Brilliant feat of pattern recognition—very persuasive.
Your prose is wonderful: “So it’s curious to me that this group should also have produced a subset of hyper-rationalistic individuals convinced that if we produce a machine superintelligence, it will kill us all. What does it mean, that the mirror AI holds up to this group should be an extension of thought that is hostile and murderous?”
And
“What that looks like, fittingly, is a god-like entity that is both hyper-rationalistic and yet, despite this (or perhaps because of it), so morally ungovernable that its coming into being signals human catastrophe.”
The precursor phenomena so prevalent in Silicon Valley of conceptually extravagant (but not very sensually appealing) sexuality and the now almost-two generation old cultic celebration of Burning Man support your thesis of why the Shadow that oozes from the consciousness of the hyper-rationalist trans human crowd is so toxic, and possibly lethal at scale.
I know a woman who works at a Magnificent 7 company who divorced her perfectly well-mannered beta husband and is now in a relationship with a trans man to woman who is biologically intact. In other words, she was unsatisfied with a man as man, but is sexually attracted to a man masquerading as a woman. This is where her “ratio” has led her!
I’m speculating here, but it’s even possible to affirm the logic of the arrangement based on primordial masculine:feminine polarity. Let’s say her cucked beta ex-husband is sexually ambivalent or passive himself and capable of, at best, tepid sex. Postulate further that her new man is sexually aroused by adopting the accoutrements of a woman and is therefore capable of intense, dominant sexual performance. In that case, the tech exec is making a rational choice by becoming a “virtual” lesbian: she finally gets properly fucked by an anatomical male while heaping up social credit in her professional circles by being a lesbian and in a trans relationship. Winning!
It could be argued that how she chooses to have fun has nothing to do with Silicon Valley forebodings about AI megadeath (or gigadeath) but the emerging disclosures about the sexual proclivities of Charlie Kirk’s murderer (and other trans-initiated violence) make this position nearly untenable.
Burning Man, especially for those who know about the dark underbelly of what happens on the salt flat, occupies a place on the collective trans human penumbra somewhere between a transgressive fantasy roll in the sheets and nightmares about AI extermination of humanity.
Everything considered, you have successfully connected cutting edge AI technology with the ancient human capability for bottomless evil in a startlingly fresh and compelling way.
You have absolutely hit the nail on the head with your analysis of male to female trans people and their female partners.
I have come across this on (of all places!) a TV programme called Say Yes to the Dress, where these pairings are surprisingly common. My little theories are that (for the female partner) it is the added frisson of difference, or the only way they can get the kind of man they're after.
It's a pornography-induced fiction that lesbians enjoy penises, however. Porn caters to the fragile male ego by erasing the possibility of female rejection of men as sex partners. The fact that the average American heterosexual man now harbors the porn induced delusion that lesbians suck cock just shows how pathetically insecure and fantasy-addicted he is.
The person I know is a woman who is now in a relationship with a biologically intact transgender (male to female) lover. She calls herself a lesbian while (I speculate) sucking her lover’s cock so it is also she who is nurturing the implausible fantasy.
But of course fantasies are implausible, that’s a feature not a bug.
Have you heard of the book “Morning Glory Milking Farm”? It’s a romantasy in which the innocent heroine goes to work at a glory hole for Minotaurs and falls in love with her first client.
By contrast, the idea of actual lesbians enjoying fellatio seems like a chapter from a Margaret Mead work on cultural anthropology! I suppose that is where the “ratio” of both members of that couple has led them.
To Mary’s point, it’s totally disconnected from empirical reality and is in fact a projection of their respective shadows.
I certainly understand your frustration, Gemma, and I’m sorry you’ve been sexually harassed by women at the behest of their deluded husbands / boyfriends.
Personally, as a heterosexual man I am a great admirer of the way lesbians have demonstrated exceptional expertise performing bilabial plosives (a playful synecdoche for written and spoken language), including as brief representative examples: Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kate Millett, and many others. In particular I’m a fan of the love letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West because of their towering passion and tender eloquence (without ever forgetting those letters are directed to another woman) and the ability of lesbians to produce great political rhetoric is also world class. Even bat-shit crazy lesbians like Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin are capable of writing many a soul-stirring sentence, however deluded those sentences may be.
