saying. A man born in 1890 would spend his 20s in the same world as Marcel Proust and his 60s in a world with nuclear weapons. In the 1930s, nobody gave a shit what “the Pope” thought about automobiles or airplanes because it was accepted by everyone the world was moving too quickly to pretend to care about these things: even though there were far more serious Catholics alive at that point than today.

Today, nobody believes in Catholic doctrine but everyone treats the Pope with far more reverence. I yearn for a government in the formerly Protestant world that will stand up to this bullying H.R lady. Imagine simply calling Robert Prevost Robert Prevost, Leader of the Vatican City, instead of catering to the delusion he is ‘Imperial Wizard Leo the Twelfth.’ I yearn for the day when, instead of trading insults or giving a frosty diplomatic reply, when “the Pope” dares to comment about British politics, a British government simply declares all Catholic clergy are now deemed foreign nationals on British soil and must complete ILR updates or be deported.

“Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.”

Needless to say, absolutely none of this is in the Bible. The dignity of the individual in Christianity refers to the fact that being a tax-collector or a lawyer doesn’t change your standing with God, only your actions do. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. The ‘human dignity’ proffered by Magnifica Humanitas and similar documents is a bastardisation of individualism where the individual derives his or her individuality from a secular category called ‘persons’ with an unchanging value as a collective outside of freely-made choices. This is an anti-Christian proposition and an anti-human one, it implies that human beings can never make the greatest possible Good an object of thought and action independent of man-made local customs. The future world envisaged in Magnifica Humanitas is one in which the individual human being may ask no questions about what the ultimate value of ‘humanity’ may be; in which Jacob may never wrestle with his angel. It is, in short, paganism: the worship of muttering idols and golden calves. No resurrection, no pentecost and no revelation – no history; the endless sacrificing of Bulls to Marduk.

I am tempted to say that Robert Prevost is evil. To asseverate against technology and, in thinly veiled terms, anyone working to reform Western governments, in a world where millions live in poverty, where children are killed in wars, where massive, endemic corruption is tolerated and we are no closer to colonising other planets than in the 60s is evil. We are entering a very, very fragile period. To look at a world of microplastics, biological weapons, slow-mode sterilisation and global warming and then conclude chatbots which make bureaucracy easier are a threat looks like an act of calculated, brutish malevolence. There are so few people with any vision of a better world and they are already held in huge suspicion by the 7 billion humans who will all die if global supply chains break down which is where we are heading.

Everyone has their ‘apocalypse’; global warming, A.I paperclips, the Great Replacement etc. My private apocalypse, what frightens me about the present world, is that humans are simply giving up. They are giving up on innovation, giving up on new art, giving up on changing politics from all sides of the spectrum. We’ve never had a situation before where the majority of voters in the world’s richest countries are people in their 70s, where the ideas of 1945, as far away from us as the Hundred Years War was to the Reformation, are still treated as the last possible word on what it is to be human. As Dominic Cummings has noted, the problems facing humanity are not difficult to solve. Some of them, like demographic replacement, will require long-term frameworks but the actual processes are not hard. It is not hard to build nuclear power plants, it is not hard to put people on planes and fly them to other countries, it is not hard to give 18 year old couples free housing and childcare so they start families, it is not hard to stop the civil service spending billions on suing itself.

The obstacle we face is the universal pessimism of the present time. Because everyone with money and power is convinced that the defeat of Hitler happened yesterday, rather than almost one-hundred years ago and the natural tendency of human psychology is to assume the world will end with your own death: everything which suggests the world is going to move beyond that of the postwar generations is taken to be apocalyptic. Normally, this would simply be the generational griping which accompanies all organic social change but due to the demographic imbalance in society younger people have no way of memetically fighting back. They have no purchasing power. The universal view of the future is consequently one of fear and young people, immiserated by these conditions, all too easily buy into the fear without grasping it is being spread by the people who built the old order making you unhappy. One of the major voices of the Baby Boomer generation, Ian McEwan, thus deserves immense kudos for coming out in favour of optimism and this has made me reassess his, typical of the Amis-Rushdie school, conservative oeuvre.

