Apocalyptic Eschatology in the Tech Bubble
In the earliest mythologies Gods were immortal and the secret of eternal life was guarded carefully. Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden because of this, not because they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Genesis 9
22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever.”… 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life.
It’s bad enough to have obtained knowledge of good and evil, but eating of the Tree of Life is for Gods only. Yahweh was concerned enough that humans might become “like one of us” (note the plural here, also the plural “Elohim” often used in Genesis) that he stationed cherubim with flaming swords to enforce this divine prohibition.
When Jesus entered the picture the story changed. His early Jewish followers, trying to make sense of their prophet being crucified like a common criminal, elevated his death into a divine drama wherein he overcame death and provided his followers with access to the Tree of Life.
1 Thessalonians 4
16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.
Romans 6
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord
1 Thessalonians is considered to be the earliest proto-Christian writing; written some decades before the Gospels. It is clear from this earliest authentic Pauline letter that Paul believed, and taught, that Jesus would return during his lifetime and usher in a Paradise of Eternal Life — not in some distant future, but in the lifetimes of “we who are alive.”
What prompted this letter, it appears, is that he had some explaining to do to the Thessalonians regarding at least one member who had died. This contradicted his preaching that all believers in Jesus who had been freed from sin and, thus, freed from death, i.e. “the wages of sin,” would “be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” while they were still alive. He tried to allay their concerns claiming they hadn’t really died, they had just “fallen asleep through Jesus.” When Jesus returned — while Paul and his converts were still alive — “the dead in Christ will rise first” from their “sleep.”
This led to centuries of problems and questions from curious miscreants. When the dead awoke in Jesus what sort of body would they have? What age would they be? If the Rapture came while a believer was dying of cancer would they be dying of cancer forever in Heaven? Did Jesus have a human body or was he wholly divine? (This one caused serious violent schisms among the faithful) Bodily resurrection was a knotty problem. Much easier to consign the body to death and conceive of an eternal non-physical soul. There were also questions about this, but not quite as knotty: like where did the soul reside or where did the soul go after death.
It’s hard to tell how far back into prehistory the conception of eternal life arose. It was a popular and comforting answer to a great mystery. Like St. Paul’s, promises of Eternal Life abound in mythology, in spite of the Gods’ anxieties about it. Heroes, like Hercules, ascend to Mt. Olympus to live forever while others dwell in a shadowy underworld after death. Hindu and Buddhist doctrines teach of reincarnation of an eternal soul that passes through many incarnations. What is common to all these systems is some kind of division between mortal physical reality and a hidden metaphysical realm beyond the body. Plato was big on this dualism. For him, death was a great liberation from slavery in the body into a rarified realm where a philosopher’s soul could be free to philosophize for eternity. Socrates said,
“It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body. Only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord and battles, for all wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth, and all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy…” (Phaedo)
Death is essential to the natural world. Nature is chock full of decomposers; bacteria, fungi and innumerable unnoticed creators of soils and recyclers of nutrients consume the dead throughout the biosphere. Death is the way the entire tangled bank, the diversity of life we see around us, has come to be. The hundreds of millions of years of evolution via natural selection absolutely requires the death of myriad mistakes. The random fluctuations of DNA that have expressed themselves in organisms that fail to meet the tests of survival turn those mistakes into food; nothing is wasted and no mistake escapes death. But, amid all these fatal mistakes, there are a rare few that provide advantages that enhance the ability to reproduce, multiply and produce more random mistakes. Our biosphere is a resilient and miraculous creation of successful mistakes, fertilized by death, decay and decomposition. As Aldo Leopold says,
“…there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing harmony — its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”
Eternal Life would be a natural catastrophe. All of the miraculous cycling and recycling of nutrients would come to a halt; evolution would stop and life would fade away into an entropic decline. Earth would become Mars.
The human species is the only species whose members are aware of their own inevitable demise. The earliest human ritual observances around the dead express this ancient human awareness. Bodies have been found in prehistoric burials laid with care and treated ceremonially. It seems that the mysteries of death and the resulting anxieties around it are what led to the first religious impulses. It is only the human imagination that could cling to the idea of Eternal Life as a Heavenly Paradise and fail to account for what a disaster it would be for the natural world.
