One of the most fascinating things about AI is not AI itself; it is the way its adoption has been expanding and to what high viral level this adoption has been evangelized.
As an "analog", I cannot but wonder how amazing it would be if we approach our curiosity to human understanding and communication toward cooperation.
In religious/spiritual circles, cults, and mega churches, evangelizing is the norm. Members of a certain group share a common sub-culture, a drive for belonging, and a need for validation. Thus, each individual becomes an amplifying instrument - a tool, to be more accurate - for disseminating that sub-culture's mission and message.
This creates a double edged sword where each individual from within their sub-culture yields both a megaphone and a scanner. When an evangelist from any particular religion or cult addresses you, they are checking to see where your principles and allegiances lie, and, at the same time they attempt to recruit you to their cause.
With AI, the promise is not Divine, and yet it is presented as a God-like implacable phenomena that is poised to infiltrate and permeate all aspects of human life from a deterministic position of efficiency and power.
The evangelizing process is nearly the same. The stakes are similarly high.
The battleground is YOU.
However, unlike a divine promise of communion with an elusive, invisible, and untouchable God, AI offers the absolutely necessary ingredient to human addiction without the use of fear, guilt, or manipulation. Yet.
It provides instant gratification. A promise not only probably, but almost palpable.
At the same time, while traditional evangelizing works via direct human to human, almost visceral connection, the AI evangelizing relies heavily, if not entirely, on a digital interface providing a digital transfer of digital token-based prompts and prompting.
AI evangelizing also cuts like a double edged sword, but in a fundamentally different manner. It uses human nature and behavior as its interface while at the same time entirely dehumanizing both the experience and the user experiencing life via digital means.
While your local church aims for your mind and wallet through songs, rites, and holding hands, AI operates outside of localized proximity and aims at technological adoption, not connection.
For AI, as an infrastructure, to grow and expand its capabilities and control, humans do not need to connect - they need to USE.
While this is where we could be tempted to think that the two evangelizing undercurrents will forever diverge, the opposite actually happens.
Initially, the two human conditioning processes seem parallel in their use of human nature, then, they clearly diverge in both form and purpose. But then, the two unequivocally re-converge when analyzed through the lens of an ultimate goal (in the analog realm) and an end game (in the digital realm).
And THIS is where it gets really frightening.
In the analog realm, we observe - throughout millennia - two concurrent elements virtually controlling human civilization: (1) an ideology foundation from which all cultural contexts are designed and derived, and (2) an extraordinary hierarchization of executive infrastructure sustaining an aggressive consolidation of power - all and any power - in the hands of a very few, under the self-declared auspices of a superiority status divinely ordained.
In the digital realm also, we can observe the parallel execution via two identical elements: (1) a technological ideology reflecting the belief in an inevitable and mandatory transformation of human civilization, and (2) a hyper-concentration of wealth, power, and multi-layered influence in the hands of even fewer individuals delivered through an aggressive dual-hierarchization of infrastructure through technology and corporate entities.
While the analog realm expanded through the human mental space using spiritual concepts and over extended periods of time, the digital AI realm expanded beyond exponential growth and using capitalist concepts in an astonishing yet predicted short amount of time.
While analog expansion depended on human belief, which takes time to establish and fully control, AI expansion is almost a one-click install, requiring zero human belief.
The analog approach promises delivery under threat and demanding near obedient conformity. The AI approach bypasses all the “noise” in human nature using a single neurological mechanism to achieve its goal.
The analog uses blackmailing dogma. The AI uses marketing.
The analog promises the afterlife based on current life subordination. The AI quantifies and delivers using easily accessible incentivized and gamified processes.
What we are witnessing is a millennia-old realm disintegrating from within, a civilization-based auto-immune response gone haywire, where human beliefs are used to divide and conquer every aspect of human existence.
Both analog and AI while striving toward an identical goal of total and unquestionable domination, they are coming to a civilization-shattering clash, where the new power is consuming the old, leaving almost nothing behind - or at least attempting to leave nothing of the old realm behind.
This is an identical aim for global dominance, but rooted in two different eras.
As the AI realm emerges from within the fragmentation of the analog realm, the human mind also becomes more and more fragmented.
The ancient and fully accurate principle of dividing and conquering is now being “installed” as an operating system tapping directly into the modus operandi of the human brain. No implants necessary.
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P.S. It took me about an hour to write this article, and only about 1 minute to prompt AI to create the image I used to catch your attention.
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