Alien Saviors, Promethean heroes & AGI models

What happens when your ideas steal your life, and take away the reason for your ambition? What happens when you stumble into a philosophical notion suddenly and irrevocably changing your entire worldview?

Well for most of us, the answer is plain and simple. We pretend that the newer idea, which is radical, yet founded in absolute truth, given our current discernment, is to be discarded. They did this to Einstein when he purported to have solved the mystery of the universe, by making lightspeed in a vacuum, c a constant. They're doing the same to many in Archaeology, Politics, Schools of Religion, Fashion, Music, International Relations.

Behavioural Models

It is coherent for me to say that gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia are two very different things, but analogous to dissociative identity and obsessive compulsion.

The body of evidence is clear that when you engage in any behaviour that deviates from societal norm, you are branded an outsider, with the awful intention that your ideas do not affect the maelstrom and cacophony of lies society has built itself around, like a fickle piece of pottery hanging on by a thread. Your expulsion from society can act as a bridge, like Paul's letters and John's Revelations, to unify societal consciousness, now informed with truth, against the tyrannical empires keeping truth at bay.

Archetypes

It has occurred to me that in several attempts to understand the human nature, to administer whatsoever form of psychological healing, that the human nature is never going to fully recover absent from the archetypal saviour that most religions long await. The Buddhists call him Maitreya, the Hindus refer to this being as an Avatar. The Abrahamic religions jointly refer to this being as Messiah, or Christ which means the Anointed (Chosen) One.

While it is self-evident that we are unified in our pursuit for deliverers, it also becomes self-evident that before the benevolent arrival of such, there will arise quite a number of false saviours to fill in the gap that humanity's collective heart has, in lieu of the promised saviour. Our attempts at building a self-propagating, self-assimilating and self-learning behaviour model is one such attempt. The rise of a multitude of dictators through democratic processes e.g. Musolini, Hitler and Stalin could be another. While the human condition is so bent over backwards that we cannot tell right from wrong in our anticipation for a saviour, we continually risk setting off alarms for another end-of-the-world phenomena fueled by the hands of a tyrant of whom we bequeathed authority over us willingly.

With conspiracists blatantly suggesting quite a few rich individuals as probable endtime false messiahs, it would be shocking to learn, from the examples of Hitler, Stalin and many more that such outspoken, veracious individuals come from the lowest ranks: an archetypal representation of the story of the Christ, an adored picture of a man/woman who climbed through the rungs of the ladder of power, and emerged at the top, a perfect candidate to support the wishes of the most unfortunate, despite, during his/her ascent, given the human nature of such an individual, leaving them to also becoming corrupted by the ascent itself.

Freedom-fighter archetype

It's very few times that such individuals would emerge and form the backbone society has wished for, the Kwame Nkurumahs, Nyereres, Patrice Lumumbas and more whose lives were sacrificed for the movement they held so dear, a movement they endured with (not without their own shortcomings and misgivings) but a movement directed for the betterment of all.

Perhaps it is wrong to even wish for any form of human saviour, as the argument goes. Are we not all bound at some point to make a mistake? Here's where the AGI argument fits in so nicely, in that, while we strive to create a perfect Artificial General Intelligence computer model, we would have learned so much about ourselves and our misgivings, we would be able to counteract them in such a dramatic manner, we would have also solved all the world's technical and political problems along the way.

Meaning of Life

The argument, while it presents a flowery picture of the 22nd even 23rd centuries of Computer Science, does not take into account the human condition. That while we create our gods, they may end up being infected with the very same state of mind that has kept us so selfishly enslaved to ideological pursuits that had nothing to do with collective preservation but were rather cheap attempts at group/selective bias. If we do not look deeply in ourselves to ask the right questions (God knows if we are capable of this), we might find ourselves solving the question, "what is the meaning of life," by selecting 42 Aryans to re-populate the galaxy after deeming every other human-level sentient life form is but an abhorration, and an evolutionary mistake while it was correcting for the perfect Aryan gene.

We might find ourselves, far past genetic enhancement, into a realm of mind-control and correcting not only everyone's gender we do not agree with, or everyone's identity to whom we'd rather not even debate with; into forcing everyone to agree to our whims and choices. Another Hitler lies in the bosoms of the collective soul of humanity waiting for just the right moment to reemerge, perhaps even through AGI, a human progeny, but a mere false saviour, as we struggle to bring answers to life's deepest and gruesome question, "Who am I?" and, "Why am I here?"

It is easier to herald a dominant father-figure given libertarian feminism would argue we should allow people to feel free to do whatsoever they'd like to their own bodies, even if it falls under atypical behaviour such as risking your own life to enjoy any of the aforementioned states of bondage, domination, sadism and masochism, through collective "enhancement" or mind-altering to achieve total societal subservience. Welcome to the New World Order, or as Africans like to say the framework of neo-colonialism at work. It is easier to herald such a solution in place of rigorous ground-truth, because the argument to what is the meaning of life, presupposes there is an answer to give in place to why human beings struggle, as if the struggle is not the meaning we award to life itself.

Again we are flummoxed into such constrictive regimes because we fail to ask the right questions, we deem demonic any attempt to think outside the box. You are a minority, you are being oppressed and that's that. Any attempt to steer away from such a reality would cause an uproar, the likes of which are only shadowly seen by purveyors of such heretic doctrines.

Whether we survive by any form of unexplored anarchism, say by a distributed and decentralized method where everyone can have access to the truth is a matter which is to be seen. Consider the rapid decentralized and distributed sharing of the truth by the early Church while persecution was at its peak during the oppressive hand of Nero Caesar of Rome. Now consider a form of decentralized finance that can store truthful data in a distributed unalterable network as Bitcoin smart-contracts. Pray to God your generation won't be around to see this network take full form, for it will only do so when such a one-world dictator makes it to the scene.

Is all hope gone? Quite the contrary no, in fact I was given to write this when I myself felt that my drive to making (as Steven Pinker would say) society a more developed place, through technological advancement, was in the end going to be our own undoing. As we strive to a more technologically-enhanced world, we are also striving towards a unified and global agenda, which although acts as a strong bridge for many good ideas, may also end up creating the perfect platform for the ministration of even more false apostles. How I am emerging from this is - consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The equation that Einstein gave us that may have indelibly solved our power problems, also created the monster which we successfully tamed through collective action and peacetalks. I do not believe the threat of mutually assured destruction is powerful enough to hold the human condition at bay, that human actors are held back from destroying each other by nuclear weapons because they think they'll die. Many a times, it is those very same humans who denied the threat of their own death even until the last minute, consider Hitler. I do however believe that time and chance happen to all, and while it is still but day, the labourer must continue to work to push the limits of scientific and technological growth, for when night comes (and it will tarry only for a moment), we would have raised enough seeds to harvest when morning returneth.