Paul Kingsnorth's latest book #AgainstTheMachine has an interesting thesis.

Basically he says that the unstoppable rise of AI is the coming of the #antichrist from the bibical book of revelation.

Well if the #RaptureOfTheNerds ever does happen there will be a non-human intelligence that is superior to humans. I believe the terms weakly or strongly god-like are banded about by the "AI" adherents.

Its fairly obvious that the "AI" adherents are some form of cult. They behave like the followers of some bearded acid casualty living in the desert. They talk of "transcending" and "improving" humanity by merging our physical bodies and minds with machines. They want to make humanity anew in the image of what Kingsnorth calls "The Machine".

Kingsnorth himself is a convert to Orthodox Christianity from paganism and talks widely about his faith. He asks this question of the "AI" cultists, "What if this is not a metaphor?" Is the rise of "AI" really the actual return of the Adversary (as the devil / Satan) used to be called before Islamic eschatology was adsorbed into Christianity. Is the rapture of the nerds and the biblical rapture the same thing?

I am not a religious person whatsoever. I note the similarities in the use of language and metaphor between Christians and "AI" cultists. I guess the "AI" cultists are by and large Christian as many of them are from the former USA. They are steeped in the language, metaphor and culture of the Christian Church. Its easy for them to co-opt the language from the Church into "AI". Its also noticeable that #AntiAI people like me use religious language and metaphors. I call the "AI" #techbros cultists after all.

I am very concerned about the damage "AI" is wreaking in the technological, social, environmental, political and more aspects of human life. I think "AI" should be killed with fire right now. "Take off an nuke the site from orbit, its the only way to be sure" is a good idea in my book. Stop using and creating "AI" right now. Bury it deep underground like nuclear waste. Its just as dangerous after all.

I would like to see an debate between Paul Kingsnorth and Peter Theil. They both talk about the coming of the antichrist a great deal. Theil and Palantir can be seen the pinnacle of Kingsnorth's Machine in flesh and code form. I wonder if Theil has even heard of Kingsnorth and his book?

#AI #Antichrist #PaulKingsnorth #PeterTheil #Palantir #AICult #Singularity #Rapture

"...‘It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression,’ says [Jacques] Ellul, ‘but what if victory has been gained at the price of even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 118-119

"...This does not require a global conspiracy, or a wizard behind the curtain. There is no wizard. There is no curtain. There is only technique, which ‘has become an autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which has renounced all tradition. Technique no longer rests on tradition…its evolution is too rapid, too upsetting, to integrate the older traditions.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 117

"...Technique, on the other hand, when it is taken up as a way of seeing, gives birth to an entirely new type of technology: one which exists to remake the world in the image of technique itself. The kind by which, today, we are all increasingly enslaved.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 116

"...something which, in some indefinable way, seems to be struggling to be born through us. Something which we are midwifing into existence every time we click and swipe, whether we know it or not. The question is how we can begin to understand it.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 115

"...Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can't be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. ‘Open’ things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 108

"...‘Openness’ is both the aim and the core value of the age of globalism. It is, in the telling of those who promote it, always a good thing. Open minds, open hearts, open doors, open borders; open to trade, to growth, to change, to progress, to ‘diversity’ in all its manifestations.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 106-107

"...All of this creates not universal peace but universal upheaval. Like Perry's arrival in Japan, its effect is to dissolve our previous social bonds, cultural stories, social arrangements and religious commitments in a sea of open, boundless nothing.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 110

"...If Japan was a hidebound ancient nation, America was a newly incorporated business, and it had ambitious plans for expansion—plans which involved spreading its core values of individualism, commerce and competition to every corner of the globe.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 103

“To those who ask, ‘What can I actually do?’, he [E. F. Schumacher] said, the answer was ‘as simple as it is disconcerting: we can each of us work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 99

"...sees our world as a blank slate to be written on afresh when the old limits of nature and culture are washed away. This is our faith: that breaking boundaries leads to happiness, that boundaries are barriers rather than opportunities. We strain against all limits. It is who we are.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 99

“‘What is at stake,’ asserts [E. F.] Schumacher, ‘is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics and the standard of living can just as well be looked after by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and redistributive taxation. But culture and, generally, the quality of life, can now only be debased by such a system.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 97

"...‘economic problem’? When we look around us, we can see that Keynes’ naive notion—that a society which cores itself around ‘avarice and usury’ can suddenly drop those vices when some undefined plateau of perfection is reached—is ludicrous. Once you adopt these values, they will make and remake you. The world they have built will depend upon their being pursued forever.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 96-97
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"...The same way we run our old ships up onto the beaches in China in India, and leave them for the locals to break up—if they can. The same way we dump nineteen million tonnes of plastic into the environment every year.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 91

"...The poorest Stone Age savage’, Mumford concludes, ‘never lived in such a destitute and demoralized community.’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 85-86

“This Metropolis breeds a globalized elite class who feel more at home in each others’ cities than they do in the hinterlands of their respective nations, and who promote and represent the ideology of Progress that keeps the metropolis humming. This global network of megacities represents the Machine's core.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 85

“The city provides opportunities for wealth that the village never could, but it treats its poor and marginalized with a contempt that the village would regard with incomprehension.
As so often, this is a question of scale. Plato, according to Mumford, ‘limited the size of his ideal city to the number of citizens who might be addressed by a single voice’. Everyone should be within hailing distance of that voice in order to ensure human-scale living.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 84

“One of the great myths of the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure. A city's inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 84
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"...Like a black hole, a city sucks into its orbit everything around it; and a modern world-city sucks in the world. The impacts of this are measurable.
To take just a few examples: 75 percent of worldwide energy use is in cities, and energy energy demand is outstripping population growth as those cities expand.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 83
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"...The sheer scale of the modern urban conglomeration is mind-boggling and entirely irreversible.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 83
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