Human nature being what it is, however, there are infinite complexities in the way individual human behaviour can be expressed. For example, my grandmother attended an elite European girls school, which is no doubt where she acquired her taste for emotional and sexual intimacy with women. In the early 1920s she attended the American University of Cairo dressed as a man (because only male students were admitted to the American University), while in a love affair with the painter Wilhelm Wessel, who traveled with her to Cairo. While still in a relationship with Wessel she my grandfather, fell in love, and with whom she had a loving marriage that lasted many years and produced five children. My grandfather was killed in World War II and my grandmother then entered a life-long relationship with a woman I was brought up to call Aunt Lotte. Decades later, Wilhelm Wessel’s widow seduced (or was seduced by) Aunt Lotte and abandoned by grandmother to love with Wessel’s widow on her luxurious estate. My grandmother died not long afterwards.
Perhaps because of my family background I’ve always enjoyed the company of lesbians and lesbian couples. I have noticed that often, at just the time we are all getting along very well, the dominant partner tends to become alert, disapproving and protective of her femme partner, who is typically being very open and friendly, and distances the couple from me. Although this is merely anecdotal (although repeated) evidence, my experiences do suggest that while certainly not the majority of lesbians, there is nevertheless perhaps a plurality of lesbians who are indeed open to the possibility of savouring a masculine amuse bouche.
The excellent translator and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn tells us that ironically the original meaning of “lesbian” in the Greek of Sappho’s own time mean “fellatist” not “homosexual woman”. Apparently, the population of the island of Lesbos was noted for their unusually libertine sexuality, even by Greek standards. So the contemporary meaning of “lesbian” was “cocksucker” in the same way that the meaning of “to do the Corinthian”, at a time when the wealthy city of Corinth was the Los Angeles of its time, was “to fuck”.
As a final irony (or perhaps harmony) you share your surname with the author (and husband of the literary agent Sandra Dykstra) Bram Dykstra, who wrote “Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture.” In this book, Dykstra basically makes the case that in the late 19th century non-reproductive sexual behaviour by women was stigmatized (and fetishized) by a host of artists and writers as a threat to the Darwinian evolution of humanity by blocking or side-tracking the natural heterosexual instincts of men.
Personally, I think Bram Dykstra’s case is over-blown (no pun intended) but it’s certainly an elaborate scholarly case for the kind of delusional fantasizing to which you’re so understandably objecting.
It's one thing for insecure men to fantasize about women who refuse to have sex with men (lesbians). But they actually believe the fantasy as they have brainwashed themselves into believing it with the positive reinforcement of ejaculating to it. If they ever knew what pathetic pussies it makes them look like. . .
This is my pet peeve. I have been sexually harassed at work by two female supervisors (as directed by their delusional porn addict men). Last one was a doctor. Doctors who went to Harvard Medical School should know that in real life lesbians do not suck cock.
Female is the sex that produces large gametes (ova). Females are born with ovaries, not testes.
Every human is either male or female, including those with disorders of sexual development.
Homosexual means Same-Sex attracted, i.e. female attracted to another female.
“Men at birth” are males, therefore not lesbians.
Humans cannot change sex. A male will never become a female; therefore, he will never be a lesbian.
Heterosexual men with the sexual paraphilia called autogynephilia are not, nor will they ever be, lesbians, because they will never be Female.
There no such thing as a lesbian with a penis.
Lesbians, as Female Homosexuals, are Not sexually attracted to males, no matter how they (males) dress, what they call themselves, or whether they have breast implants.
