The nuclear weaponization of AI marks a new phase of existential risk—technical, political, and ontological. Inscrutable, hallucinating, and unbound, AI now informs nuclear command systems without any felt sense of what Armageddon entails—amid a mimetic swarm unfit to intervene.
@RobertEllsberg That strikes me as a dangerously partial reading—underestimating just how intricately fragile the current nuclear landscape has become, shaped by converging forces far beyond—and far more perilous than—anything traditional deterrence logic can account for. And yet—there is God.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick, top and Oct17 inset Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Copy of tweet here: “A security founded on the existence of nuclear weapons rests on tacit acceptance of the prospect of everything and everyone you know being destroyed.” And the superpower game-theory of this moment? You mean the manifest escalation in a form of psychotic absolutism blended with sudden, massive, Cloud-driven amplification of warfare technologies now integrating the nuclear weaponization of AI? Ah, yes, "a tiny flaw in the plan". 2/ Concomitantly, this vastly-enhanced, explosive, authoritarian surge correlates with complementary mimetic trends subverting the geopolitical psycho-dynamics historically putting a brake on Armageddon. We desperately need an immediate, radical revisioning of the problem of war.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1689823821577220097 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @lukeburgis Our 'war of all against all' exponentiated to the geo-political level of nation-state dynamics? A mob of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish? Endings foretold by countless prophets. Why the mimetic escalation, now? Girard, as apt as any. It's Time. t.co/rEZtRJulAx
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: René Girard Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1941633398780354971 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. end/ Girard, of course, thought humanity so deeply habituated into patterns of escalating violence, and the scapegoat mechanism to be so perfectly self-justifying, that he concluded some form of concrete, transcendent intervention necessary for world redemption and salvation. 1/ Essentially eschatological, his later work. On one hand, he identifies our crazed, self-justifying lurch into total cataclysm: on the other, echoing Holderlin, "Danger itself invites the rescuing power", transcendent intervention as humanity's only realistic hope of survival. The ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of all “the kingdoms of this world” is no longer distinguishable from the counter-violence it opposes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin completely out of control. 6/ “People all over the world are employing intellectual, moral, and rhetorical ingenuity in an effort to endow the violence they favor with culture-founding authority, and all over the world they are failing” - Gil Bailie 7/ As such, “The idea of ‘limitless’ violence, suddenly looms up before us,” notes Girard. “For the first time,” he says, humanity faces “a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence.” 8/ More convinced than ever that reading Girard is a good starting point for reflecting on the circumstances we find ourselves in. Apt. His concern, he said, not religion, but its anthropology and, as such, the staggering features of Jesus' murder ultimately revealing the only way out of a revolving hall of projections, our "automatic, unconscious, ingrained and mimetic" escalating war of all against all. Quote tweet: Eliot: “Prophesy to the wind to the wind only for only The wind will listen.” The mimetic escalation of 'war of all against all' exponentiated to the planetary level? A global mob of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish? Why now? Girard, apt. Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. Panic in the system. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst.” René Girard
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick quoting Hölderlin; Nick Feb3 inset Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1941633398780354971 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Tweet: I don’t know about you, but intuition long ago suggested the Eschatological Event would ultimately manifest as a transcendent political intervention at the planetary level around nuclear confrontation. “Danger itself invites the rescuing power.” - #Holderlin Subtweet: Thank you so much for this. And the murder of the orphan would appear to be the likely prospect of the moment. So, anybody got an effective, planetary response to address the immediate threat of totalizing nuclear annihilation? Hands up, then. Nils Gilman @nils_gilman - 8/7/20 Nuclear weapons remain the greatest threat, by far, to long term human well being and civilizational integrity paul bassett davies @thewritertype - 21m There's plenty to be despondent about this #HiroshimaDay, but given the grotesque assortment of festering despots, lethal clowns, and howling nut jobs currently in power all over the world, we're fucking lucky any of us are still here at all. Noam Chomsky Quotes @chom... - 7/29/21 It's hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”
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