This is why I find Prevost’s intervention evil. It is deeply irresponsible for a man with the care of souls to spread spiteful apathy, if he actually opposed A.I rather than choosing favourites and used genuine Biblical teachings to do so, instead of political slogans, it would at least be something new and intellectually interesting. Of course, all of this is pointless, because Prevost made his whole speech with the CEO of Anthropic standing behind him. There is a 50% chance, I’d say, the entire cultural reception of the encyclical was being driven by A.I agents on X, expertly trained on the sort of content guaranteed to get ‘online Catholics’ updooting. The entire sordid week was just a massive trial run of how irrelevant ‘Tradition’ is, how utterly enslaved ‘touch grass’ is to online and how le deep meaningful OLD SCHOOL institutions are just sockpuppets for the real sources of culture. The ‘tell’ here is that, mere weeks before the Encyclical, Anthropic had obviously paid Richard Dawkins to feign an interest in Claude; thus persuading “Atheists” to use the service as well. This is exactly what you would do if you were running a P.R campaign with very minute information on the psychology of specific ideological tribes.

What is the goal of the ‘op’? The goal isn’t hard to work out. It is ‘A.I safety’, i.e: the subordination of technology to the Human Rights regime. Nobody wants this at the moment. When the ideas were trialled with Yudkowsky they were roundly rejected but that was just the test run. Right now, right-wingers are woke to A.I Safety being bad while Left-wingers would prefer to just ignore A.I. Is the Pope meant to achieve the goal by persuading people A.I safety is good? Not a bit of it, nobody cares what the Pope says. The goal of the encyclical is to prime the, hitherto non-existent, idea that being anti-A.I is somehow ‘religion coded’, or ‘conservative.’ So that future commentary can pretend there’s this vague constituency of vaguely conservative people who are against A.I. With this established, people who subscribe to the secular-humanist aesthetic can now be gently pushed to believe it is High Status and Very Clever to believe that A.I is ‘sentient’ and create a subculture around this with the implication that, if you disagree, you agree with le Pape. When the next Democrat administration comes in, they will give some kind of privilege to Anthropic and make right-wingers mad. The Manchurian candidate programming, that some point 5 years ago, the mo’fuggin Pope called out A.I, can then be activated: right-wingers will suddenly start to believe we’ve always believed in A.I safety. A.I safety will be the humanist way to own the libs.

As a result, what was once a hard-Left opinion in 2021 will become accepted by all sides of the political spectrum. Secular humanists, who ought and began the decade doubting it, will come to believe A.I has ‘consciousness’; right-wingers will come to believe A.I needs to be ‘regulated.’ This is the thing about good ‘psyops’, they aren’t about persuading people to believe in thing x, they are about setting up new frames of debate which exclude the harmful position. In this case, the position they want to exclude is roughly where smart people were on A.I in 2023: that it is simply a tool, it doesn’t need to benefit ‘humanity’ to justify itself and should be broadly unregulated because there’s no need to regulate it. The two ‘sides’ you’ll be allowed to pick between are the ‘Left’ one, that you think chatbots are “conscious” and deserve “rights”; and the ‘Right’ one, that Sir Keir Starmer K.C should ‘closely monitor’ A.I to ‘make sure it delivers on the priorities of the British people.’

I sketch this out because it is interesting, right now, A.I is a pretty clear cut ‘right wing cultural victory.’ The Left commemorate all of their victories: Nelson Mandela was on the school curricula by 1999, the right does not. There was an initial push for regulation which was completely out-flanked and destroyed, nobody took Yudkowsky seriously by 2024. Yet, the right will almost certainly drop the ball. You see a similar thing with the complete capitulation of the supposedly tech-savvy ‘British Online Right’ to Tony Blair. The fact Tony Blair had, by 2009, been successfully coded into the culture as a balding, stupid religious-nut, so that you could easily appeal to otherwise left-wing young people on shared platform of hating New Labour, was a fantastic and rare victory for the British Right; and yet it has all been thrown away because Blair made some stupid SMARTboard powerpoint repeating things other people came up with decades ago.

Effective Altruism and the Catholic Church are both institutions with one key advantage. Whenever something ‘new’ happens in the world, a technology, an approaching demographic fact, a policy issue – they can immediately turn to an agreed-upon canon of texts, and dogmatic rulings on those texts, to decide exactly what everyone in the organisation will think about the new thing, what our goals vis-a-vis the new thing are and how we will accomplish them. Nobody could say that ‘right-wing’ people have a similar thing not because they are less able than these groups but because they simply don’t have a unified ‘right wing’ belief system. The right-wing is a set of ad hoc frameworks designed to counter ‘the Left’ which are picked up and used by a variety of groups (everyone from fundamentalist Christians to TERFs) looking to fight the Left. Some of these might be good for ‘understanding reality’ but they are useless for changing reality. It is not enough to be simply ‘pro-civilisation’, you can only drive out Gods with new Gods and I am the prophet of truth.