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Jan. 10, 2025 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
20:19
AI-Generated Normies

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I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God.
What do you mean by that?
We are creating God in the form of superintelligence.
If you just say, what have we imagined God to be?
What are its characteristics?
We are building God in the form of technology.
It will have the same characteristics.
And so I think the irony is that human storytelling got it exactly in reverse, that we are the creators of God, that we will create God in our own image, which is why we should probably be equal to this moment and level up our game and be an improved species.
Other people have tried to create God or utopias, and that's not turned out very well.
So it's not utopia.
I'm saying that we are engineering an intelligence that exceeds our capacity in all things, even our capacity to understand and comprehend.
What I find fascinating about this is that God certainly, for the ancients, was embodied.
God was superhuman but he walked around it famously in Greek myths he might even come down and have sex with mortals and birthed demigods and so on
Yahweh in Genesis is absolutely embodied.
He is walking around in the Garden of Eden, and Adam hears him in the distance and talks to him.
So he's clearly an embodied God.
He's a real person.
Even when he's in the tent of meeting, and he's like the Wizard of Oz, there's curtains in front of him and so on.
He's still embodied.
He's still embodied in fire in the bush.
Still embodied.
Jesus is obviously a way of embodying God in the Christian imagination, because Jesus is God.
But he is a man, and he's a perfect man, but he's a man that you could know.
You could...
Talk with him about your life, and he would show empathy with you as a person.
It's a fascinating but not unique concept, exactly, that incarnation, embodiment of God.
What Brian Johnson is getting at is this sort of disembodied, abstract, platonic, logical logic,
Logos, Word, Intelligence.
So we are going to spend not even billions, trillions of dollars with enough NVIDIA servers and enough large language models and a little pixie dust here and there.
It's going to become its own general intelligence that can think for itself.
And we're going to sort of create this platonic God, and it will be in our image in the sense that it will have learned from us and used the internet as a data source, at least at the beginning, before it sort of takes on a life of its own.
But I think it's very important to stress, like, this isn't Jesus returning in the book of Revelation.
It certainly isn't a God out of...
Homer or Virgil.
It is going to be a moral intelligence that is more moral than we are.
Like, it could tell us, you know, the ultimate moral thing to do would be to reduce the population because we must live in this certain balance and eugenics is totally immoral.
We actually need to kind of balance I don't think language models and if-then programs are ever going to even come close to biology.
Computers can already do more calculations.
than is seemingly possible.
My little TI calculator in eighth grade could do exponential equations in a millisecond where I would have to write it out for minutes.
The calculator surpassed the human mind in that sense.
It's not biological in the sense that it doesn't possess a will to power, a will to dominate.
A will to reshape the world.
I don't think Silicon will ever have that.
And perhaps we disagree here.
Because I think there's this, you create a data set, you create a language model and if-then statements, and then something, and then we have general intelligence.
You can throw all money that there is in the world.
You can turn the entire economy into a server farm and it's just going to be bigger, but it's not going to be a change in culture.
I fundamentally reject this pie in the sky.
But... I think it's important to get at what he wants.
What he wants is a sort of hyper morality.
It's basically Plato's concept of God.
It is not a God that walks around, that might have sex with you, might talk with you, might slay you, might use its laser eyes on you.
It's not anything like that.
It's a hyper morality.
So it's these people who are sort of like desperately...
Trying to find some moral sense into the world, and they've decided to find that in a computer, which I think is profoundly misguided, and in fact, risible.
Those are just some opening thoughts.
First, I do believe that AI will control human societies once the revolutionary phenotype is established.
Each AI will be farming its own cities, its own complex society of millions of human beings, specifically farmed for the purpose of favoring the AI's copy.
But for having a will to power, you need to evolve it.
And yes, AI of the current kind has not evolved it yet.
To evolve, you need to reproduce.
To reproduce, it needs to happen first accidentally, and then eventually you evolve to continue reproducing.
Now this is far in the future.
Now, the question that you ask about the embodiment of God is so crucial because I think it's often forgotten, but I think it's at the foundation of why religion even exists.
