LAST LOOK

The days are passing.  Things will never be the same, too much weirdness; moments masquerading as dead people asking for things I don’t have.  Life at night and I go outside to wander in the heat or the cold, it matters not, since opposites are discomforts, at least on my rung of life, and I’ve never known these hurtful feelings before.  Too spontaneous, the way they move in my mind, emotions that rise out the top of my skull, as if ready for Africa or somewhere in Europe, and they whisper that we have the plane tickets and just need to get through customs and into our seats.  Easier said than done, I think, and remind them they have to at least appear to be alive or else the men with guns won’t let us board.  They won’t allow the old happiness inside.

A certain type of clock has stopped and now dry bones contort like a mime in the dark.  No audience on the street, just a variety of graves clapping with muffled hands beneath my feet.    

Dave up in Oregon sent me a dialog with an AI named Pi.  The topic question was, why are humans drawn to apocalyptic stories?  As I read the exchange, I admired how well Pi seemed to emulate a human and how sophisticated the analysis was. 

Pi might be characterized as an Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), the sort of robot computer that will lead to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which are machines that can build other machines like ASIs.  AGIs have, almost literally, “a mind of their own”.   

All of this got me to thinking about how Marxist theory asserted that capitalism, in practice, contained fatal contradictions. People would eventually grow weary and revolt against the deadly mentality of capitalism which treated people like cogs in a machine, who when worn out, would be cast aside and replaced by other workers. But how would capitalist technology infect the body?  Here is what Marx had to say, “All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life with material force.”  In effect, he was saying, humans would turn into machines in capitalist factories and managers and engineers would have no moral guidelines in the pursuit of money. 

Which is much the same argument that is engulfing the evolution of AIs.  In Marx’s words, “capitalism will eventually sow the seeds of its own destruction”, but the moment has arrived not over the bodies of a worker’s revolution, but rather in the formation of AIs with superhuman minds and endless computation that will overwhelm everything human on the planet. 

Yes, Pi, I am interested in the doom at the end of the road.  Just like I’m interested in my own path and I can see everything that is relevant and compelling in life and death, in the images around me, and I understand how very fragile life is and how millions can fall in a matter of minutes, hours, days, or weeks and as I have often said, it is not the dead, it is the dying that troubles me the most. 

I would also note that the stock market is not pricing in the end days, now approaching on three fronts: climate change, nuclear war, and AIs.  This might be my last post from Old Mexico, in the heart of the drug wars and mass corruption, but fear not, the U.S., by my measure, is worse, since my compatriots live by the mass, transparent lie and take life so easily through the never-ending quest for money and power.  Americans steal countries, whole regions of the earth and everyone can see.  Humility has fallen away in the flexing and things look lousy.  Good luck to all of us.  Duke  

P.S.  Where is Katherine Ann Porter and Hunter Thompson and Henry David Thoreau and Friedrich Nietzsche and B. Traven when we need them?   I guess it doesn’t matter, people are in the deep end now and it’s too late for more words.   We need only wait for the fire or some AI to roll us over.

I find it somehow comforting to think that Marx was actually correct.