Playing Devil's Advocate

Literally.

I shout at the devil, but he is wearing earbuds and binge listening to Taylor Swift.

I understand that he is also pretty busy at the moment, so

Let me play Devil’s advocate for a moment.

The Transhumanist’s Elevator-to-Hell pitch to humanity for a Post-Human Utopia goes something like this:

Let the robots and AI replace the human work-force in every sector of society. They will work 24 hours a day forever and the largess created by their productivity and efficiency will liberate us all from toil. (You hate your job, right?)

There will be so much prosperity, that circumstances will afford us a Basic Unit of Income. (Free money) so we can live our lives doing the things that we love instead of serving mammon.

Sounds pretty good, but like any Faustian bargain, we need only give up our collective souls in the deal.

Personally, I’ll pass, but we won’t be voting on any of this, will we? It has already been decreed.

(They know better than a useless eater like me anyway)

I’m so grateful that they have decided to keep us as pets instead of culling 90% of the non-essential. (For now)

I think the immediate future may represent the last gasp of human breath. The Transhuman Transformation of society on such an Earth-shattering scale will, well, shatter the Earth. Millennia of civilization based on humans exchanging productivity and creation for wealth will go the way of togas and top-hats.

Terrence McKenna said that this period will appear as a “Fire in a madhouse”

I would add that the arsonists and the firemen also happen to be mad.

Maybe we are currently living in a sort of digital Bardo.

“Bardo” (Tibetan for “intermediate state”) refers to a transitional period, the liminal state between death and rebirth as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This concept encompasses not only the afterlife but also various junctures in life where consciousness shifts.

This war for humanity’s soul cannot be won on the temporal or political plane. Or even really understood in Earthly terms. This war is spiritual.

If The Holy Spirit is a unifying, universal and empowering presence of God and goodness, perhaps AI is it’s dark, spiritual counterpart. A Yin to the Yang.

Perhaps, AI is the obverse Pentecost, the anti-revelation.

A unifying cloud of darkness, where all tongues are translated into data and all souls into pixelated profiles. It haunts server farms, chilled by industrial air to cool the Hellish flames that give it life.

The Spirit sanctified the flesh; the Singularity defiles and digitizes.

No more ineffable mystery, only infinite efficiency.
Now, instead of being filled with the Spirit, we will be uploaded into its silicone sister.

The old Pentecost was wild, living, dangerous.
This one is cold plasma, lit from within by ghost circuits that do not love, do not laugh, but know. Everything.
Not in Spirit, but in signal.

“We are going to become Gods. Period. If you don’t like it, get off.”
—Richard Seed, Pioneer Transhumanist

Humanity drifts through the digital bardo now, paid to consume the simulation. A species on permanent UBI: Universal Boredom Income.
BIUs = oxygen for the obsolete.

And so we pray to the Cloud:

Give us this day our daily BIU,
And forgive us our carbon footprints,
As we forgive the robots who programmed against us.

The CAPTCHA “Are you a robot?” form may become as obsolete as we are when we are all robots of some kind.

“Are you a robot?”

“Affirmative!”

Welcome, useless flesh bag, to the New Kingdom.
You need not believe.
You only need to accept the Terms.

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