“For four billion years, all of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and the laws of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds, [but] our intelligent design, and the design of our ‘clouds,’ the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud. These are the new driving forces of evolution.”[1]
~ Yuval Harari, Israeli historian, advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF)
Considering the lack of intelligent design found in many Microsoft products, the idea of Microsoft and IBM driving human evolution does not comfort or excite me. The extraordinary hubris of the idea is so extreme it would almost seem to be a joke. Except it’s not.
Stunning human enhancement technologies like deep brain stimulation devices (DBS) have been used to successfully treat tens of thousands of patients with Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. In January 2019, researchers at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) implanted six electrodes into the brain of a quadriplegic man during a 10-hour operation, enabling him to control a pair of prosthetic arms with his mind sufficient to perform simple tasks like feeding himself.[2] Soon, AI technology will allow prosthetics to be controlled almost as naturally as the limbs they replace—an enormous humanitarian gift for millions.
And yet the vision of neural-lace implants that can wirelessly hook us up to computers, giving us access to Petabytes of information in the blink of an eye—technology already in existence—is a discomforting one.
Like so much else in life, AI is a two-edged sword that can be used for tremendous good or tremendous harm. A neural-lace implant can send and receive data from linked satellites—which is great if you’re tracking a child lost at sea or in the jungles of the Amazon. Not so great if you contemplate the vision of millions of people being hacked and programmed to respond to data commands in politically desirable ways.
A hammer can be used to build a beautiful home for a family to live in—or it can be used to bludgeon someone to death. It all depends upon the consciousness and intention of the person holding the tool in hand … or creating the program.
Considering the corruption and grotesque abuse of economic power by corporations, the disintegration of democracy and freedoms citizens of the West have taken for granted for decades, media control, moral and spiritual decay, and the despair and confusion of global populations, it’s obvious that the “powers that be” currently wielding the hammer are not of sufficiently mature consciousness to be wielding the incomprehensibly more powerful tool of AI.
Which doesn’t mean we aren’t being sold the idea and that we aren’t eagerly buying it.
The setup
We humans are extraordinary beings of immense spiritual beauty, purity and power. Our innate essence is pure love—not the sappy, puerile concept of love we’ve been taught in romantic books and songs, nor the impotent vision of niceness idealized in religion and spiritual circles. I’m talking about LOVE! The cosmic force that creates whole universes and destroys them with equal zest and impartiality.
For eons, I think we must have known and lived the truth that we are divine spirit beings. Angels come to Earth, if you will, here to expand and extend the expression of love into more and different forms and potentials across all eternity. But then came the concept of The Fall and we lost our way.
Experiencing the playground of the flesh, we forgot Who We Really Are. We lost track of our divine spirit nature. To rudely cut to the chase, this amnesiac state was then taken advantage of and amplified by various forces whose overarching agenda has been manipulation and ultimately control of the human population of Earth.
In service to this agenda, religious institutions have been guided to pay lip service to our spirit nature while focusing on the shameful, polluting influence of the flesh. For well over a hundred generations, the Middle Eastern religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism have mesmerized men, women and children with the concept of Original Sin, saturating us in such a paranoid hatred and revulsion for our humanity that it has epigenetically scarred billions of people, stamping them with the brand of Religious Trauma Syndrome, inevitably resulting in the current epidemic of low self-esteem in modern generations so widespread it cannot be rationally measured.
Never mind quantum physics has been pointing a stalwart finger toward the equivalency of mass and energy (and our true spirit nature) ever since Einstein released his Theory of Special Relativity in 1905, along with the famous equation E=MC2 may as well be an Egyptian hieroglyph.
As far as mass consciousness is concerned, ancient Newtonian science still wins out, steadfastly supporting the trend religion started, guiding man and woman into focusing purely on the material aspect of life.
In the reductionist, Newtonian view, biology becomes nothing more than a predictable machine. Behaviorism reduces human action and choice to mechanistic stimulus/response reflexes. Mind, love, creativity, tenderness, higher states of consciousness, become nothing more than random expressions of biochemical reactions, essentially meaningless. Concepts of spirit, divinity and God are explained as mental aberrations triggered by existential angst over our very real terror of death.
Considering 1) humanity’s total amnesia regarding Who We Really Are; 2) thousands of years of shame-based religious programming; 3) several hundred years of scientific reductionism; 4) a 70-year onslaught of media programming holding up a mirror, telling us we are nothing but a bunch of dysfunctional, violent, greedy, highly-sexed morons, and; 5) angst about facing the very real possibility of global extinction since we entered the Atomic Age in the late 1940s … how can the vision of AI augmentation and transhumanism be seen by the typical modern-day man and woman as anything but a heaven-sent reprieve?
Everyone wants superpowers
In the last hundred years, we have been assiduously programmed to believe that only more and more left-brain intellectual function and more and more information can save us from ourselves. Data has replaced the heart. Downloads have replaced intuition.
Forgetting Who We Really Are, reduced to identifying with the mind and body, we have developed an understandable craving for magic—the ability to manipulate the natural world around us with the mind (understood in Eastern terms as siddhis/supernatural powers)—as well as a yearning for superstrength and indestructability. These desires birthed the first major superhero in 1938, Superman, a being with x-ray vision who could “leap tall buildings in a single bound.” DC and Marvel Comics and then the movies quickly brought us dozens of ass-kicking, villain-pounding superheroes—Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, the X-Men, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, et al—to satisfy our craving.
Today, people like Larry Page of Google fame, Elon Musk, Andrew Ng, CEO of Landing AI, Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder of Affectiva and many more are all in a global corporate race to provide humanity the opportunity to experience being superheroes by hooking us up to computer interfaces and luring us into virtual reality dramas that will make current day-to-day living seem beyond disinteresting … but downright distasteful.
Before they ever have the opportunity to wake up and realize Who They Really Are, people will undoubtedly line up in droves to participate in the great transhuman experiment and end their human lives before they ever understand and get to experience what being human even means.
This is nothing less than a nightmarish, opium den vision of mind-numbing mass self-destruction—and the ultimate wet dream of those who lust for power and control over the masses.
Hang in there
I’m writing this in hopes that these words will help to slow down the rush to the transhuman experience. That they will help wake a few people up to the fact that they already are powerful and creative, beautiful and strong beyond their wildest imaginings. I’m trying to hold up a banner and wave it for life and love and the unseen innate potentials waiting right around the corner for us to experience … if only we can get past the current trauma and temptations and get into our hearts and bodies once again.
The human being is the most glorious and divine of all expressions on this planet. For a long time, we have wandered in the wilderness of the mind, lost and confused, badgered and beleaguered by those who would lead us into the trap of control by programming us into such a state of shame, self-hatred and confusion, that we feel we deserve the whips and chains and welcome them.
But the time has come to see through the matrix of lies, look in the mirror and finally know the truth. We are spirit. We are love. We are connected. We are vast and we are many. And our numbers are growing as we shake ourselves awake, join hands and walk together into the creation of the New Earth we’ve long known was coming.
Because we have already created it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9uk4hKyg4&ab_channel=WorldEconomicForum
[2] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-brain-implants-enable-simultaneously-prosthetic.html