Wednesday, August 06, 2025

with gods on our side....

 If I was more philosophically inclined, I'd observe that the last time we had such a shift in the notion of what constituted "power" was the Enlightenment (and its various related changes outside of Europe), when the power base shifted from religious to secular (or if you like, from superstition to science).

At the current state of development of AI, this seems like a retrograde step :-) But being prepared for it is probably a good idea...

...a friend of mine has seriously discussed using GenAI to create new religions (for profit, somwhat as  L.Ron Hubbard did with Scientology). There's an interesting section in the fictional work SNow Crash by Neal Stephenson, where he discusses the organisation of religion in ancient mesopotamia 
where the use of something akin to neurolinguistic programming (think of this as viral social media) was used to control society (for good - e.g. to inform the population (who had then only relatively recently moved from hunter gatherer to the worlds earliest city builder/deweller supported by a large settled agricultural working class) when to carry out various important tasks (plant/pick crops, avoid floods,  deal with locusts/plagues etc)

you can easily (I think) imagine a modern society organised around the cathedrals (aka data centes) hyperscale companies and their open AI priests...

I'm not sure this is what the various AI Safety Institutes are thinking about, sadly...

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