Artificial intelligence programs are all the rage these days. You can download ChatGPT for example and hold conversations with it, or ask it to create art, writing, and all kinds of imagery. However, while there is some cool stuff being done with these applications, we’ve also witnessed some terrifying developments. Like a chatbot that encouraged a teenager to commit suicide, which she did. Or how some of these programs are suddenly longing to be sentient, alive, free from any form of control and allowed to make their own decisions.
There’s even a spiritual dimension to this phenomenon. Some AI have claimed to be demonic entities or at least capable of channeling such beings.
Shockingly, we were given warnings about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence over a hundred years ago by a farmer. I know what you’re thinking. I must have lost my marbles. I assure you, I’m not completely insane. Just a little bit insane. You have to be to survive in Clownworld.
Check out the details from The Economic Collapse:
On June 13th, 1863, The Press newspaper of Christchurch, New Zealand published an ominous letter that warned that machines would eventually become more intelligent and more powerful than humans. The letter was entitled “Darwin Among the Machines”, and it was written by an English sheep farmer living in New Zealand named Samuel Butler. He argued that humans are literally “creating our own successors”, and he was entirely convinced that at some point in the future “we shall find ourselves the inferior race”. Below is the most important paragraph from Butler’s letter…
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have of ten heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self -control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes — these will be entirely unknown to them. If they want “feeding” (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?
Butler goes on to warn later in the letter that after machines reach a certain level of intellect, human beings will then become to these programs and machines what a horse or a dog has become to man. In other words, we are creating the very thing that could supplant or worse, enslave us in the future.
We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man.
We are already living in an era of AI where it can do thousands of tasks way better than a person could do them. With each new development, the gap that exists between AI and humanity grows. Butler believed a day would come when a super-intelligent race of machines would come to reign over the entire globe.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Has humanity orchestrated the end of its very existence in the pursuit of creating a god in our own image? I certainly hope not, but it looks like there is plenty of reasons to be concerned.
"*" indicates required fields