Really beautiful insights Mary. I find Mcgilchrist’s Hemisphere theory here very useful as a framework. To see the left hemisphere (the fall, ratio, reason, intellect, left hand of god (as Jung would say), etc) as the general force that has created machines, with the tendency for self reflection, schematisation, division and narrow, utilitarian focus. Then I see technology now as a metastasis of this faculty, out into the physical world. Untethered from a holistic field of form/purpose and blindly proliferating, much like a cancer cell has forgotten the tissue it is part of, and goes back to base programming. Our untethering from god (or the richer, pre-conceptual world the right hemisphere perceives) has unlinked our ‘ratio’ faculty from serving a broader meaning / purpose - and now reverberates not only inwardly with itself, but also now externally with the technology and systems of thought we use and share. (Since smartphones especially) - A hall of mirrors phenomenon, analogous to the hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, or narcissus staring at his own reflection. Disconnection, division and proliferation, at many different levels of cell, mind and culture!
I’m not the most eloquent writer so apologies for the word jumble!
I was banned from Scott Alexander's blog because he took offense at my exasperated disbelief that he couldn't think of a good reason one ought not to kill a newborn baby except that "not killing newborn babies seems like a good norm to have" and "it would make the parents sad". The rationalists are deserving of every criticism they receive. Their worldview is completely impotent against evil. It even provides cover for evil, as long as it can be justified on some utilitarian grounds. Just take a look at their many many disturbing thought experiments.
Great post. I don’t know if you noticed, but Alexander recently posted an imagined conversation between God and some sort of comparably divine interlocutor in which they argue about the value and nature of human beings; in it, God essentially says the things Alexander himself says about LLMs, while the demon foolishly says the sorts of things critics of the notion of “inevitable LLM based ‘superintelligence’” say. I don’t think I’ve seen a funnier incidental confession about how grandiosely rationalists think about themselves and their little project than this post; highly recommended.
I wonder what Jung would think of the times we are living in. Isn't transgenderism the ultimate in merging with one's Shadow (which Jung thinks is bad), along with the accompanying anima or animus depending on original sex.
I believe Jung's Devouring Mother archetype is also widely prevalent in today's world.
I also am not too worried about AI. I am not even sure that today's LLM's can be called AI unless you emphasize only the Artificial of AI. I do think LLM's, when refined, will be great tools. The tricky part will be how to roll them out in a minimally disruptive manner.
If humans ever do create a Super Intelligence, the result will make the Tower of Babel look like a picnic.
“For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” – Exodus 34:14
Nice piece by Mary. We are living in a toxic moment, and it is best to let things hopefully settle before venturing out.
“How do you account for impulse, chaos, error, and - worst of all - evil? For Christians, original sin had this covered.” The divide is becoming more and more apparent.
Typos (speech recognition software?) distract a bit from the argument in places. If I was smarter I could probably make an AI joke about that. Then someone could make a Jungian joke about why I pointed them out.
I don't think there were many typos but one was 'transformativer' which got my old cogs turning about this unbeknown word... before I realized it was a typo! And in one spot you wrote 'radio' instead of ratio. Trivial errors to me, that took nothing away from the profundity of your essay! Thank you!
In physiological terms it would probably go something like:
Limbic system>subconscious>conscious>AI
The problem is the first three are all multiply interconnected and developed alongside each other, whereas AI has only one point of connection (language) and is a "bolt -on" attachment.
I would argue the real AI apocalypse probably more closely resembles a "limbic democracy" (a la Robert Charles Wilson) enabled by social media
That’s why Im subscribed to Mary even though sometimes wading through long shot associations and obscure (to me) references could be challenging, there’re too many diamonds lying around. That was a superb exercise in sense making
Thanks for sharing your insights on the shadow side of AI. I like your analogy of treating the problems with AI like "being chronically late for work and insisting you just need more or better alarm clocks." The problem with AI is deeper than you think - it's about the state of the human heart.
“ the regions of the unknown are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society, in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight…” (Joseph Campbell)
AI does not need to be self-aware to kill us, it only needs to be pursuing goals programmed into it and to misinterpret said goals or to come up with a novel solution to them, that we didn't account for.
Brilliant feat of pattern recognition—very persuasive.
Your prose is wonderful: “So it’s curious to me that this group should also have produced a subset of hyper-rationalistic individuals convinced that if we produce a machine superintelligence, it will kill us all. What does it mean, that the mirror AI holds up to this group should be an extension of thought that is hostile and murderous?”
