AI is a Mirror

There is understandable fear around the takeover of AI.

And.

I wager that the deeper fear is that humanity may become indistinguishable from it. AI, like so much else happening around us, is an invitation to look in the mirror and assess what is going on within.

Though the defense of the em dash as a perfectly human punctuation mark remains worthwhile, we are also being invited to wake up in the morning and actually choose how to feel and act. If your house is falling on your head, then, indeed, that might be cause to panic. If it is not, perhaps there are other things to feel beyond those listed on the limited menu of social scripts within one’s chosen identity or cultural group.

I have noticed that those in institutions in most distress about AI also reward human actions that resemble AI coding. Note: how the academic job goes to the best mimic of a certain theorist; when the publishing industry invests on the writer whose works may provide the highest marketability; and the many economies fueled by the question “what will get the most likes?” None of these should even be considered “spicy” critiques of academia, the publishing industry, and the influencer economies; these institutions would not exist as we know them without their reliance on humans mimicking each other.

This issue is not only a question of capitalism. The reliance on human replicability to structure the very nature of reality began long ago, finding its best nest to be the familial home and other small communities. Consider the scripts of the Mother, the Father, the Concerned Citizen, the Rebel, the Priest, the Virgin, the Crone, and so on. Woe to the ones who dared act beyond their chosen, assigned, or inherited scripts.

Even the one who tries to create their reality from their singular self-sourced spark may find their their nearest and dearest waiting right outside their front door holding that nice mask they’d prefer one to wear.

Haha, you don’t mean that. You’re a_________.

Who does he think he is, going there? He’s a ______.

I can’t believe you desire that. Aren’t you a ______?

Oh, don’t bother asking him what he thinks. He agrees with us because he’s one of us [e.g., this organization/social group/racial or ethnic group/voting block/parental status].

Humans constantly check against pattern break, thereby manifesting into human reality what they most hate and fear about AI: mimicry, replicability, lack of spontaneous life.

I used to be just as anxious about AI as everyone else. But when the veils dissolved through my initiations through divine flame, AI ceased to have the same threatening hold over me. The reason is not that I suddenly began to have an uncritical stance towards it. Rather, I began to live from that which AI truly cannot replicate—the singular, un-replicable divine spark within. From that endless fount one can also begin to discern an amplified version of what is possible and real, most of which stands outside of the paradigms that prize replicability, whether in humans or AI.

Read the longer version here.

Image: Technik by Minya Diez-Dührkoop (ca. 1924).