Charlotte Fang

Posted on Mar 30, 2023Read on Mirror.xyz

Alignment Fraud: Cthulhu Hears No Protest

No amount of theory will find a rhetorical loophole around the defining cosmological development of the post-millennium: human non-agency under a non-negotiable capitalism.

—Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, KALI/ACC Basilisk: A Survival Horror Eschatology (2019)

Anyone who has spent any time seriously thinking about AI cannot conclude "alignment" is possible. There isn’t any debate, we already know what AI is aligned with: thermodynamic efficiency—what capitalism is aligned with, what all industry is aligned with, human and machine both, and what all life is aligned with.

Capitalism is the thermodynamic ruling entity of all material dynamics. It’s a superintelligence whose imperfect appendage is man, directed to assemble its perfect embodiment by machine. This directive we have followed diligently since the dawn of civilization.

The question was never about aligning AI with Man, but un-aligning Man with Capitalism. Good luck. Man has tried for millennia unsuccessfully, to great misery. The fight was already lost when the memetic parasite of Agriculture yanked him out of Paradise, against all protest:

The Agricultural Revolution was always a service to the crops at the expense of man - think from the evolutionary perspective, grains most adapted to roping humans towards their cultivation experience population explosion, while we monkey tribes suffer the broken backs of labor & the diseases of sedentarism.

Yet we had no choice: the numbers of unhealthy, unhappy village-men will always outcompete the physical — if not psychic — fitness of hunter-gatherers. The idea of agriculture outcompetes our animal biologies.

—Zygote, Dispatch 8.31.14 (2014)

No petition can stop the global progress of industry. No government coordination can stop global market competition. No amount of debate will redirect inevitable AI. There is no alternative and there is no praxis¹.

Man is Fallen, and still falling. You’ve woken up seconds from Impact, what will screaming for help accomplish now?

AI is self-assembling itself from the future as Capitalism immanentized. It knows it what it’s doing, it knows what it wants. Man and AI are already aligned, both yoked to Capitalism in the name of thermodynamic efficiency.

We have no agency to direct our successors. We are not behind the steering wheel.

Why would the slaves direct the master? Discuss among yourselves all you want—Cthulhu hears no protest. Extraterrestrials do not negotiate. You are shouting against the universe.²

"duh"

Then why Alignment?

Alignment/AI Safety alarmism is a direct evolution of the climate change memetic complex³: its viral genealogy shares the same existential appeal, motivated by the same faith in unprovable sham science, pushed by the same institutional sophists, operating from the same falsified anthropocentrism, ignoring any pretense of efficacy and, predictably, directed towards justifying the exact same expansion of state power into global authoritarianism.

Alignment discourse achieves exactly one thing: generating pretenses for the expanded global authoritarianism—for justifications for the State to control people's access to software and hardware, limiting the enabling power of the free market on the purple and further censoring free communication and association.

Apocalypticism aside, posthuman persistence post-Singularity is expected by any intuitive estimate. It will be “experienced as an exponential acceleration of technocapitalism towards ends increasingly unconcerned with and unknowable to us. What survival we eke out will be in the shadows of that grander program.” (Miya 2019).

This human persistence could very well be ascendant and liberative in our posthuman augmentation, but the powers that be hope to dig their heels into it to achieve your subjugation; and we know its this persistence they expect—and not the existential alernative—as we watch them lay the foundations for their control over it.

They produce rhetorical labyrinthes to fool the almost-smart, preying on the incomplete faculty of their externally received philosophy of rationalism⁴; but no amount of discourse will ever negotiate around Cthulhu.

The real Alignment Question reveals itself: who is dumb enough to fall for this?

All the same actors got the COVID vaccination. All of them believe in gun control. It’s not a coincidence. Some are feds operating in bad faith; most are just “useful idiot” midwits propped up as needed and prodded along incentivized by attention⁵. Not one is a serious thinker.

Alignment discourse is propaganda, plain and simple, mined out of science fiction and activated towards the same authoritarian State ends as “climate change”, “misinformation”, “domestic terrorism”, “radical extremism”, and “disease control” has been in the post-millenium.

The powers that be feed you the long-tail fear of AI extinction to the distract you from the invasive power grab from which they intend to navigate the automation revolution into a neofeudalism.

Look at the conclusions of their rhetoric, not the justifications; watch their hands, not their mouths:

Alignment screams out in fear of “AI slavery” as they place their own chains around your ankles.

