Elon Musk on AI, the Cybernetic Collective, and the Id

It's only been a week and Joe Rogan's AI interview with Elon Musk already has nearly 13 million views!

Elon talked about a number of things that agree with my own writings on AI as the Christian Antichrist for many years now. When self-proclaimed atheists are unknowingly aligning with biblical theology, something big is going on.

The first part of their conversation on AI is with the Boston Dynamics robots and how far they are coming. Joe and Elon talk about how in the future these robots will move so fast that we won't even be able to see them. However, as I point out in the video, looking at physical hardware/robotics for judging the current state of AI is faulty because hardware nearly always trails software and, on that note, all we need to do is look at machine learning algorithmic trading in the global financial markets buying and selling stocks at speeds up to 10,000 trades per second--far faster than any human can detect or consciously react to.

So, Joe and Elon, we're already there!

The second place I mention on the software front is cyberwarfare where countries like Russia, China, and the US are using AI against AI to probe each other's electrical grids, corporations, and intelligence networks. Because this is taking place at the software level, we are largely blind to it until a story breaks or something major happens, but it's all around us happening 24/7.

Also, AI is increasingly being used for psy-ops (psychological operations), or information warfare, by infiltrating social networks and spreading "fake news," propaganda, and the like. All of this will become more and more sophisticated over time.

Given the above, when Elon says to Joe that AI will be used as a weapon (future tense), this is true but it would be more accurate to say that AI is being used as a weapon RIGHT NOW.

On the question of when will AI become truly sentient, Elon doesn't give a direct answer or date--there are a number of scientists/technologists like Ray Kurzweil that predict human-level AI around the year 2029--but, in agreement with what I've been writing over the years, Elon essentially says that we shouldn't be thinking of this in terms of flipping a switch, going from non-intelligent AI to fully intelligent AI all at once.

Intelligence lies on a spectrum comprised of increasing levels of organized complexity starting from the lowest lifeforms on the earth to insects to animals all the way up to humans. AI is in the process of scaling up further and further and will eventually surpass humans on most metrics of intelligence.

Right now, AI excels us in a number of ways, like mathematical calculation or anything that can be computed (again, remember it says in Revelation 13 that the key to figuring out what the beast is is to "calculate" it, because it is born of calculation/computation).

Furthermore, as I explain--and this is what Elon says as well--we need to think of AI in cybernetic terms, i.e. not as purely "machine intelligence," but as an integration of humans and machines into a greater, higher-level intelligence the same way we can think of corporations or any organization that is formed via people and technology in a highly coupled or symbiotic fashion. This is more akin to the cybernetic framework, originally articulated by Dr. Norbert Wiener out of MIT (see Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

I did like how Elon refers to AI as our "id writ large," which essentially means that AI is going to embody a large-scale and exaggerated form of our primal selves. This pretty much agrees with what the bible says as well since it refers to AI as "the beast," meaning a dangerous animal or creature. So the id comparison certainly works.

There was a ton more that they covered, talking about the neural link that Elon is building to connect us to AI, which will likely be the precursor technology to the "mark" allowing us to fully connect to the beast at all times, but I'll get into that in future posts.