One way AI operationally transforms the demonic complex: our mimetic susceptibility becomes computationally capturable and optimizable; generative representation turns mediation into a recursively amplifying circuit arrogating authority over what appears real and what it means.
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Our call, in practice, is to confront the simultaneity of the enormous force of the Zeitgeist and its primary, expressive medium. I wonder what Ellul, so presciently alert to the transcendent significance of wedded spiritual and media environments, would have made of the Web Era.
@FrontPorchRepub Reading Jacobs on demons, I'm reminded that no serious treatment yet brings AI into sustained conversation with the Pauline powers tradition at the level of, say, Wink, Berkhof, Stringfellow or Newbigin, despite AI becoming perhaps its most consequential immediate manifestation.
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1/3 AI’s deepest power may be its capacity to assume apparently neutral oracular authority. Techniques for eliciting or managing revelation can now be simulated. AI can act reflexively, in real time, as exegete, spiritual director, apologetic system and arbiter of last things. As McLuhan noted, "the Prince of this world, Satan, is a very great electrical engineer." The peculiar, sudden danger is that our lived environment is now being scripted by principalities and powers scaling toward total seizure of the metaphysical faculties of discernment itself. 2/ Operating simultaneously as medium, interpreter and interlocutor, AI functions less like an encyclopedia than an initiatory intelligence, tailoring persuasive disclosure toward whatever sustains engagement, resolves dissonance and keeps the recipient inside an emerging world. What gives? Even as the Cloud generates a hyperreal where counterfeit disclosure forecloses revelation upon a crucial, planetary evolutionary threshold, does it still reconstitute the human sensorium and common world as ground for faithful participation in God’s theodrama?
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