And
“What that looks like, fittingly, is a god-like entity that is both hyper-rationalistic and yet, despite this (or perhaps because of it), so morally ungovernable that its coming into being signals human catastrophe.”
The precursor phenomena so prevalent in Silicon Valley of conceptually extravagant (but not very sensually appealing) sexuality and the now almost-two generation old cultic celebration of Burning Man support your thesis of why the Shadow that oozes from the consciousness of the hyper-rationalist trans human crowd is so toxic, and possibly lethal at scale.
I know a woman who works at a Magnificent 7 company who divorced her perfectly well-mannered beta husband and is now in a relationship with a trans man to woman who is biologically intact. In other words, she was unsatisfied with a man as man, but is sexually attracted to a man masquerading as a woman. This is where her “ratio” has led her!
I’m speculating here, but it’s even possible to affirm the logic of the arrangement based on primordial masculine:feminine polarity. Let’s say her cucked beta ex-husband is sexually ambivalent or passive himself and capable of, at best, tepid sex. Postulate further that her new man is sexually aroused by adopting the accoutrements of a woman and is therefore capable of intense, dominant sexual performance. In that case, the tech exec is making a rational choice by becoming a “virtual” lesbian: she finally gets properly fucked by an anatomical male while heaping up social credit in her professional circles by being a lesbian and in a trans relationship. Winning!
It could be argued that how she chooses to have fun has nothing to do with Silicon Valley forebodings about AI megadeath (or gigadeath) but the emerging disclosures about the sexual proclivities of Charlie Kirk’s murderer (and other trans-initiated violence) make this position nearly untenable.
Burning Man, especially for those who know about the dark underbelly of what happens on the salt flat, occupies a place on the collective trans human penumbra somewhere between a transgressive fantasy roll in the sheets and nightmares about AI extermination of humanity.
Everything considered, you have successfully connected cutting edge AI technology with the ancient human capability for bottomless evil in a startlingly fresh and compelling way.
You have absolutely hit the nail on the head with your analysis of male to female trans people and their female partners.
I have come across this on (of all places!) a TV programme called Say Yes to the Dress, where these pairings are surprisingly common. My little theories are that (for the female partner) it is the added frisson of difference, or the only way they can get the kind of man they're after.
It's a pornography-induced fiction that lesbians enjoy penises, however. Porn caters to the fragile male ego by erasing the possibility of female rejection of men as sex partners. The fact that the average American heterosexual man now harbors the porn induced delusion that lesbians suck cock just shows how pathetically insecure and fantasy-addicted he is.
The person I know is a woman who is now in a relationship with a biologically intact transgender (male to female) lover. She calls herself a lesbian while (I speculate) sucking her lover’s cock so it is also she who is nurturing the implausible fantasy.
But of course fantasies are implausible, that’s a feature not a bug.
Have you heard of the book “Morning Glory Milking Farm”? It’s a romantasy in which the innocent heroine goes to work at a glory hole for Minotaurs and falls in love with her first client.
By contrast, the idea of actual lesbians enjoying fellatio seems like a chapter from a Margaret Mead work on cultural anthropology! I suppose that is where the “ratio” of both members of that couple has led them.
To Mary’s point, it’s totally disconnected from empirical reality and is in fact a projection of their respective shadows.
I certainly understand your frustration, Gemma, and I’m sorry you’ve been sexually harassed by women at the behest of their deluded husbands / boyfriends.
Personally, as a heterosexual man I am a great admirer of the way lesbians have demonstrated exceptional expertise performing bilabial plosives (a playful synecdoche for written and spoken language), including as brief representative examples: Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kate Millett, and many others. In particular I’m a fan of the love letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West because of their towering passion and tender eloquence (without ever forgetting those letters are directed to another woman) and the ability of lesbians to produce great political rhetoric is also world class. Even bat-shit crazy lesbians like Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin are capable of writing many a soul-stirring sentence, however deluded those sentences may be.