Steve Jobs quite capably weighed on this in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
These words of Steve Jobs bring us up to the latest iteration of the ancient Paradisal dream of Eternal Life clothed in rhetoric that fits modern technological society; a society still inhabited by humans who fear death. Since we are in an age of science, traditional religious superstitions will not suffice, so, instead of an eternal soul, is postulated an electronically scanned brain uploaded to a computer database. And instead of a Heaven inhabited by angels is postulated a Paradise of unlimited resources and unlimited energy created by advanced computers and nanobots. Here’s what one of the prophets of the new techno Tree of Life said about Steve Jobs’ statement:
“…This is what I call a deathist statement, part of a millennium-old rationalization of death as a good thing. It once seemed to make sense, because up until very recently you could not make a plausibly sound argument where life could be indefinitely extended.” -Ray Kurzweil
“Plausibly sound” arguments these days are arguments that tend to be couched in the language of science. But it is pretty clear from St. Paul millennia ago that, for that time and place, his arguments were also quite plausible. “Plausibility” doesn’t necessitate scientific accuracy. People can be convinced of an argument these days if it sounds scientific but cannot be proven by the methods of science, especially if it is conveyed by a charismatic leader of good reputation.
Modern industrial technological society has come to dominate the earth. Miraculous real scientific innovations are being produced rapidly and constantly. And Ray Kurzweil, as prophet of a new techno-religion, has sound and verifiable scientific credibility. His work in computer innovation, like designing print reading programs for the blind, has been deservedly applauded and richly rewarded. He has invented new computer technologies and started lucrative business ventures with his inventions and innovations.
Ray also promotes eating the fruit of the Tree of Life as an attainable technological accomplishment to be realized in the Singularity, which he prophecies will arrive in 2045. He has written two books with his doctor, Terry Grossman M.D. about life extension — “Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever” and “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.” You can buy these books on their website — “Transcend by Ray and Terry” — along with numerous “life extension” supplements (you can buy an “Anti-Aging MultiPack” for $95.14).
Ray proclaims that people presently alive, who are “diligent,” will be able to survive until the Singularity, when they will be able to live forever and become meshed with super intelligent computers that will give them instant access to infinite sources of information. He says:
“In the 2040s and 2050s, we will rebuild our bodies and brains to go vastly beyond what our biological bodies are capable of, including their backup and survival. As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized body at will: We’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them. We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly, we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”
So Ray has come up with a “solution” for the bodily resurrection problem, but instead of a soul separate from the body he uses “selves” or self. It is a brain-centered dichotomy in which the body doesn’t decompose; it just becomes somehow irrelevant, malleable and easily replaceable; a computerized pseudo or virtual Eternal Life.
But what will happen to those, who, as St. Paul said, have “fallen asleep” before the Singularity of 2045; those who have not been “diligent,” like Ray (who takes hundreds of anti-aging supplements daily). What about them??
Well… for $220,000 via the Alcor corporation — as Ray has done (should he fall “asleep” before the Singularity), you can have your body cryogenically processed and preserved for future resurrection after the Singularity arrives. This cost isn’t a problem for Ray (he’s worth $30,000,000). And by that time nanotechnology will have advanced to the point where it can cure all physical ailments. And then some (from Life Extension magazine):
Kurzweil predicts a future in which these tiny robots are everywhere, attacking a host of conditions and enabling humans to “go substantially beyond the limitations of biology.” Robots the size of red blood cells could be injected by the billions to carry oxygen more efficiently than can actual red blood cells. Neurons could be enhanced by tiny microcomputers implanted in the capillaries of the brain, which would communicate with biological cells, each other, and a wireless Internet…. “We’ll be able to provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the central nervous system,” he says. “‘Nanobots’ could shut down the signals coming from your real nervous system and put in place signals you would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment. Designing new virtual environments will be a new art form.”
