For anyone not in the know, title is a reference to Dune (the book series. Its good, go read it or listen to an audiobook. The new movie is also good)
Seeing very disturbing trend of people playing around with AI chatbots and artist ai and whatever. Stop. AI is demonic and doing so is indistinguishable from playing with an Ouija board.
Even if AI is not demonic and just a bunch of algorithms (sure and drawing lots before pagan deities is just random chance), we should still treat it as such, or with a great degree of repulsion.
Everyone should take it very seriously since AI progress represents a transition similar to the industrial revolution and we know how much of a disaster that was. For starters, its about to kill off a whole bunch of industries. Automation has been killing our economies and livelihoods slowly but surely over the past century. The AI revolution will leave billions out of work in a matter of decades. Years maybe. Can you imagine the effects on global economy? On local economy? It will be much like the great depression actually, because the economy is about flow of money. Think of a country as a body and money and economy like blood and heart. Its not enough to just have a lot of blood or oxygen. Blood must keep pumping, money must keep circulating. The specifics are a whole nother topic entirely but its how it is. Guys like truckers for example are big spenders, they’re crucial to the economy not just because they earn a lot, but because they spend a lot too. And that money goes to people providing them goods and services, who in turn spend it, and in the end that money ends up going to the guys who pay truckers their salaries. Healthy economy is about the flow of the money, the flow of resources, goods and services. Its why eco-nomy and eco-system have the same root, an economy can be thought of as a human or civilizational ecosystem. What happens if somewhere in your arteries blood stops flowing, cause theres a clot or something there? That’s called a heart attack and you die. If a nation is a body, such massive disruptions will destroy it. People up top dont care, causr either they’re too blinded by greed or think they’re insualted from the disastrous consequences of their actions (or worse yet, they’re doing this deliberately). But we need to understand this and know better and push back.
Playing with these open AI programs isnt just innocent fun, just like solving captchas was a massive machine learning training op (why yes, I did deliberately gave completely wrong answers whenever I could get away with it). They are open for a reason, its beta testing on a mass scale. You’re doing work for these big corporations who plan to suck the blood out of our nations and make a run for it. And you’re doing it for free. It also normalizes AI, after a century of self reflection sci-fi created a consistent stereotype of AI and automation posing an existential threat to humanity, this is a smiley face branding to wash away those very reasonable fears. Yes, self conscious general AI is still far away, but we don’t need that to have disasters here and now. Machine learning algorithms are one big black box, so who knows if one day self driving cars glitch out and decide to play carmageddon irl. Think of how often your own printer or phone glitch out. Now imagine if your printer can do something that could kill you. Sure they’ll iron all the bugs out, just like they do with printers.
But also consider this from a Divine perspective. God commanded Adam to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Monks and Saints dont sit on their asses, they work them off. “Ora et Labora”. Its always been true that those who do hard work for a living are more conservative, more religious, more resistant to globohomo (and are the only reason their countries havent collapsed into ashes and dust). God didn’t do things just because, and why we have material bodies, why ressurection will be of glorified bodies, why we have to eat and and yes also to go to the toilet are not accidents. Christ was a carpenter before He was Messiah. We are bodily creatures, the unity of body and mind is essential. Russian communists had a funny saying, “it was labour which turned ape into man”. Communism, being an offshoot of the Arian Heresy, is grossly wrong of course, but Marx didn’t come from nowhere - he was a reaction to the horrors of the industrial revolution and its consequences on the human race. And for all of his nonsense, the theory of labour has its merits. Labour for its own sake has value, when it sanctifies the human. Its also why going to the gym and physical exercise has a positive effect on our psyche. We were made to move, to sweat, to work.
Consider this then, AI and automation and technology in principles exists to reduce labour. What then, it aims to turn man back into ape by depriving him of his purpose? Sounds like something Satan would love and use in his fiendish designs. I know this from personal experience and observation, that hard working men when they retire or are can’t work for some reason, they turn into drunkards and drug addicts very quickly. Very good men, Ive seen it happen to my own relatives, young and old. Its not just about the economy (because the prosperity of the nation is directly tied to its spiritual well being, the broken prosperity gospel clock is right twice a day - the righteous men in the Bible are all hard working and prosperous men), but consider the spiritual effect of another great depression (and due to globalization and technological progress, we have a lot farther to fall), how many souls would be damned.
In the Dune universe, the use of pocket calculators was banned under pain of death. We can start off by derisively mocking those who use them. I don’t believe that the Automation Revolution would destroy humanity. I sincerely doubt we live in the last days and Armageddon is just around the corner - Christians always believed that for the past two thousand years and yet here we are. God will preserve the human race, and He will preserve His Church, and a path to Holiness. Perhaps that path would be all the more glorious for all its difficult, but if we lived in days of Industrial Revolution, would it not be right to resist it?
I remember a conversation I had with a friend when we were watching a Youtube video of a glassblower in the Venetian style. We talked about how for this man, even though he was not a luddite, he wore modern clothes, he had a phone, he lived in this world. But he was of the world of the Renaissance and Venetian Masters. His job was not threatened and never will be threatened by automation and industrialization, because the value is not just in the object, but in the man and the labour that went into it. The value was in the human celebration of beauty. I’m not saying we need to be luddites. That guy wasn’t. But there’s plenty of opportunities to step outside the stream of time. Some of these opportunities are even technological in nature, for example, some people make and sell handcrafts on Etsy. Mennonites and Amish and Farmers Markets always have a market. And we also have plenty of opportunities to ride out the industrial economy, there are many blue collar means to work hard and make the bank, but a bank that we can invest into setting up human economies based on human values.