Before I speak about the book, I have to warn everybody that it has a 3-page preface by Steve Bannon. If that’s too traumatic, then don’t read. For the alternatively situated, I have to mention that Allen despises Elon Musk (although not for the same reason that the Left does) and has no interest in Trump (also for different reasons than the Left). If that traumatizes you, also don’t read.
Now that the sensitive snowflakes are gone, I can tell everybody else that Dark Æon is a messy, ranting, raving, extremely erudite and highly entertaining gem of a book. People in Amazon reviews complain that it’s hard to understand and, yes, AI is not an easy subject. Allen does everything possible to help the reading go down easier but you still need to have a developed human intellect to understand artificial intelligence.
The main idea is that our techie elites are driven by a two-pronged fear. They are terrified of death because they have an overinflated sense of their own importance. And they are also convinced that the AI will soon become so powerful that it will end humanity in its present form. Nobody really knows what the AI will ultimately become but the fear is already here, especially among the creators and investors of the AI. As a result, they have become convinced that the only way to address these two fears is to strive for a technologically augmented humanity. At least, for the humans who matter. Those who don’t matter (like me and you) can be used as a pool of experimental subjects. If some don’t agree, they can be shut into basic-incomed but otherwise rejected enclaves of useless people. Or humans 1.0.
This plan will ultimately fail because God is great (Allen is very religious) but it will do a lot of damage in the meantime. Allen outlines a detailed plan of what each of us can do to preserve our own normal human subjectivity and says that everybody is personally responsible for maintaining the lines of cultural transmission.
I’ll say more later but let’s sit with this part for the moment.
Clarissa's Blog 
“also convinced that the AI will soon become so powerful that it will end humanity in its present form”
Am I completely stupid or is that impossible without embedding AI into every facet of human life and that’s being done by the same vainglorious doofballs that are so terrified of AI?
Have these people never heard of cognitive dissonance?
LikeLike
It’s a case of, “if I don’t do it, somebody else will. I’ve got to preserve my competitive advantage.” And the government, instead of creating oversight and regulations, is bankrolling much of this crap.
The effort to preclude the negative effects of AI consists of programming “the correct” values into it, in hopes that if we teach it the importance of diversity, it will let us continue to exist because that’s diverse.
Yes, these people are…. like that.
LikeLike
The government is probably thinking if we don’t do it, the Chinese will.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Exactly. They are so stupid they fear Russia will outpace them.
LikeLike
“This plan will ultimately fail because God is great (Allen is very religious) but it will do a lot of damage in the meantime.”
One thing you and this writer may not have considered is the ultimate goal of transhumanism is to essentially achieve god-like status. Eternal life, hyper augmented bodies capable of performing things previously only possible in mythology, etc. So, what if the ultimate goal is to become “great gods”? Instead of praying to one and fearing one, become one.
One short coming that I see with critics of transhumanism is how short their time horizon is. You’re really going to tell me that in 200,400,1000 years from now we’re just going to remain the same as we are today? What is going to happen to god if by the year 5000 AD we are able to make people out of a rib and completely terraform new planets in a week?
If we don’t completely annihilate each other first, I fully expect humanity to transcend the human body probably in the life time of our children or grand children. And that’s not even an argument for pro transhumanism, that’s more of a reality based on current trends.
LikeLike
As for the future prospects, I strongly believe that we’ll be evolving down, not up. We’ll be extraordinarily fortunate to not devolve much from where we are now. We already have people who can’t spend 30 minutes alone with themselves without watching or listening to something. We get literal infants addicted to machines that crush their subjectivity and turn them into an appendage.
There will be a rapid stratification between the small number of resisters who’ll have a normal human subjectivity and many more who won’t. Allen says this will be the big racial war of the future.
LikeLike
So he’s a fan of The Marching Morons.
LikeLike
“We already have people who can’t spend 30 minutes alone with themselves without watching or listening to something. We get literal infants addicted to machines that crush their subjectivity and turn them into an appendage.”
Yes, this is something new that has emerged since smartphones came about 10 years ago. How do you know this will still be a problem 100 years from now when smartphones are as archaic as telegram machines?
There is already significant push-back against social media addiction and better understanding of the problem. This is not an unsolvable problem and it also doesn’t require doing away with technology.
“There will be a rapid stratification between the small number of resisters who’ll have a normal human subjectivity and many more who won’t. Allen says this will be the big racial war of the future.”
For sure. There will always be people who don’t want to be part of this and that is totally fine. The most important thing is people have choice.
However, the writer of the book and I’d wager most people on this forum are already active participants in the current system.
It also doesn’t have to be so dark and dystopian, even though that’s a huge risk and likely where we are heading. A lot of these transhumanist technologies likely can hugely improve the human experience. The medical field is a prime example for this, where people are already massively improving their quality of life with implants such as older people getting hip replacements and knee replacements. Without these, they’d be bed bound and in constant pain for the rest of their lives. Disabled people can now walk, talk, hear, like they’ve never been able to before. Children can now survive diseases and ailments like never before.
I don’t see anybody complaining about that, or genetic drugs that are tailor made for a person and can solved an innumerable number of ailments, including genetic diseases that make life a living hell for some people. That’s also transhumanist in nature.
So yeah, there are risk, but all this negativity while completely ignoring the benefits that many millions of people ALREADY enjoy, just feeds the negativity machine that is making everybody depressed.
LikeLike
The future will be built by the people who are being brought up right now by distracted moms who hold a device between themselves and their infants all day long. They don’t mirror the infants’ and toddlers’ emotions back at them because they are looking elsewhere. These children will need (and already do need) to be medicated chronically and heavily simply to be able to go on because their capacity to process unpleasant things never develops. They will feel extremely endangered because it’s first and foremost the feeling of safety in the world that distracted mothers can’t transmit. As a result, the multitudes of such people will constantly edit public life in pursuit of the feeling of safety that they no longer can extract from their own selves.
This is only a single negative effect of the refashioning of the human subjectivity in which we are engaged. This will not go away by itself. We will all have to make an effort to wean ourselves off the poison. And it takes an enormous effort.
LikeLike
St. Paisios said:
“Technology is progressing at an alarming rate. People are becoming slaves to it. They are becoming more and more distant from nature and their fellow human beings. They are losing their sense of empathy and their ability to connect with others.”
Pretty sure he died before home internet was a thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think transcend is the right word for that.
Who is going to keep mining coal to keep the servers running, once they’ve uploaded their brainwaves and left their gross material bodies behind? Will they enslave all future humanity to service their silicon hardware for eternity?
I doubt anyone will be much motivated to keep them plugged in.
LikeLike