This picture of an Eden of technological Eternal Life may be “plausible” to some but, like me, there are many skeptics. There are those who dare to doubt the numerous cheerful charts in Ray’s new book “The Singularity Is Nearer.” Many say these charts are carefully selected to show only the positive side of the impacts of technological society. These impacts are many, deep and profound, and definitely not all positive; there are massive amounts of scientifically proven data that can be charted in the opposite direction of Ray’s carefully chosen charts.
This new religion, which is what it is, depends heavily on Moore’s Law and nanotechnology. The chart of Moore’s Law which shows exponentially increasing computational power is accurate, but to assume, as Ray does, that this will continue unlimited by the Laws of Physics on into the future is delusional. This thinking is indicative of the detachment from reality that characterizes the denizens of the tech bubble cult which has chosen him as their prophet. The other charts in his book are confirmation bias in action. They are not wrong. But they are carefully selected from massive amounts of data that are less sanguine about the effects of industrial consumer capitalism upon humanity and upon the ecosystems of the earth. Singularitarianism, as many call this new faith, is actually quite breathtaking in its denial of biological and ecological realities. Here’s John Horgan
“The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind. Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world’s problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.”
Even software engineers within the tech bubble have questions about the fabulousness of Moore’s Law. Here’s Jaron Lanier
“The hardware side of computers keeps on getting better and cheaper at an exponential rate known by the moniker ‘Moore’s Law’. Every year and a half or so computation gets roughly twice as fast for a given cost… there’s a reverse Moore’s Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources…It is the fetishizing of Moore’s Law that seduces researchers into complacency. If you have an exponential force on your side, surely it will ace all challenges. Who cares about rational understanding when you can instead rely on an exponential extra-human fetish? But processing power isn’t the only thing that scales impressively; so do the problems that processors have to solve… If Moore’s Law is upheld for another twenty or thirty years, there will not only be a vast amount of computation going on Planet Earth, but also the maintenance of that computation will consume the efforts of almost every living person. We’re talking about a planet of helpdesks.”
Moore’s Law is a flimsy foundation for a techno-utopia in which, presumably we will all be happy. Jonathan Haidt is very concerned about the rise of anxiety and depression among today’s teen-age smart phone generation. School districts support Haidt’s concern; many schools are increasingly instituting smart phone bans because these devices impede the development of young minds. And, presumably, these young minds will be the ones maintaining the infrastructure of the Singularitarian techno-Eden. Haidt has charts of rising levels of anxiety and depression among teenagers that would reside very uncomfortably alongside Ray’s optimistic projections.
As these young people, presumably, become employees of the tech companies racing to advance AI, develop AGI and, in Ray’s vision, bring on the Singularity we should note these rising rates of anxiety and depression in their future employees. Especially when considering that Open AI has found it necessary to contract with a company, Sama, that employs workers in Kenya at about $2 an hour to
“annotate data sets… pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.”
This was necessary because Chat GP 3 was
“prone to blurting out violent, sexist and racist remarks. This is because the AI had been trained on hundreds of billions of words scraped from the internet… Since parts of the internet are replete with toxicity and bias, there was no easy way of purging those sections of the training data.”
So they, like all the tech giants are doing, exposed “content moderators” to horrific content in order to expunge it from their platforms. This is an ongoing, and deeply disturbing, problem. The “content moderation” industry is worth $9 billion and is estimated to employ 10,000 content moderators for TikTok; 15,000 for Facebook and 1,500 for Twitter as of 2022. These contracts are outsourced to low wage countries where employees suffer PTSD and other serious psychological conditions from being required to view the horrible toxic materials far too many depraved deviants seem intent upon sharing with the world.
And Ray is proposing that we should be enthusiastic about these companies developing in the future “microcomputers implanted in the capillaries of the brain, which would communicate with biological cells, each other, and a wireless Internet.” Error free microcomputers linked, noise free, to a toxin free Internet is going to require some serious entropic energy dissipation and human capital to maintain (see Shannon-Hartley theorem).
