@FrontPorchRepub 5/ Truly, I revel in the supernal eloquence and acuity of responses such as yours to the root civilizational disenchantment and self-exile launching AI on supercharged steroids. Nonetheless, debasing AI literacy strikes me as not altogether coherent. The Word is perspectival.
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Copy of tweet here: 5/ (I note a grave irony here. Use AI models to research Nuclear Command, Control and Communications systems (NC3), and one is immediately confronted by the same generative tendency toward closed-loop pathologies they're introducing to NC3. It's a recursive, hallucinatory mess.)
@socialwithaayan And yet control metrics miss a deeper paradigmatic break. The core AI–NC3 shift isn’t simply degraded human control; it’s AI decision architecture entering the epistemic infrastructure constructing crisis reality, reshaping nuclear logic and, crucially, its escalation pathways.
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Tweet thread: 19/ Deeper still, what's most disturbing is the ontological manner in which the Algorithm is functionally colonizing the epistemic core of the rivalry engine. Name it the deep strangeness of AI-NC3, making rivalry legible to itself by knowing itself as Armageddon. 20/ It's what current research misses: AI-mediated NC3 is both hallucinatory perception process and execution mechanism. The gear that tells us what’s happening doubles as the gear that makes it happen. The knowing-apparatus is the ending-apparatus. The preventer is the danger. 21/ That's the shift: AI-mediated NC3 collapses perception and execution into one loop operating at machine speed. The stack references itself—at a tempo, opacity, and unpredictability lashed to doomsday incentives—pointing the result at launch authority. Tweet: 27/ Mimetic escalation is now, in practical terms, already beyond human control and fully infrastructural. “Try turning it off." Girard names the trap—mimetic rivalry drives us toward apocalypse—and the only exit is interruptive intervention—something outside the rivalry's logic. @nick_routledge and @BrianZahnd 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. @nick_routledge and @johnrobb 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? [Image edit to remove inverse coloring] 5/ The novelty of our moment isn't that capitalism exploits or that militarism kills—it's that digital infrastructure has made mimetic escalation algorithmic. The convergence has become infrastructural. What Girard saw as cultural process is now technological architecture.
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