Human nature being what it is, however, there are infinite complexities in the way individual human behaviour can be expressed. For example, my grandmother attended an elite European girls school, which is no doubt where she acquired her taste for emotional and sexual intimacy with women. In the early 1920s she attended the American University of Cairo dressed as a man (because only male students were admitted to the American University), while in a love affair with the painter Wilhelm Wessel, who traveled with her to Cairo. While still in a relationship with Wessel she my grandfather, fell in love, and with whom she had a loving marriage that lasted many years and produced five children. My grandfather was killed in World War II and my grandmother then entered a life-long relationship with a woman I was brought up to call Aunt Lotte. Decades later, Wilhelm Wessel’s widow seduced (or was seduced by) Aunt Lotte and abandoned by grandmother to love with Wessel’s widow on her luxurious estate. My grandmother died not long afterwards.
Perhaps because of my family background I’ve always enjoyed the company of lesbians and lesbian couples. I have noticed that often, at just the time we are all getting along very well, the dominant partner tends to become alert, disapproving and protective of her femme partner, who is typically being very open and friendly, and distances the couple from me. Although this is merely anecdotal (although repeated) evidence, my experiences do suggest that while certainly not the majority of lesbians, there is nevertheless perhaps a plurality of lesbians who are indeed open to the possibility of savouring a masculine amuse bouche.
The excellent translator and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn tells us that ironically the original meaning of “lesbian” in the Greek of Sappho’s own time mean “fellatist” not “homosexual woman”. Apparently, the population of the island of Lesbos was noted for their unusually libertine sexuality, even by Greek standards. So the contemporary meaning of “lesbian” was “cocksucker” in the same way that the meaning of “to do the Corinthian”, at a time when the wealthy city of Corinth was the Los Angeles of its time, was “to fuck”.
As a final irony (or perhaps harmony) you share your surname with the author (and husband of the literary agent Sandra Dykstra) Bram Dykstra, who wrote “Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture.” In this book, Dykstra basically makes the case that in the late 19th century non-reproductive sexual behaviour by women was stigmatized (and fetishized) by a host of artists and writers as a threat to the Darwinian evolution of humanity by blocking or side-tracking the natural heterosexual instincts of men.
Personally, I think Bram Dykstra’s case is over-blown (no pun intended) but it’s certainly an elaborate scholarly case for the kind of delusional fantasizing to which you’re so understandably objecting.
It's one thing for insecure men to fantasize about women who refuse to have sex with men (lesbians). But they actually believe the fantasy as they have brainwashed themselves into believing it with the positive reinforcement of ejaculating to it. If they ever knew what pathetic pussies it makes them look like. . .
This is my pet peeve. I have been sexually harassed at work by two female supervisors (as directed by their delusional porn addict men). Last one was a doctor. Doctors who went to Harvard Medical School should know that in real life lesbians do not suck cock.
That objection is so 1990. Lesbians are refusing such categorizations now, you can even have men at birth claiming a legitimate lesbian status.
Lol!
The definition of a lesbian is Female Homosexual.
Female is the sex that produces large gametes (ova). Females are born with ovaries, not testes.
Every human is either male or female, including those with disorders of sexual development.
Homosexual means Same-Sex attracted, i.e. female attracted to another female.
“Men at birth” are males, therefore not lesbians.
Humans cannot change sex. A male will never become a female; therefore, he will never be a lesbian.
Heterosexual men with the sexual paraphilia called autogynephilia are not, nor will they ever be, lesbians, because they will never be Female.
There no such thing as a lesbian with a penis.
Lesbians, as Female Homosexuals, are Not sexually attracted to males, no matter how they (males) dress, what they call themselves, or whether they have breast implants.
So quaint!
Really beautiful insights Mary. I find Mcgilchrist’s Hemisphere theory here very useful as a framework. To see the left hemisphere (the fall, ratio, reason, intellect, left hand of god (as Jung would say), etc) as the general force that has created machines, with the tendency for self reflection, schematisation, division and narrow, utilitarian focus. Then I see technology now as a metastasis of this faculty, out into the physical world. Untethered from a holistic field of form/purpose and blindly proliferating, much like a cancer cell has forgotten the tissue it is part of, and goes back to base programming. Our untethering from god (or the richer, pre-conceptual world the right hemisphere perceives) has unlinked our ‘ratio’ faculty from serving a broader meaning / purpose - and now reverberates not only inwardly with itself, but also now externally with the technology and systems of thought we use and share. (Since smartphones especially) - A hall of mirrors phenomenon, analogous to the hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, or narcissus staring at his own reflection. Disconnection, division and proliferation, at many different levels of cell, mind and culture!