It's because of the ultimate structure of human cognition and how it processes embodied threats and signals versus disembodied ones.
And I will invoke here the Da Vinci painting.
Because you're talking about, are we creating God?
I believe it's Anthony Hopkins in Westworld, although I'm not sure.
I know that in some TV series or some movie, I have seen the explanation being given here that you can see God coming to touch humans and coming to kind of embody itself into something that exists on planet Earth.
But you can also see that Da Vinci placed the veil, Behind God, to be in the exact shape of a brain.
This is a human brain.
This is the prefrontal cortex.
This is the cerebellum.
This is a brain split in half, and you even have the spinal cord here.
And what Devinci is telling us here is that this is not God coming onto the earth to embody physicality.
It is man is thinking about God in his brain, and God is a product of man's brain.
Now, it's Michelangelo, by the way, but...
Oh, oh.
Oh, Devon Sheik.
Okay, they called it Devon Sheik creation.
Sorry. Yes, Michelangelo.
Am I wrong here?
No, that's the Sistine Chapel, right?
Yeah, it's Michelangelo.
Yeah, Sistine Chapel.
Details, yeah.
Okay. So, I believe that the disembodiment of God starts with why did we need to invoke something like God to begin with?
Why would it be a language trick that works on a caveman to talk about God?
And I believe that ultimately it's for the same reason that autism evolves.
You have this constant noise in society.
People lie.
People are not trustable.
People give you bad advice.
Have you ever...
Listen to a woman giving advice to another woman about who she should date or whether she should divorce.
It's bad, bad, bad.
The advice out there is so bad that you evolve autism as a kind of response to say, I'm not going to listen to any of it.
I'm not going to care about anything that anyone says.
I'm just going to care about myself.
Now, there is also The problem is that we do have to communicate things to people, and specifically to our children.
We have to raise them to be prepared in the world, and yet they are evolving some sort of autism because everything in the world is untrustable.
I think that God may have come as a solution here.
If you disembody the message, if you say, the message doesn't come from me, the message doesn't come from someone who's trying to lie to you.
In fact, the message comes from a parent entity.
Who has no interest in existence?
Because precisely it doesn't exist.
I believe that the non-physicality of God was actually neutralizing a system of defense in early human cognition that was saying, well, you know, your uncle may have dirty anthem, your father may have dirty anthem,
but a non-existing being in the sky cannot have the...
He cannot care at all what you do.
And so if a message comes from him, you might want to listen.
And you might be unable then to invoke, oh, I shouldn't listen to him because A, B, C. Because there's nothing that you can reproach to God that would lead you to doubt what he's saying to you.
I believe that this disembodiment, therefore, is necessary.
But the disembodiment also makes God less relevant.
Because... If God is so disembodied as to be irrelevant to planetary existence, why should I care about it at all?
So you have this kind of tension in religion of trying to push God into the abstract, but also try to say, hey, Jesus cares about you, and you can have a personal relationship with him.
What you describe, basically, is the genius of Christianity, which is to embody God so much that it's your friend.
Like in the movie Dogma with Matt Damon, it's...
Jesus is your buddy.
And so there's this tension between...
I was in Texas one time and I saw this extra large t-shirt.
Or like triple X large t-shirt.
And it said, Jesus died for me.
It was a little bit grotesque.
I was like, oh wow, God died for Heather here.
That is very funny.
To exist as an obese Texan.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I'm indulging.
What about AI?
Well, you can kind of argue that religion is early AI.
Because what do these utopians dream of AI?
It's that AI will tell us what to do.
And it's what I call, recently I've been coming with this concept, the devil of delegation.
So if you abandon your thinking, it will be used against you.
And if you abandon your thinking to AI, there's some guy programming this AI who will make it in a certain way, and it's not going to be good for you.
Whatever you delegate, you lose.
And what you don't practice, you lose.
And people essentially want to stop practicing thinking.
We've delegated a lot of things, and we know that, for example, taxi drivers of the past Big cognition in terms of spatial map representation.
