@lukeburgis 1/ In a Girardian note, Eric Davis' 1998 classic, 'TechGnosis': "If a postmodern World Soul is indeed emerging from the electronic hypercortex of information networks, then we must make sure that soul keeps its feet on the ground", worth a looksee. In X, @jamespoulos, of course.
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...supplants the entropic reality of the body with an incorporeal simulation, a mighty simpleminded gnosticism at that. As Thompson notes, "With its detestation of the imprisonment of the soul in matter, its imagery of mind as light, male, and informational, a logos spermaticos, and the flesh as dark, female, and entrapping, Gnosticism is a basin of attraction that awaits those naive technologists who step outside modern society's conventional worldview. Thompson's point is astute: As modern Prometheans pursue the "rational" possibilities of science and technology, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to maintain the commonsensical perspective of the man on the street. Instead, such thinkers and tinkerers are loosed in a world of possibility whose profound metaphysical and religious dimensions they are often incapable of handling, let alone recognizing; as such, they find themselves unconsciously drawn to the soul's most adolescent fantasies of transcendence and immortality.
@jamespoulos 1/2 "Even in neutral scenarios without initially provided conflicts, Big Tech's AI models chose violence and escalated to nuclear strikes in simulated wargames. All models show signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations.” @jamespoulos: "Imagine what they’ll do your soul.”
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Copy of tweet: and 2/ Some aver the recent, massive, mimetic escalation in technology-accelerated cycles of violence and counter-violence defining geopolitical conflicts perceived by key antagonists in fundamentally existential terms, abrogates the theoretical premise putting a brake on Armageddon. Image copy of tweet: end/ So, an algorithmically-supercharged vortex of mimetic contagion and, all told, a momentum the prophets universally anticipated would inevitably deliver us to the very threshold of suicidal, planetary cataclysm. Hobbes' 'war of all against all', plus nukes. What next, then? Quote tweet: John Milbank, to me, yesterday: "I am certainly a just war theorist and stand with the tradition on this." Polite and cultured, John. Then again, I'm not sure Christian politesse is quite my cup of tea. One man's logic, another man's Auschwitz. Odd, what's been made of Jesus.
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Tweet here with image: "Nobody in the establishment seems to understand the role of networks in destabilizing and escalating this situation. A world full of nuclear weapons isn't compatible with the way networks drive politics and conflict." @johnrobb Copy of tweet @thomasviolence 9/24/17 i wonder if any high level staff at twitter have had a 5 minute chat about the entirety of global nuclear escalation happening on their app The cat, already out of the bag. AI, but an atomic configuration going thermonuclear.
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Tweet and quote tweet here: 1/ Why stop at polls? With the fusion of military and corporate functions in a single, conjoined mediasphere, vast resources - increasingly, at a machine level - aimed at dominating perception of reality itself, now define planetary war at the level of total consciousness. Quote tweet: Bingo. *Choice* excerpt, Nils. Peculiar, isn't it, the evolutionary ontology of a noospheric, algorithmically-supercharged claim upon the private soul, and the planetary harvest of consequence, consciousness and disclosure it radically enhances, remaining, as a rule, unobserved.