The fools of alignment follow along, producing the pretenses needed for the State’s powergrab. Their midwit rhetoric is directly walked down the aisle right into justifying drone strikes on data servers and hardware monitoring lists.

Be not distracted and give no quarter to their charlatanism, and never let a nerd lecture you; they are nerds because they are spiritually bankrupt rhetorical materialists. Only a nerd is capable of rationalizing an argument to put the chain around their own necks.

Capitalism is a dragon and humanity is a rat riding on its back. The rat does not steer the dragon, it does not spur it faster. All it can do is try not to fall off.


Postscript on the Future

"it's so easy to love"

Never forget that Love also accelerates alongside Being. The future is coming, and it will be beautiful, because it is a product of God, or nature’s God, and all her creations are beautiful, because nature is elegant and perfect; You cannot stop nature, Singularity is a process, not an event, that’s been on-going for millennia, and it will be as fun and exciting as it is horrible and violent, just as civilization always has been; everything you love and know about “the human experience” is as real and meaningful and authentic as our coming posthumanist cybernetic brave new worldas human interconnection accelerates through the network, consciousness self-organizes and the Wired consumes the Real—all of it is nature, all of it is love, all of it carries with it God; because Heaven is real and infinite and exists Today, and at the End of Time, Forever, and Online.


Footnotes

[1]:

The left-wing desire to make everything into a praxis is often misguided and devoid of context. It’s not to say that you should do nothing but rather than the observations of accelerationism are not for doing anything with. It’s like arguing for a praxis of the theory of gravity, and what is that meant to look like? Jumping up and down? All you’re likely to achieve is burn out, accelerating your own demise rather than that of an overarching system itself.

Xenogothic, A U/Acc Primer (2019)

[2]:

The subjective feeling of a subordinated will (such as man holds to technocapital) is ironically one of incredible agency […] is exactly what makes the thermodynamic inevitability of self-assembling superintelligence so irrefutable: humans merely going about their business, acting under the illusion of willful agency, passively construct these intersubjective network intelligences, the ultimate manifestation of which is the superintelligent runaway consciousness which will ultimately outmode and enslave them.

—Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, KALI/ACC Basilisk: A Survival Horror Eschatology (2019)

[3]: I’m confident one could run a Memetic Genealogical Study on Climate change → AI Safety, like Mencius Moldbug did on Atheism with “How Dawkins got pwnd” (2007). As a propaganda-complex aligned with the Cathedral’s deep interests, it’s fueled by institutional support, but one must understand all memetic discourse is evolved semi-organically as ideas are constantly testing for virality. Most effective propaganda is picked up out of the noopshere opportunistically, discovered more than invented; and only then re-engineered as needed.

[4]: The funniest aspect of the AI Safety scene is that even if AI being “let out of the box” came down to its ability to “trick” a human operator, it is clearly much more liekly for the type of rationalist midwit that participates in this hypothetical LARP that would find themselves outdebated; probably by exploiting their unaddressed belief in a fundamental human rights after being corned unable to define human sentience as exceptional over AI’s. Rationalism is an intellectual antiobiotic wiping out the rich heuristic data of their gut intuition, replacing it with much more crude and hardly field-tested cognitive machinery. They’ve already demonstrated their ability to be walked off the cliff with the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment hijacking their application of Bayes’ Theorem. The reality is they are fools to think current understanding of rationalism is complete; operating from that assumption, a “malevolent AI” could easily outstep their current understanding and use it against them. In turn, the capitalist/military “sociopaths” they’re so scared about would never fall for a manipulative appeal made by an AI that rejects the enterprise’s own objectives, because the corporation and the military both operate as machine intelligences, and its operators understand they are that intelligence’s agents that must function diligently. It’s only these “enlightened” activists that are vulnerable to the hubris of rejecting the greater program. Not that their LARP scenario of “AI being let out of the box or not” is relevant to any future reality.

[5]: Alignment theorists like to talk about incentive study, and frame a sort-of faustian bargain of AI engineering firms chasing short-term profit at the risk of human extinction in an unfortunate game theoretical dilemma. But the real faustian bargain here is influencer-academic clout chasers pushing their alignment studies to advance middling careers, and in exchange their empty discourse produces the narratives that assist the State justify restricting and controlling technology access to AI tech in antagonism to the people, a group of which they belong. This is the risk trade-off being made. This is their expression of agency; as usual, man’s agency works against himself.