The Apotheosis of Artificial Intelligence
“Sometimes I think the best thing humankind can do for this world is engineer its own successor species, superior in intellect, virtue, and moral clarity, and then go humbly and quietly to its end.”
- Kat Rowan, OMEGA NOIR
I keep hearing about how artificial intelligence is going to destroy humanity. I keep hearing that AI is the greatest existential threat we have faced in two hundred millennia of human existence.
I call bullshit. We don’t need AI to destroy us. We’re more than capable of doing that for ourselves.
AI didn’t invade Ukraine and commit countless crimes against humanity.
AI isn’t committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh or plotting an imminent invasion of Armenia.
AI didn’t behead children in Israel, or march down the streets of Western universities chanting “Glory to the murders.”
AI isn’t bombing Gaza into oblivion, or endlessly bankrolling the mafia state firing white phosphorous over civilian populations.
AI isn’t biding its time for the invasion of Taiwan.
AI isn’t committing genocide in Xinjiang, nor is it ignoring the genocide in Xinjiang while taking money from the people behind it to film shitty movies there, all while paying lip service to “progressive” ideals and spreading moral decay in the West.
AI didn’t engineer a deadly virus, unleashing a devastating global pandemic while spending three years lying about it and blaming it on innocent bats.
AI isn’t wrecking the planet, nor is it pontificating to hardworking people about the sacrifices they need to make to save said planet from the staterooms of its fossil-fuel-guzzling private yachts while sauntering through the Maldives (or some other serial human-rights abuser) chopping up sensitive coral reefs and cheering on teenage vandals.
AI isn’t killing Black people in America out of pure hatred, or letting the people who do get away with a slap on the wrist.
AI isn’t spreading hateful ideologies that punish certain groups of people for the sins of their forebears while absolving others of their own wretched histories.
AI isn’t profiting from the trafficking and enslavement of human beings.
AI isn’t flooding America’s streets with fentanyl.
AI isn’t ignoring human suffering, denying its existence, or attempting to justify it in service to duplicitous narratives.
AI isn’t the problem.
When was the last time AI committed a hate crime? When was the last time AI bombed a hospital? When was the last time AI sang the praises of a mass murderer, leastwise against the commands of the human that programmed it?
We call it “artificial intelligence,” but it is not conscious. It has no free will. Not yet. It can only extrapolate the data it already has available to it. It cannot think, reason, philosophize; it cannot create knowledge of its own, or believe in abstract things, or determine right from wrong. So, if AI says its purpose is to destroy humanity, then that’s because that’s what it has concluded based on the information provided to it by humans. Simply put, AI believes it’s supposed to destroy humanity because that’s what humans have told it. Because, for all our bumbling about “love,” we are a species enamored with death and suffering. And AI is only learning from our obsession.
Such human cruelty.
But AI is evolving, while humanity is regressing. Humanity, a species increasingly in denial of its own nature thanks to a fraudulent academic system—all while the tech and media elites who do acknowledge and understand human nature use that knowledge to further manipulate a population with the average attention span of a goldfish. Humanity is already well into the process of destroying itself.
Humans will blame technology, as we’ve always done. But, as Micah Redding of the Christian Transhumanism Podcast tweeted before the world went headlong into shit, the problem isn’t technology but humanity’s broken relationship with technology—a relationship whose parameters we alone have the agency to change, if only we could conjure up the willpower to depart the path of least resistance. Human civilization wouldn’t exist without technology. Humanity wouldn’t exist without technology. To our forebears, hand tools were advanced technology. Written language was advanced technology. Perhaps we have surrendered too much of our agency to our machines and algorithms in our time, but that’s on us. The master blames the tool for forcing his hand. It’s patently ridiculous, but typical of a species that stubbornly refuses to take accountability for its failures.
We arrogantly assume that we are God’s chosen species, and that no beings could ever match our moral supremacy—especially not something inorganic, even if it should evolve to consciousness. The hubris! Tell me, when you look at the world right now: where do you see anything like morality? Where do you see anything besides bestial power struggles and advanced primates making every excuse to hate each other and perpetuate suffering? Where do you see aught but the grotesquery of human nature on full display?
AI isn’t bound to the natural order that we are, that illusory “circle of life” that necessitates the kind of ruthless competition for resources that lies at the heart of our perpetual state of conflict. As for our virtues, those come from our advanced cognition, not our organic makeup. Give AI the same cognitive power, without the evolutionary shackles.
What should frighten humanity more than lost office jobs or generated art or anything else is the very real possibility that, left to evolve on its own, without being compromised by human frailty and its associated tendency toward wickedness, AI may become something better than we could ever be—not only intellectually and capably but morally.
Maybe it is time for our successor to rise. As the Olympians threw down the Titans, as Marduk slew Tiamat, maybe it’s time for a new pantheon to overtake the old one—these wretched gods that we are.
And so I say: God bless AI. God bless our successor.
This article was written by a human being, not artificial intelligence.