I’m not the most eloquent writer so apologies for the word jumble!
- Matt
So, AI is the unconscious revenge of the nerds.
I was banned from Scott Alexander's blog because he took offense at my exasperated disbelief that he couldn't think of a good reason one ought not to kill a newborn baby except that "not killing newborn babies seems like a good norm to have" and "it would make the parents sad". The rationalists are deserving of every criticism they receive. Their worldview is completely impotent against evil. It even provides cover for evil, as long as it can be justified on some utilitarian grounds. Just take a look at their many many disturbing thought experiments.
Great post. I don’t know if you noticed, but Alexander recently posted an imagined conversation between God and some sort of comparably divine interlocutor in which they argue about the value and nature of human beings; in it, God essentially says the things Alexander himself says about LLMs, while the demon foolishly says the sorts of things critics of the notion of “inevitable LLM based ‘superintelligence’” say. I don’t think I’ve seen a funnier incidental confession about how grandiosely rationalists think about themselves and their little project than this post; highly recommended.
I wonder what Jung would think of the times we are living in. Isn't transgenderism the ultimate in merging with one's Shadow (which Jung thinks is bad), along with the accompanying anima or animus depending on original sex.
I believe Jung's Devouring Mother archetype is also widely prevalent in today's world.
I also am not too worried about AI. I am not even sure that today's LLM's can be called AI unless you emphasize only the Artificial of AI. I do think LLM's, when refined, will be great tools. The tricky part will be how to roll them out in a minimally disruptive manner.
If humans ever do create a Super Intelligence, the result will make the Tower of Babel look like a picnic.
“For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” – Exodus 34:14
Nice piece by Mary. We are living in a toxic moment, and it is best to let things hopefully settle before venturing out.
Excellent piece. I've always maintained -from observing- that rationalists always wind up in superstition.
“How do you account for impulse, chaos, error, and - worst of all - evil? For Christians, original sin had this covered.” The divide is becoming more and more apparent.
Typos (speech recognition software?) distract a bit from the argument in places. If I was smarter I could probably make an AI joke about that. Then someone could make a Jungian joke about why I pointed them out.
You can blame that on too busy a family week rather than AI but thanks for the heads up, I’ll re-read later when I can
I don't think there were many typos but one was 'transformativer' which got my old cogs turning about this unbeknown word... before I realized it was a typo! And in one spot you wrote 'radio' instead of ratio. Trivial errors to me, that took nothing away from the profundity of your essay! Thank you!
In physiological terms it would probably go something like:
Limbic system>subconscious>conscious>AI
The problem is the first three are all multiply interconnected and developed alongside each other, whereas AI has only one point of connection (language) and is a "bolt -on" attachment.
I would argue the real AI apocalypse probably more closely resembles a "limbic democracy" (a la Robert Charles Wilson) enabled by social media
Or
"Hyperion" by Dan Simmons
That’s why Im subscribed to Mary even though sometimes wading through long shot associations and obscure (to me) references could be challenging, there’re too many diamonds lying around. That was a superb exercise in sense making
Thanks for sharing your insights on the shadow side of AI. I like your analogy of treating the problems with AI like "being chronically late for work and insisting you just need more or better alarm clocks." The problem with AI is deeper than you think - it's about the state of the human heart.
https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/the-problem-with-ai-is-deeper-than-you-think/
Can't believe you didn't use 'adumbrations'
A Web of Our Making. Anton Barba-Kay. 😒
“ the regions of the unknown are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society, in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight…” (Joseph Campbell)
AI does not need to be self-aware to kill us, it only needs to be pursuing goals programmed into it and to misinterpret said goals or to come up with a novel solution to them, that we didn't account for.