Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @danwaterfield

@danwaterfield Open the bomb bay doors, Hal? Anybody @Plough or likewise pondering AI's ongoing nuclear-weaponization in a blesséd light, do you know? I mean, what happens when soulless masters meet it? #NATOReview, for example, hardly a heartland of moral philosophers. x.com/NATO/status/1782695515127165107

Quoted or linked post

Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 1 Jun 2024

@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.

...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.
Image description

Original X alt text

...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.

View this post’s context →

Context in the archive

Quoted by@jamespoulos NATO Review, 2 April, 2024: "There are myriad roles for AI in our nuclear defences ...Concern over AI should not preclude the use of AI in strengthening nuclear deterrence ...There is, of course, the potential for an arms race in AI-based targeting systems for nuclear weapons."