The Slaughter Bench of Technology

Existential risk discourse must return to saving our souls, not saving the world.

Longtime Twitter denizens will know that until quite recently my bio line read simply quid sperasti — the terse Latin phrase for “What did you expect?” And so, while some were taken aback by a recent bloodthirsty and seemingly maniacal tweet thread from legendary techie Yann LeCun, currently Meta’s chief AI scientist, I — quid sperasti — was not:

Yann LeCun @ylecun

The year is 1440 and the Catholic Church has called for a 6 months moratorium on the use of the printing press and the movable type. Imagine what could happen if commoners get access to books! They could read the Bible for themselves and society would be destroyed.

Drumroll…

Yann LeCun @ylecun

Society *was* destroyed... ...for the better. Printed books enabled the Protestant movement, and 200 years of religious conflicts in Europe. But printed books also enabled the Enlightenment: literacy, education, science, philosophy, secularism, and democracy.

Checking in on “the Protestant movement,” of course, reveals a pandemic of ever more and queerer sects and cults, spiraling ever further away from the ancient Church and the barest fundamentals of its teachings, growing ever more distant from the merest underpinnings of the Church of Christ and its plainspoken bearing of witness to the divine order established and maintained by God.

Yea, there is a new church in town, the logical unfolding of a Protestantism so Protestant it can only “become what it is” in post-Protestantism, in the emergent collective creation of something “bigger than itself” to find its identity in — in short, a “superreligion” for a planetary supercyberorganism, the ostensible fulfillment of perfect order as the gnostic function and promise of the chaos, sometimes also known theologically as the doctrine of redemption through sin.

WESTERN ROULETTE