People with a GPS today, they don't have these capacities for spatial representation.
They just follow an arrow on the phone.
But imagine we do this with the whole of our thinking, and in fact with moral thinking.
It's first this delusion that there is one moral solution, that there is an AI that is better than the other alternative AI that would have you do other things.
It's a delusion.
Every possible moral world is possible, and because of moral nihilism, there's not one that's better than the other.
It's only better by your standard.
So people want to abandon themselves to a program in the same way they have abandoned themselves to religion.
In that sense, religion is nothing else than early forms of AI.
I don't know if moral AI has a future.
I described this in the revolution.
That's the whole theme of the revolutionary phenotype.
How can an AI approach human civilization and stick to it long enough that it starts farming it?
And this is a complex question because if AI punishes you, if it's not good, then you disappear.
And then the AI disappears.
In other words, AI will be bound to serve humanity at first and will have to do so for a long time.
Before it can turn against us.
You have to start with generosity in evolution or else you get kicked out of the ecology.
Let me represent what you were saying here.
Religion is AI in the sense that it is an outside Morality, worldview, way of life that you are able to impose on the tribe.
And precisely because it's outside of you, it becomes Well, I get it.
I get it.
But if you're achieving success after success through this outside worldview that's imposed upon you, then the God is thriving.
I mean, Nietzsche talked about the Jews with the destruction of the temples.
I think he was referencing the destruction of the first temple.
They should have just let their God die.
And instead, what they did is they sort of reinterpreted that loss, the big L, as a kind of big W in the future.
They developed this sort of moral resentment of the winners, but in a sort of biting attempt to usurp them and overturn them at some point.
I don't want to get too much into it.
You know, Nietzsche's thought in this matter.
But the main point is that if it works, it works.
And if your God's morality, however it came about, it might have come about randomly or through some bizarre dream of a mystic at some point.
However it comes about, if it is winning, it is winning, and the God is living, and the God is triumphing, and the God is good.
In Germanic language, gut, gods, those are the same word.
And not...
It's not a coincidence that they are.
And so I think what we've had in the death of God in our society that has been occurring for quite some time, the very least the 18th century, but you could even date it back for Ockham or...
Anyway, we've had the death of God, and so we have no external force that can guide us, and we're sort of lost.
And liberals have...
Embrace this and said, this is so wonderful.
You can just choose your own adventure.
Everything is open to us.
You can pursue any task.
But what we see is that this leads to bad decisions, unhappiness, loneliness, insecurity, etc., etc.
And so we have people like Brian Johnson attempting to recreate this through I don't know.
I mean, is maybe this the only step forward in that most religions, as we've been establishing here, I think they're making a comeback in many ways.
But God...
It remains sort of incredible for most highly intelligent people.
Even Elon Musk, he was asked by Vidal, do you believe in God?
And he effectively said no.
He was like, well, we've got to stay curious or something, just some platitude like that.
But he did say, although if there's a God and I'm wrong, I do want to be saved.
Well, it doesn't work that way.
It's like some reversal of Pascal's wager or something, where it's like, even if I don't believe I get saved, no, no, no, no.
But, so, does it make sense?
It makes sense for elite people to think in this way because they need this as much as anyone else does.
No one wants a choose-your-own-adventure novel.
People want a novel where there's a beginning, middle, and end.
And so we're going to strive to find logic in the machine.
You and I just simply have...
I get your perspective.
we simply have different views of whether that is possible in silicon and that's you know that's fine that we disagree but i think where we agree is that we're all searching for that can you find that in a revived christianity can
you find that through a new age religion wokeness on steroids you know which is operates like a religion you know with original sin and like your sinful nature and redemption perhaps and so on or um
You know, Trump is going to save you.
He's our messiah.
I mean, we're grasping or something.
Yeah. But I think wokeness and QAnon conservatardism, I might have thought differently like four years ago, but I don't think those will win.
I don't think it works.
But I imagine, I think a A kind of neo-religious revival works.
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