Things, unfortunately, are not any better when we consider the interactions of the tech bubble with the physical realities of Nature. Here’s Ray again:
“We’re not using up any resources that can’t be replaced. The amount of sunlight that falls on Earth is 10,000 times what we need to create all of our energy. We’ll use AI to create food and so on. So it’s not like we’re running out of resources… Within 10 years we’ll come up with renewable energy that doesn’t produce carbon dioxide…We don’t have to worry about it.”
Yes, what could go wrong? “We don’t have to worry about it.”
Big tech is in a race to build new data centers, and supply those data centers with the huge exponentially increasing amount of power they need, in order to support the development of increasingly sophisticated AI programs. These data center are wreaking havoc in the communities they are proposed to be located, are forcing utilities to re-commission coal fired power plants that were originally scheduled for decommissioning and are in a panic to find new sources of power that enable them to maintain their carefully tailored professed commitment to carbon neutral energy. Due to this, Microsoft has contracted with Constellation Energy to reopen Three Mile Island
What could go wrong? “We don’t have to worry about it.”
Amazon contracted with the only modular reactor company that received a design certificate from the NRC, NuScale, and that contract failed. NuScale was unable to complete its project because of cost overruns.
“What should be clear at this point is that the failure of the advanced nuclear industry will have serious consequences for America’s decarbonization and energy security goals”
Jacques Ellul wrote about technological mythmaking in his books “The Technological Society”(1954) and “Propaganda” (1962). He says, in “The Technological Society:”
“The human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe. The new order was meant to be a buffer between man and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both with the world of life and with the world of brute matter. Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is ‘no exit’; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.”
And in “Propaganda” (1962) he tells us
“An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda…The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference — all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will…And what is the content of this conditioning? …All propaganda must play on the fact that the nation will be industrialized, more will be produced, greater progress is imminent, and so on.”
The myth of progress tells us the economy must continue to grow, corporations must continue to get bigger, highways must be continually widened, forests must be razed to make room for the continuing growth of housing developments and data centers must continually be supplied with exponentially increasing amounts of energy. Any politician who dared to question the necessity for economic growth and more jobs would be wasting their money in their attempt to get elected.
And the prophet of Singulariatarianism is telling us that “we don’t have to worry about it” because “We’re not using up any resources that can’t be replaced… We’ll use AI to create food and so on. So it’s not like we’re running out of resources…”
In his interview with Wired magazine the interviewer asks:
“I: You seem to be at war with biology.
RK: Biology has a lot of limitations. A lot of analysts feel there’s nothing inevitable about dying, and we’re coming up with things to stop it. Basically we can get rid of death through aging… Once we get to AGI, computers will be able to do anything, including cleaning the dishes and coming up with poetry — anything you say, these machines can do.”
If, Heaven forbid, any vestige of this techno-delusion comes to pass in 2045 it is much more likely to look like some kind of Borg nightmare. And perhaps Ray got some of his ideas from the Borg.
“Nanoprobes could be modified to perform a wide array of functions that their host drones desire. First and foremost, nanoprobes would be utilized to maintain a drone’s functions, and facilitate any repairs, should the biological or technological components be damaged. In one case, nanoprobes were able to repair and revive drones buried in ice for over one hundred years. In another case, nanoprobes were able to revive an unassimilated individual eighteen hours after death. Nanoprobes could be further modified to eliminate toxins and repair damages to unassimilated individuals and environments affected by radiation poisoning. (ENT: “Regeneration”; VOY: “Scorpion”, “Mortal Coil”, “Friendship One”, “Someone to Watch Over Me”)”
Being at war with biology; being at war with death; basically being at war with the Laws of Nature is both arrogant and foolish. Only in a deeply dissociated bubble of techno delusion can anyone imagine winning such a battle.
We shall soon see this bubble pop. The mad rush by the tech giants for more data centers and more energy, and ploughing billions into companies like OpenAI that have yet to generate any return on investment is going to culminate in the next year. The bubble will pop and blow a huge hole in the economy. Check back in a year to see if this prediction holds true.
(P.S. AI was not consulted for any of this. These are entirely my own words and research — unless you count the interjections of auto-correct, which I find deeply annoying … and there are those who say AI is just basically auto-correct on petaflopping steroids.)
