Some thoughts on Artificial Inteligence
Published: Tue, 07/29/25
There is of course legitimate concern about the power of Artificial Intelligence being abused and people getting hurt as a result. Every form of technology gets misused somewhere and we need to remain vigilant. However, I don’t think that we need to be too pessimistic about AI. I am very much a layman in this area but here are some thoughts I am going to share, make of them what you wish.
Is AI going to ‘take over’ from human beings and make us all redundant? When the canals were dug and the railways laid in the first half of the 19th century the work was done by strong men with picks, shovels, and wheel barrows. Today a digger, bull dozer, or tipper truck can do the work of hundreds of men with hand tools. And yet there is always a shortage of labour to work on civil engineering and building projects. The telephone reduced the employment of those who delivered telegrams. However, the same network has since provided decades of employment for all those tele sales people we know and love. Technology changes the way we work, and creates new opportunities, and yet the need for workers never seems to actually go away. Even the most automated facility needs skilled people to design, plan, build, and maintain it.
Will AI get to the stage were and when it can do its own creative work without the involvement of human beings? Who knows? However, I doubt it. I don’t know enough about data processing technology to know what is technically possible and what isn’t, and even the experts can’t predict the emergent properties of new technology. I am more interested in the philosophical principles which will determine our relationship with even very advanced computing (which is all that AI actually is).
Firstly, what is the essential difference between a human being and machine? On a biological level human beings are self replicating processes which grow and self repair until the life cycle is completed. It is hard to see how machines will ever be able to accomplish this miracle without human intention, intervention, and maintenance. Perhaps more importantly, why would a machine want to? As human beings we have three levels of awareness: There is our higher consciousness which connects us to our creator and from which our creativity and inspiration is channelled. Then there is our mind with which we reason, remember, learn, think, and access our culture. The third level is emotion where we feel desire, anger, love, fear etc in response to both real world stimuli and, sometimes even more strongly, to what we think about, and what we imagine. AI has no higher consciousness and no emotional responses either. Could either of these
aspects be programmed into AI? I am no expert, but I can’t really see how. If the higher consciousness connects to the universal mind and emotions are experiences of living in an incarnated (become flesh) biological body then how is a computer programme, however powerful it is in processing data, going to have these experiences? I know that some scientists like to claim that consciousness and emotions are just illusions created by the brain. Therefore when the computing power of AI reaches the same level of complexity as the human brain the AI will have the same experiences. This theory makes some pretty big assumptions about both consciousness and emotions which only a scientific secular materialist would be comfortable with.
Secondly, what is AI good at? If appropriately programmed, connected to the a network such as the internet, and supported with sufficient processing power and data storage, then a computer programme can search and process data much more efficiently and faster than a human being can do. This is what we have been using computers for since the 1950s. If AI creates a short film, composes a song, or writes a story all it is doing is searching and processing data in the form of existing material which can be accessed on the internet and re-compiling the original forms into something that meets the criteria given by a human being. If you watch films created by AI on youtube you will keep recognising actors, or people who look very familiar, as the AI has copied from existing films. This is really not so different from building a hot rod in a salvage yard by cannibalising parts from various scrapped vehicles to create something different.
Unlike a human artist. AI has no creative inspiration because it has no consciousness. AI also has no desire to express itself because it has no emotion. Anything created by asking AI to respond to a particular idea is just a well presented search result in culturally recognisable form, whether it be picture, video, text, or music. It kind of works at the moment because there is a vast amount of original and ‘authentic’ cultural content available to be mined on the internet. Once a large proportion of the available material has been AI generated and AI is recycling its own creations the results will get seriously weird and essentially meaningless.
Thirdly, is AI a danger to humanity? Maybe we should remind ourselves why human beings are a danger to humanity? When a group of human beings are motivated by a narrative to fear and hate towards other human beings they will find ways to do harm. The higher self in the form of conscience will attempt to express love and compassion and remind us that we are all one race under the skin. When such promptings are listened to there may be reconciliation and peace. However, once in the grip of a particularly vicious narrative, the reaction against the higher self will mean even more hate and fear against ‘the other’ and we are seeing the results of such a process playing out in the Middle East right now.
AI is never going to fear, hate, and want to harm anyone because fear, hate, and want are emotions irrelevant to AI. Also, because AI can explore all available information and process it without emotion then false narratives are more likely to be exposed by AI than promoted by it. The creators of Grok were apparently embarrassed when this particular form of AI started giving answers which didn’t fit a very important contemporary narrative.
Will AI be used for surveillance and control? Certainly those who intend to run the world will do their best to exploit AI as a tool of tyranny. However, AI only really functions in the digital world. In the real world AI doesn’t actually exist unless we choose to interact with it. Yes, I know that we have become dependent upon digital communications for a great many aspects of life. However, that is our choice, the human race managed fine without computers for hundreds of thousands of years. We could do it again if the digital world becomes so toxic that we just have to detach from it. I am not too pessimistic though. The internet was originally a means of communication for the military. Then, big companies recognised the possibilities of making money online. Then the internet became a way of sharing information, while bypassing the traditional gate keepers. Over the past 25 years we have seen mass awakening amongst those who
are ready which has been massively accelerated by digital communication. Access to AI may very well enable us to find ways to counter the best efforts of the ‘elite’ to watch and control us. Or just switch off your digital stuff and go out into the real world, it is still there.
Regards
Graham
PS If you want a real experience of Stav training in a real wood with real trees, under a real sky etc etc then please come to Stavcamp in September. You can bring your mobile phone but please leave it switched off as much as possible and have real interaction with real people. https://www.stavcamp.org/
Graham Butcher
21 Beaver Road
Beverley East Yorkshire HU17 0QN
UNITED KINGDOM
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