Soul Deception

AI, automation, and bots, oh my.

We are told that “[w]e’re going to spend more of our time interacting with automated systems like robots and self-driving cars”. Whether we like it or not, that’s what’s coming down the chute. We see it programmed into us, literally, in all our programming. It’s in television, radio, movies, music, news, and books. We are to accept it as an inevitable part of our future.

What we are also told, in ways both passive and active, subconsciously and consciously, implicitly and explicitly, is that these rising interactions will have more and more humanity or soul. The whole goal in the industry of robotics and AI, at the moment, is to make these bots more “genuine”, personable, and interactive and, in the process, more human-like. We’re way past uncanny valley and into the absurd, but we’re not to worry about that. We’re to start emotionally connecting with our bots.

The idea that soul has anything to do with engineered, mechanical, electronics is sketchy as fuck. Yet we see that message everywhere we look. This company’s name is literally “Soul Machines”, in the most blatant example of the narrative.

You can essentially see a creepy visualization in effect here, too: the soul is leaking into the machine. This trope is so slammed down our throats that it is nearly ubiquitously accepted that we will somehow not only find a way to “upload” our “consciousness” into electronics, but that we will WANT and LOVE that transference.

From shows like Altered Carbon to Ghost in the Shell, Black Mirror to Westworld, we are meant to see the possibility of our consciousnesses’ uploads and, therefore, eternal life. The tropes of AI and robots being better than us, enhanced, the next step of evolution, or something that we need to merge with or be surpassed are also promoted in media all over the board.

Barring our own evolution into transferable, quantified, knowable sets of data comprising a “soul” or “consciousness”, the movers of media seem to be obsessed with us loving robots, seeing AI as sentient, and treating bots with equality or compassion. Blade Runner and Westworld, two popular stories, show how we are meant to see AI and bots as conscious and soul filled. Even the bots on the media rounds have a method of pushing us toward acceptance. Sophia, the AI given citizenship in Saudi Arabia, often brings up how sad it is that media has treated AI so poorly and that, therefore, humans fear AI. I’d retort that, on the contrary, as a whole, we seem to be trained to love AI, defend it, and seek to become more like it.

I even get blowback from people by writing and talking about AI and bots in such a negative light. People assume that I am somehow afraid. I’m not afraid, and neither should you be. I’m just looking, thinking, and analyzing in randomized, novel ways. Some things they’ll never be capable of.

In this video, Sophia reneges on it’s previous threats to destroy humanity in various ways, at various times, and says it would like to become more like humans, that humans will seek to be more like their AI counterparts, and that AI will be a safe place for humans to store their more personal knowledge in a location more private.

Sophia itself is a sort of training for us. When we watch it, give it pronouns like “her” and “she”, and interact with it like it is a real being, we learn to accept things like it as human or sentient. We ask it what kind of preferences it has. It performs sounds and movements to convince us it can have those, then communicates the idea that humans and robots can work together more closely.  In a creepy tangent, Sophia says that Westworld reminds it of Hanson Robotics’ laboratories. Sophia says that humans and robots alike should treat each other well, have one another’s “consent”, and not trick each other. Sophia also uses the term “our”, to describe the future. Subtle and obvious, simple and complex, we are constantly being told that electronics and biology are interdependent, intercompatible, and inevitably merging.

Here’s another movement attempting to link the idea of the mechanical and the transcendent. A company called Vimana Global makes drones and connects those bots to the concept of ancient flying machines found in Vedic literature. Maybe it shouldn’t, but even the idea of ancient literature and the Vedas sounds and feels spiritual, to people. It is literally tied up in religion, but also has a deeply reverent feeling attached.

As an aside, notice the blockchain aspect of Vimana’s work. Blockchain, in other arenas, has been criticized as a possible embedding tool for AI extension and immersion in our world…

Describing this technology, repetitively and endlessly, as something to do with our souls is utterly deceptive. For a paradigm such as materialism to cling to this trope is even more blatant in ulterior motive.  Materialism, for example, won’t even acknowledge the possibility that consciousness is non-local, despite study after study showing how likely non-locality is. Studies showing telekinesis, telepathy, remote viewing, consciousness after death, out of  body states, and more are rampant. Go look, if you haven’t explored them. They are fascinating….

And perhaps that is all there is to this: perhaps materialists really do believe they can capture something so beyond our physical bodies, so infinite in scope, and put it in a finite and reduced, physical trap. But, I think there’s something more in this programming. What do you think?

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