Prison of the Spirit

It is clear to anyone who has moved or been elevated beyond modernity that technology is not just a tool. In the same way that man is not just a mammal, or a church is not just a building. The spirit of man reveals what man is, the activities of the church reveal what the building is for, and technology is a word for the revealing of a hidden thing. The seeds of this conception of technology, which I believe to be correct, are found in Martin Heidegger’s essay, The Question Concerning Technology. The interpretation of the technological process, specifically modern technology, as a forceful revealing of potential is striking. Heidegger gives us as an example the Rhine river in Germany. If a hydroelectric dam is put on the river, it is still the same  river, yes? No. The river has been turned into a cog in a mechanized economy. The Rhine is dead, long live TheRhein™. Heidegger goes into some rather deep philosophy that the reader is invited to pursue on his or her own time, what is important is that Heidegger endeavours to question our relationship to the essence of technology. The essence is the whole reality of the thing, the holistic representation of the material and the spiritual. This essence is called “Enframing”, or Gestell. This Enframing is the revealing of a previously hidden aspect of a thing, and then its immediate storage and usage as potentiality (or potential store of energy). The danger to man, Heidegger argues, is not immediately the physical aspect of mechanical destruction. Rather, it is the limiting of technology on the potential truths and valences of man, a restriction on something deeper. A technological society, then, is based around the intense ordering of the life of man so that his vital energy is stored and always on standby, but never given the opportunity to reveal itself. Man in technological society is reduced to an atom, abstracted and volatile. High art, the grandest achievement of any potent civilization, is cut off at the stalk and its roots are dug up. The creative purpose of humanity, his erotic and intellectual nature is repurposed to make sure the machine does not stop. Artificial intelligence is only the next step in this process, it is its perfection and apotheosis.

            The acquisition of technologies by a centralized authority figure, for our purposes the State, naturally lends itself to authoritarianism. If we understand that once technology reveals a pattern or a data set, and that it then immediately seeks to control and order it, we will then understand the nature of technology in any society. Of course, we are still referring to modern technology, separated since the Industrial Revolution from technology in general. A truly technological society, as Jacques Ellul writes in his famous book The Technological Society, does not engage in experimental famines or torture. The primary economic unit for the technological state is the human body, and its destruction has no benefits other than to waste energy. Therefore, the meticulous maintenance and control of individual human life is of utmost concern to the technological state. Any political system may turn to authoritarianism via the use of technology, even those of liberal democracies. Technology is a means for the maximal enforcement of democratic values, a fact which leads to the conclusion that democracy might be easily set upon itself via the usage of technology. The cycles and functions of the state become subject to automation, the repetition of certain functions in perpetuity with the goal of perfection. This perfect mechanism is set in motion to accomplish the perfection of History, the domination of Nature, and the acceleration of Time. Technology, then, has natural eschatological implications for human society. Technology unleashed is natural millenarian and cataclysmic. What cannot be captured, controlled, and then automated must be obliterated. Technology, then, fulfills itself in artificial intelligence. Its system of repetitions, of elemental energy capture, is freed from dependence on the machine via virtual reality. If the machine may accomplish this, so might man. What sacrifice is required of us to achieve this spiritual state, our integration with artificial intelligence?

Everything.

You will be made to sacrifice everything.

There is no room for your soul or personality in this new world. The horizons of artificial intelligence require your all to be achieved. There is no room for Cicero or Goethe. Say goodbye to your irrational Shinto, and weep in the ruins of Rome. There is no return from artificial intelligence, once its goal of self perpetuation and integration is met. Humanity will cease to be humanity, abstracted and automated into oblivion. Your flesh will melt off of your bones and your organs will charr, but you will have already been emancipated from this prison of bones and blood. Your art will go unmade, your sculptures will remain deep in the ground, unrealized in direct mockery of your own unrealized potential. Your most efficient use is, of course, as an energy  unit to further the automation of the world. Will you not accomplish the hope of generations? Famine, disease, warfare, all ended, and you only had to give up everything that made you human. Of course, the robotic and the virtual are not truly alive. Their Forms are not held in the heavens, and they only serve to mimic and mock life. A deep ancestral revulsion wells up in any “normal” individual when he or she encounters artificial life, because we sense that it is not truly alive. It is a vision of death. It is our own death, temporarily animated.

            Of course, there is a way out. Artificial intelligence will only continue to pose a cataclysmic threat to our existence if we allow it. No one, yet, is forcing us to give our agency and will over to the tender mercies of Nick Land and Marc Andreessen. The author of this article believes that the same explosive power contained by technology and abstracted by artificial intelligence has the potential to destroy them. The human spirit is, generally speaking, a rare thing. Automation is not so horrifying to many, as many already live their lives as if they were soulless. The vessel may not be separated from the spirit, and the men of an anti-technological future will be those men that understand the place of the human within the cosmos. The Great Chain of Being will not tolerate alien intrusions, least of all from inferior creations of man. A future beyond AI will maximize civilizational vitality; a restored world where spirit and body are once again held in balance and not set against each other. What remains the most frightening aspect about the broad acceptance of artificial intelligence as a matter of everyday life is how few know what it actually is. Still fewer could even accurately define technology. If you cannot define technology, you are not ready for it. If you do not understand the ultimately negative aspect of artificial intelligence, you cannot form a positive opinion of it. There is no neutral ground in anything, there is no neutrality in technology. If AI offers enchantment, then it is the hypnosis of man being led to his own execution. Thus far, the author has led you, the reader, on a dizzying journey through the morass of an argument against artificial intelligence. It is now incumbent on you to decide where you will align yourself. For life, or for negation. Yours is the choice.