Rage against the machines

Post-industrial society and its future

“AI is the golem of those who hate life…. It is their true Messiah and their vengeance.”

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Sorry

Marc Andreessen

, AI is not going to save the world. Not because the technology does not have profound potential utility - it does - but because its application is going to be determined by a deranged regime. 

I. 

The regime wants stable growth. Thus it always attempts to shape the populations it controls to be more productive and manageable. How the regime defines ‘productivity’ and ‘compliance’ is determined by the interplay of economic and ideological priorities at any point in time.  

We are now at an inflection point, brought on by the accelerating utility of ‘artificial intelligence’, after which the regime will redefine its vision for a productive and manageable population. It will seize on the increases in productivity that this technology brings to reassure itself that no reforms to the stifling progressive agenda are necessary, and it will buy into fantastical notions of the supposedly infinite potential of ‘AI’ to save their grand project.  

This will in turn accelerate the regime’s commitment to a society that is hostile to the historic populations of the West. It will attempt to leverage machine learning to replace the professional competence that it previously was forced to draw from high-agency Anglo and European populations.  

Reliance on these populations has long been undesirable for the regime: they represent a source of risk, and the greater their irreplaceability, the greater potential they have to destabilize the entrenched system if mobilized. 

For many decades, the regime has had to content itself with reducing these populations to ‘cogs in the machine’: spiritually suppressed and physically dwindling, but still keeping the lights on. The attempt to replace their competence at more complex tasks with foreign populations has seen limited success. Now the regime will try AI.

This attempt will fail. Its failure will represent a moment of singular potentiality for us - the dissident vanguard. We must be prepared to seize it.

II.

In the industrial era, the ruling political class of the West pursued a policy of reducing their populations to cogs in the machine: ordered, productive, compliant. It’s worth understanding why and how they did this to understand how this will change in a post-industrial society. 

Kaczynski devoted a significant portion of his manifesto to outlining the logic of this policy, and did so quite eloquently, continuing the tradition of thinkers like Heidegger and Ellul: 

...modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work people have to do what they are told to do, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules…

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system… Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system… It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

The extent to which we have freedom within this system is determined by a risk/reward calculation made by the regime. 

Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice “safe sex”). We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior.

III.

The regime will grow to believe that the advent of more useful classes of AI/ML will change the risk/reward calculus of maintaining undesirable populations. 

Driven by increasing regime desperation as their longstanding multicultural project - predicated on the false belief that Western cogs are entirely interchangeable with non-Western cogs - fails to usher in the promised utopia, they will turn to AI as the next deus ex machina.  

The current generation of machine learning technologies can be conceived of as a technology of replacement. They are in no way truly ‘generative’: in fact, they analyze statistical patterns in their training data (ie. the existing output of competent humans, like books, articles, diagnoses, recommendations…) and use these statistical patterns to attempt to replicate competent output when prompted. 

This is pure math: if-this-then-that reasoning. This is not a creative, generative, or visionary technology. It is only suitable for tasks that can be achieved using statistics, no matter how much the radical evangelists try to dazzle you.  

It is the perfect technology for a society in decline, in which fewer and fewer competent human decision-makers exist. These can be replaced by less competent actors augmented by a technology that provides suggestions as to what a competent actor would have done.

Believing this, the regime will delude itself into believing that Europeans and their descendants are now completely expendable. They will transition from a human-as-cog model to human-as-liability model. The next great project of the regime will not be the conquest of space; it will be an internal conquest of its own populations. 

This license to treat Western populations as expendable will remove all constraints on progressive ideology. Insisting that whites are universally guilty of ubiquitous prejudice, their disenfranchisement will continue, and psychological pressure, immigration, and deaths of despair will mount. It will be assumed that the resulting loss of productivity can be outpaced by AI-driven gains. 

The problem is that this programme cannot and will not succeed. Policymakers do not have a good grasp of the technology and of its limits, which are very hard and very real. They are being deluded by dreamers and evangelists - many of whom have their own anti-human, science fiction blinders - who are telling them that this technology will do things it cannot. 

Forget about bringing about the apocalypse - ‘AI’ can’t even drive a car properly. Elon has been promising that autonomous Teslas are imminent for a decade, and has now gone strangely silent. It turns out that you can reliably reason statistically about common situations but not about unique ones, which occur all the time while driving in complex environments. 

The whole world is a complex environment. Human excellence will continue to stand alone, absent the creation of a totally different technology that we’re about as close to as we are to a warp-drive: true, independent intelligence, not complex statistics. If that’s possible, it’s not close. 

IV.

The failure of the regime will bring opportunity for us. 

The sustainability of the human-as-cog model was ensured because the regime could offer both punishment and reward. Comfort and wealth - the ability to start a family - were provided to huge parts of the populace in exchange for their submission. 

The human-as-liability model will prove less successful in this regard. Antidepressants and the metaverse will fail to keep a sufficient percentage of the millions of dispossessed loyal. The regime will be reliant on punishment, which will only go so far before radicalizing these populations still further. 

The system, meanwhile, will continue to break down. Discrete AI-optimized tasks will be insufficient to save it. 

As the material logic once commanded by the regime degrades, a moment of tremendous potentiality will emerge. The existing spiritual and psychological bankruptcy of the system will be accompanied by physical collapse. Its grip will slip.  

We must be ready, waiting in large numbers, strong in body and spirit. Contributing to that movement is one of the central ambitions of Becoming Noble. 

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann