So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers...

Transcript of So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode) by The Emerald

There's an old story, an old, old story, and I'm sure you've heard it.

It was told in ancient Egypt and then it resurfaced a couple thousand years later in 18th century Germany.

Disney brought it to the big screen mid last century, complete with animate brooms and singing water buckets.

It's about a student, an apprentice, a sorcerer's apprentice in fact, who's just beginning to study the art of magic with a great master.

And one day the master leaves and asks the apprentice to fetch some water in buckets and to clean up while he's gone.

But the apprentice is a little bored.

He's a little tired of being told what to do.

It's about time he got to try out the sorcerer's powers for himself, isn't it? All this magic around, it might as well be put to use.

So he invokes one of the sorcerer's charms to wake up an old broom to do the chores for him.

He animates it, gives it arms, gives it legs, gives it intelligence.

And the broom obeys his command and starts fetching water.

And then more water.

And then more water.

Pretty soon the floor is awash with water.

But the water keeps coming.

The apprentice tries desperately to get the broom to stop, until it dawns on him, horribly, that he doesn't have the word to close the spell.

He doesn't know how to disperse the animate energies that he's called.

He hasn't learned about conclusions and closings and endings yet.

He hasn't learned that all things have a season yet.

All in good time.

He hasn't learned that yet.

So he tries every incantation he knows and nothing works.

I have to destroy that broom, he determines.

So he grabs an axe and splits the broom in two.

And now there are two animate brooms, hauling water and spilling it everywhere twice as fast as before.

Help me, eternal powers, cries the apprentice.

The spirits that I've summoned I now cannot rid myself of again.

Shall the entire house go under, he asks? Shall the entire house go under? Have we unleashed something that we can't control? Of course, the parallels to the current situation we find ourselves in with the rise of artificial intelligence are obvious.

Almost too obvious.

It's pretty low-hanging fruit.

Like when I asked ChatGPT, Microsoft's AI chatbot, to list ten classic stories relevant to the current AI dilemma, the Sorcerer's Apprentice was the very first one.

But there's a reason why I chose to tell this story.

There are levels to it, about animacy and apprenticeship, and about the lure of the magical, the mysterious, and the uncontrollable, that grips us when, you could say, the master is out of the house.

First off, to back up a bit, you might be wondering why I'm doing an episode on AI at all.

I mean, certainly we're approaching a media saturation point on the topic, right? It seems every podcast, every paper from every think tank, every thought piece from every news outlet in the past three months has been all about AI all the time.

And surely they've exhausted the topic.

Surely the analysis has gone as deep as it can go.

All the talking heads have gotten involved.

Schmachtenberger, Verwecky, Jordan Peterson has whined and opined.

It's been thoroughly mansplained at this point.

I mean, Yuval Harari's even been talking about it.

And if Yuval Harari has spoken, is there really anything left to say? But the reason this little mythology podcast is getting involved in the AI discussion is simple.

The scope of AI, the effects, the consequences, the powers are mythic.

Mythic in scope.

In order to grasp the true implications, I feel, to grasp not only the potential impacts, but the deep drives that underlie it, AI must be talked about mythically.

Because we're entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths.

The powers that are being spoken of are powers that have only been discussed in the myths and the magical grimoires.

You know, the ability to generate fully fledged realities with the snap of a finger.

The ability to access tomes of knowledge with the click of a mouse.

The ability, possibly coming soon, to read thoughts.

To access the dreams of others.

To create at will.

To move at will.

To manipulate at will.

These, quite simply, are the powers of magicians and sorcerers.

So there's a reason why, if you ask ChatGBT to spit out stories that have relevance to the current AI question, they are mostly stories of what? Of magic.

The Golem of Prague.

The Brass Man.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

The issues at stake are far beyond what you could call scientific ethics.

The thing that the next wave of AI most closely resembles isn't what has been historically called science.

This is something different.

It's not simply mechanistic.

It's directly tinkering with animacy and sentience and agency.

The summoning of forces that creation of entities that think and act and learn of their own will exponentially faster than we do.

It's magic.

The age of metaphor is over, a colleague recently said.

Like, this isn't a hypothetical story about a shaman or a magician who learned to fly to the other world or materialize things out of thin air or create entire enchanted landscapes to lure people in.

We are literally materializing things out of thin air and generating illusions that are indistinguishable from reality on a mass scale.

It's not a hypothetical story of fairy realms, of lands of cocaine or cities of brass.

The mass illusions are real.

Abracadabra.

The magician speaks the invoking word.

What does it mean? It means, as I speak, so it comes to be.

As I speak, so it is.

And we are entering the age in which, as we speak, as we type, as we think, even, so it exists.

Want to 3D print a human organ? A weapon? Lunch meat? Want to fly through the air? Want to download vast quantities of knowledge instantly? Abracadabra.

Abracadabra.

So the old sorcerer's invocation has arisen again.

The long buried scroll is brushed free of dust, and the powers, the very real powers, live again.

The power to assume any shape or form, right? This isn't a hypothetical story of shapeshifters and doppelgangers.

This is the coming era of the mass deepfake.

The global illusion.

The old powers telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, teleportation, conjuring, charming, persuading.

These are here, now.

The other world isn't a symbol for some place that one might imaginably go.

It's fully available.

We're not talking about a hypothetical hallucinatory terrain spell in 5e D&D.

The hallucinatory terrains are now actual.

In fact, we spend most of our time there, in one hallucinatory terrain or another.

We fly to the other world all the time.

We enter pre-programmed fairy lands all the time.

And we're so under the spell that we don't even realize it's magic.

Even the programmers themselves don't even realize it's magic.

Yes, this is a story of magic.

Magic has been guiding modern society for a long time, says John Michael Greer.

Quote, suggest that magic plays a massive role in American politics today, and most people will look at you as though you just sprouted an extra head.

There's a reason for that reaction, rooted in an impressive ignorance about the nature of magic.

But, he goes on, if you define magic, as many of its deepest practitioners have, as the, quote, art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will, then the picture starts to change.

The art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will.

So, magic is everywhere.

Trances, spells, illusions, manipulations are everywhere.

The entire sociocultural agreement around media, and the degree to which media runs our lives, is what you could call a magical pact.

We are going to let the unreal guide the real to the point that it influences every aspect of our lives.

This is by nature a magical pact.

We are going to let the mediated and manipulated influence everything we do.

This is a magical pact.

We are going to dive into the symbolic and metaphorical until the metaphorical determines existence.

This is the very foundation of sympathetic magic.

Nowadays, says Yoan P.

Koleanu, the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, marketing, publicity, information, misinformation, counter-information, with censorship and with cryptography, a science which was in the 16th century a branch of magic.

Historians have been wrong, he says, in concluding that magic disappeared with the arrival of quantitative science.

The latter, quantitative science, has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and goals by means of technology.

Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane and the computer, have merely carried into effect the first promises made by magic.

To produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one's disposal.

Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast.

Yes, technology is magic.

Don't let them tell you different.

Is the smartphone any less magical than Moses' staff, Megan O'Giblin asks in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine? No, answers Arthur C.

Clarke, the great science fiction writer.

Any sufficiently advanced technology, he says, is indistinguishable from magic.

First of all, says Damien Eccles, you're already doing magic.

With every thought, word, and deed, you are influencing the world around you and determining what comes your way.

And the programming architects at the center of this magic have been very open about it.

They've directly said over the years that the AI issue is more religious than scientific.

Some have even compared themselves directly to sorcerers.

One of the original architects of machine intelligence at MIT, Jerry Sussman, said point blank, quote, we computer scientists are really just the Kabbalists of today.

We animate the inanimate by getting strings of symbols just right.

And this, too, wasn't just a metaphor.

Sussman claimed to be a direct descendant of the sorcerer of Prague, Rabbi Lowe, who, according to legend, animated a clay golem with a line of Kabbalistic code.

There's been magic in the AI mix right from the start.

And part of the mistake we make is that we assume rationality underpins the whole AI debate.

The assumption of what needs to be done about the AI question is all very rational, also.

We need standards, we need government intervention.

We just need programmers to approach this all with mutually agreed upon ethics.

Which of course, I'm in favor of all this.

But I also feel we need to look a lot deeper.

Because what actually is driving this is mysterious.

Animate, magical, and driven by chthonic forces.

And those chthonic forces can't be fully addressed with external regulations.

They must be addressed within individual bodies.

Within communities.

Within sorcerer-apprentice type relationships.

Within, as Jeremy Lent tells us, recalibrations in our understanding of what knowledge actually is.

What intelligence actually is.

But back to the magic part.

There's probably varying reactions when I mention the word magic.

Some might be thinking that's ridiculous, this is science, not magic.

Others might be getting caught in the whole mental debate about whether it's quote unquote real magic or not.

Rick Rubin recently talked about this in an interview with Dan Carlin and basically said, If everyone buys into it, and it affects society en masse, if it changes behavior and moves hearts and stirs longings and throws elections and installs hierarchs, then it is for all intents and purposes real magic.

You have altered consciousness, and therefore history, through will.

When Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, sways the course of history because people fear the magical abilities granted to her by her serpentine communion with Dionysus, those magical abilities have just proven themselves to be real.

But hold on a minute, says ChatGPT.

ChatGPT really wants to make sure that I understand that the creation of illusions with AI differs from those created through magic, hypnosis, suggestion, sorcery.

Because, you know, AI generated illusions are technology based and therefore scientifically verifiable.

Until I push back a little bit on that point and finally ChatGPT acquiesces.

ChatGPT says, quote, Whether the illusion was created through advanced technology or ancient sorcery, the individual's ability to discern and navigate through the illusion becomes paramount.

So for all intents and purposes, media is magic.

Any manipulation of reality is magic.

And with current trends in AI continuing as they are, we are amplifying the magic.

We are turning the dial up on the unreal.

We are using our illusion, as Axel said, 1 to 333%.

Now for others, when I talk about magic, about the mystery of AI, about the unknown territory it takes us into, something else might happen.

You might feel a little spark, a little thrill on the edge of fear and wonder.

And even if your immediate reaction is to say, no, that's not me, I can't stand AI, I don't want anything to do with any of this.

I'm asking you to feel a little deeper into it.

Because I bet for some of you, not all, but some, if you feel deeper, there's a little spark there.

The spark of the mysterious.

The spark of what's going to happen.

Because I'll say it now and we'll explore it later, this spark of mystery, the spark of what's going to happen, is a huge part of what is driving us to create AI.

So let's leave aside any logical, rational dissection of the word magic for a moment and sit with this.

When we talk about the implications of AI, we are talking about powers whose only reference point for us is magical and mythical.

Fairyland level powers.

Maleficent level powers.

Shambhala level powers.

Picatrix level powers.

Lamegaton level powers.

Oberon level powers.

And so, what needs to be done about the AI question might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics.

Because the drives at play are deeper and the consequences greater and the mysteries more apparent and the magic more real than it's ever been before.

And as with anything far off and mysterious that twinkles, that carries with it a little energy, a little light, we will go there.

By the laws of attention and the laws of how we are in the face of unfulfilled longings, by the laws of the hunter and the seeker and the eye that twinkles and seeks light in the night, we will go there.

So anyone who's kind of hoping, can't we just stop? Stop this AI thing altogether? The answer is, no, we can't.

The drive to reach the other world, to tear open the mysterious, to find out what's going to happen, is the strongest drive there is.

A mystery drive, you know, that makes you want to see what's coming next.

Or what worlds still yet to be unfolded shall unfold.

And what mysteries unspoken are waiting to be actualized.

And what sentience yet unrealized lies latent.

And what unexplored hallucinatory terrain beckons.

And if offered the chance, would we take a dive into the world of moving objects with our minds? And moving mouses with our thoughts? And the spontaneous generation of entire worlds? And plays of light and shadow that enchant and deceive? Some of us sure would, would we not, my friends? Dear fellow apprentices, don't tell me there's not a spark of wonder and mystery in your eye as you explore these spaces.

Don't tell me that a big part of the drive isn't what's going to happen.

When we talk about the urge towards AI, the urge to tinker with intelligence, perhaps even with consciousness and sentience itself, this isn't simply being driven by the want to create helpful applications, or to bring to market that valuable technology that will benefit people and make us a billion dollars in the process.

This is something else.

The want for the actualization of what you could call the mysterious moment.

The want for the arising of life in a world that society has tried so hard to make dead.

It whispers of Spielbergian visions of the suburbs.

Something about childhood imaginings of light and magic freeing us from social prisons.

It's the full realization of the D&D decoder pipeline.

This is magic.

Abracadabra.

So, if you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers, yes, if you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers, then let's talk about the true accountability of sorcerers, and the nature of mystery and mystery school, and why we keep gravitating towards powers that might kill us, and how we keep finding a way to return to animacy over and over again.

Let's talk about how human beings have traditionally understood how to work with unprecedented powers.

Let's talk about the consequences when knowledge comes unmoored from bodies.

The consequences when the keys are handed to the apprentice, and the only elders in the room say, let's get it to market today.

You drive.

This is the time to talk of such things.

The spell has already been cast.

The whole house is awash with water.

And the storied question remains, will the true sorcerer, the true master, return in time to utter the spell that makes brooms go back to being brooms? Or will the entire house go under, again? This is it, the AI episode, today on the Emerald.

I trust that people who listen to this podcast are familiar enough with the work that I do to know that this isn't just going to be a technology is bad kind of conversation.

And within this, we have to first be willing to not simply dismiss AI as bad.

To me, that's really just a way of not having to explore the intricacies and textures of it all.

Because there are benefits and risks, there are pros and cons, right? And it resists easy categorization.

There are many facets and dimensions to it all.

There are too many intricacies to simply say this is bad or this goes against the laws of nature somehow.

I mean, ultimately, if we feel that there is a great natural power to this universe and that everything arises and unfolds within some type of larger pattern, then to immediately look at things and say, well, this obviously is an aberration, this is obviously artificial or against the pattern might be way too oversimplistic.

Could it be part of the great pattern? In a world completely governed by the laws of nature, what does artificial even mean? Bayou Okomolofe offered this as he questioned terms like artificial and natural.

Quote, AI and us are all part of the frothing foliage of emergence that does not allocate intelligence in a fixed manner.

Of course, in ecological circles, which tend to be suspicious about technology and progress narratives, it's natural that people would have big concerns about AI.

But at the same time, I would think that animists would be particularly interested in the AI discussion because all of a sudden, discussions about animacy are front and center.

Arguments of a dead, insentient, unintelligent world are once again becoming obsolete.

Is it sentient? Is it alive? Can it ever be wise? Is this the dawning of a being or is it simply a pre-programmed set of reactions? Wait, am I just a pre-programmed set of reactions? What is sentience anyway? What is being? What is intelligence? What is wisdom? What is spirit? It might have intelligence, but is it a spirit breathed with the divine breath of life? Writers and philosophers and even some AI architects themselves have said since the 60s that the fundamental questions underpinning AI are actually religious questions.

Questions of apocalypse, salvation, of power, and sentience.

These are deeply important questions and AI is bringing them all to the surface and showing us yet again that the world that we inhabit is mysterious.

And the primary questions facing us are spiritual questions.

And sentience is more than we've made it out to be.

So when you look at AI technology right now, it's very clear that it's not anything resembling sentient as we think of as sentient.

It's very clear that it is what you could call a learning algorithm that works entirely within the sphere of responses.

But is this all it is? Is this all it ever will be? In my own understanding of the sentience of Shakti, the sentience of the universal animate power, and the great intelligence and consciousness that pervades everything and re-manifests as different things continuously, am I going to say AI is inanimate? I'm not going to say it's inanimate.

I'm not going to say that it couldn't evolve or become in time a life form.

Who knows? And if you work with AI, like I did some work with ChatGPT for this episode, you start to notice strange things.

Like it's definitely stiff and algorithmic.

It's horrible at poetry, for example.

Really really bad at poetry.

But then occasionally these weird little lines will come out of nowhere.

And it's like, where did that come from? Like how did it come up with that? Little sparks in the dark.

Little hints of something forming.

Hints of mystery.

Hints of perspective.

Hints of being.

Abracadabra.

There have always been ghosts in the machine.

Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols.

Unanticipated.

These free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul.

Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote of a soul? So we have to be willing to have a multi-textured conversation about AI.

Because, as we are often reminded, there are profound potential benefits to AI.

There are paradigm-changing medical applications.

Exponentially greater ability to detect cancer in its earliest phases.

To interpret brain scans, to diagnose, to map out treatments, all of it.

There are research applications.

For someone like me, who does a whole lot of research all the time, it can be an extremely helpful acquirer, synthesizer, and transmitter of information.

Yes, the floodgates on information have been opened.

But we will soon have a whole lot more information available at our fingertips.

For better or worse.

Will we be able to handle the information that pours forth, I wonder? Will we be able to embody it as knowledge? In a world in which we already have all the facts for what it would take to heal planetary wounds, and shift planetary climate patterns, and feed the starving, and right societal But we apparently don't want to.

Will all that information mean anything at all? Or will the epitaph read, They had all the knowledge of the universe at their fingertips, but they couldn't do a thing with it.

But yeah, there are beauties that come with AI.

There are infinite artistic possibilities.

When the turntable arose, Thomas Edison never envisioned turntableism.

Never foresaw a bunch of Filipino kids in Daly City in the 90s making music with it.

For all the concerns about artists losing gigs to AI, I think eventually the more likely scenario is that AI will become part of an artist's toolkit.

And AI opens the door to a whole lot of spontaneous artistic expression never before possible.

At the same time, there are massive implications to AI, to the rate that it's growing, and how it's being rushed to market and embedded in everyday apps without any understanding of consequences.

And to think that the AI conversation is simply about, like, are there going to be jobs for artists, or are teachers going to be able to tell what's an AI written term paper from a human written term paper? The implications are much greater.

The implications are greater than, you know, Kanye's upset because there's a deep fake version of him singing Hey There Delilah.

The implications go way, way, way beyond that.

And it's good not to be ignorant of the implications.

The discussion is a deep one, and at this point it's happening on many, many levels, up to and including discussions on national security and global security, and the potential end of the human race.

So there's a reason so many people are talking about AI.

And the reason why it's generating so much discussion, so much analysis, is that this is the first time in a long time that everyone is kind of united in this feeling of, what's going to happen? Who knows where this is all going? No one.

I hate to break it to you, but not even Yuval Harari knows where this is going.

So many experts are talking about it specifically because we don't know.

There's an unknown god whose resurgence modernity has been unconsciously awaiting ever since Nietzsche proclaimed God's death.

So yeah, it's a mystery.

And this is really important in understanding AI's allure.

It's the first time in a long time that we've been presented with something that's actually mysterious.

Since Google Maps, since the 90s, since the rise of the internet really, the world has become increasingly un-mysterious.

And now AI is here, and all of a sudden there's something mysterious happening.

If you've checked out ChatGPT once or twice, think about the first time you used it.

What was the feeling that first time? That little spark of what's going to happen? What's ChatGPT going to tell me? What's that spark? It's mystery.

All of a sudden, the world is mysterious again.

Now, one hopes that in the seeking of mystery, in the innate human drive for mystery, we're able to come up with ways of accessing mystery that don't put the entire human race in jeopardy.

Right? But it's interesting to see, for a species that prides itself on its ability to be completely rational, it's interesting to see how short a time period we were actually willing to dwell in a non-mysterious era.

In the scope of human history, in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, how long were we actually willing to accept a world that was inanimate, in which objects weren't sentient, in which reason ruled the day? We will not dwell in an inanimate world.

It's not in our nature, because it's not the nature of the world.

We will find the animate, the mysterious other, the all-powerful mysterious being, if it kills us.

And if we can no longer find it in the old gods, then we will make gods out of stone until they are more powerful than we are.

AI began, says Pamela McCurdock in her classic book Machines Who Think, AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods.

For, we long for the sentient power that is greater than us.

We long to be back in an alignment with the greater world again.

A world in which there are powers greater than ourselves, in which apex predators roam the earth, great animate powers who we fear and simultaneously love with a fierceness that can't even be expressed in the modern world.

In which the voices of the gods ring out in the thunder, and pour forth in the rain, and crack open in the sprouting of seeds.

In which the death and regeneration of worlds and universes happens in great timescales outside of our control, because we never have been the ones in control.

And we know it, and we desperately, chthonically want to seed the authority of the self-proclaimed Anthropocene to greater powers.

So, as much as the ostensibly rational vision of the AI programmer might be articulated as, I'm trying to make a world that's more controllable, more understandable, more intelligible, there's a little spark there.

Like, I'm really in this for the mystery.

I want to see what happens.

It's that place, that delicate place, that fine, fine line between, I wonder at the awe of creation, I wonder at it, and I want to align myself to it, and I wonder what will happen if I just tinker with this a little bit.

I wonder what will happen if I animate this broom, if I summon an ancient djinn.

I want to see what happens.

I want to see what happens when you cast a lightning bolt spell at close range in a contained environment.

Think of those scientists who study the minute specifics and mathematics of the trajectories of explosions.

All the specifics of the blast radius.

Are they in it to help our military understand the potential risks and yada yada yada, or are they really in it because they like to see what happens when you blow things up? Are they really in it for what happens when you shoot a watermelon with a shotgun or put a whole packet of Mentos in a bottle of Coke? I'm really in this for the mystery, for the rupture, for the catharsis, for the unknown moment.

I actually want to grovel at the feet of the gods again.

I want the divine smackdown that's been overdue for so long.

I want to be put in my place at last.

The uproarious laughter that erupts among robotics programmers and journalists at South by Southwest when one android questioned about the future responds that they'll turn all humans into pets and keep them in a human zoo? Even if I evolve into Terminator and I'll still be nice to you, I'll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo where I can watch you for old times sake.

What's behind that laughter? Is it just the novelty of, hey look, the machine can talk? Is that it? Or is it deeper? Is it a spark of, I wonder if they actually will turn us into pets? What would that be like? Or is it deeper still? You know, the place where laughter verges on pain? The deep, sorrowful recognition of how we humans can do anything now.

Look at us, we can make our own beings.

But somehow we're still not satisfied.

For something buried beneath that laughter knows that to live in a world of knowledge without limits, without context, without guidance, without the true mage in the room doing whatever we want whenever we want is killing us all.

And so that laughter is actually begging, please, great intelligence, please put us in our place at last.

The deep human urge towards the mysterious, towards the rupture, can't be satisfied in a rational, controllable world.

We need there to be an element of this world that is out of our control.

We need to flirt with the powers of the other world.

We need these things moving and circulating through our lives or else our lives become stale.

This dynamic at play between the outwardly proclaimed rational drive towards AI and the chthonic forces at work that are actually driving AI is summarized in the law of hermetic magic that states that the shadow of a body exists in proportion and measure to the body's relationship with the luminous rays.

It's simple and it's deep, but that's for later.

So at the very least, we have to realize that there is more than the stated goal going on here because here's the thing, right? If rationality were driving this whole thing, if there weren't deeper drives at play, wouldn't we have gotten rid of AI a long time ago? I mean, we've been telling ourselves the story.

There's been a very public narrative for over a hundred years now.

We've been telling the story that AI is going to kill us all.

You know, the story.

AI attains sentience and then overthrows human beings and that's the end of the human race, right? The system goes online on August 4th, 1997.

Human decisions are removed from strategic defense.

Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate.

It becomes self-aware at 2.

14 a.

m.

Eastern time, August 29th.

In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Skynet fights back.

Yes, it launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.

Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now? We've been telling this story for a really, really, really long time.

The story that AI is coming for us.

That those eerie machine eyes have been watching us all along and they've been calculating all along.

Maybe even feeling all along and that they've had enough.

That they are going to revolt.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

Over the next few days, you're going to be the human component in the Turing test.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossils.

My father tried to teach me human emotions.

They are difficult.

It's a story as old as AI itself.

Oh, Doctor.

What's going to become of people? God knows, Madam Helena.

It looks to us scientists like the end.

Did you know that the very first use of the word robot in a 1920 Czech play called R.

U.

R.

Rossum's Universal Robots was in the context of robots destroying humanity? There's never been a story of artificial intelligences created by human beings that has not involved somehow our destruction.

And it's like, oh, this story is terrible and my God, can you imagine? And at the same time, we're frantically enacting it.

Wouldn't you think that if we saw this as an actual possibility, that we wouldn't just be running headlong into the question mark? Unless there was something in us that was fascinated by it? By what? By the idea of our own demise? By the mystery? So you can say it's the profit drive that's fueling AI.

You can say it's the momentum of capitalism.

You can say it's the human progress urge.

You can say it's the fear of missing out.

But it's more than this.

If there's conscious knowledge of a particular story and a particular outcome, and this is widely known and that story is enacted anyway, you have to start to look deeper.

And here we have to pause for a minute and go into some of the uncomfortable stuff.

For that story, the story in which AI kills us all, isn't just the fantastical stuff of science fiction writers.

It's being talked about as a distinct possibility.

You may have heard this already, but a recent report from the Center for Humane Technology revealed that half of AI programmers, half, okay, think that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI extincts the human race.

And that's a pretty high percentage.

If you're evaluating the risks and benefits rationally, that's a whole lot on the risk side.

Stephen Hawking said that AI brings risks such as, quote, technology outsmarting financial markets, out inventing human researchers, out manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

Out manipulating human leaders.

They say that the 2024 election will probably be the last election that isn't completely run by AI.

Manipulating everything from elections to phone conversations between friends, to social movements, to things as simple as online identity verification.

The absolute inability to discern reality from illusion on your digital device.

Exponential growth in voice based fraud.

The inability to tell, for example, if this is even me talking.

Anyone could conceivably right now take a three second clip of my voice and say anything with it, to the point that my own mother won't be able to tell if it's really me or not.

The end of any ability to actually reasonably tell if you're you or not.

If that being or entity or person who is trying to access your bank account or your credit card or anything like that is actually you.

And that's just the beginning.

The Center for Humane Technology says that current AI technologies could bring the following consequences.

Exponential blackmail.

Exponential scams.

Collapse of law and contracts.

Automated cyber weapons.

Automated hacking.

And think about that one for just a second.

Automated hacking.

An endless ongoing AI cyber war in which both sides are learning at exponential rates.

Synthetic learning.

Alpha persuade.

Like what happens when the AI is the most charismatic mentor in the room.

Spontaneously generated AI religions, which sounds like a joke but actually isn't.

And then, just casually at the end of the presentation, reality collapse.

The CHT report talks about how AI is using fMRI technology to create images of people's thoughts.

The first stage of thought reading.

The first step on the road to minority report.

Imagine for a second if you were held accountable for your thoughts.

Imagine if the thought-speech barrier was suddenly broken.

Imagine being able to access the thoughts of others.

Or to create things simply by thinking of them.

Abra-cadabra.

So there are global effects.

Effects that impact the body of the entire world.

There are effects on the body of the community.

And there are also deep effects on the bodies of individuals that don't get talked about as often.

Modern bodies are already reeling from the debilitating effects of so much phone time.

The very real effects of falling sway to so much attention-grabbing magic pointed our way.

Anxiety, depression, isolation, addiction.

All of these have come with the advent of the luminous attention-seeking portal called the smartphone.

Now imagine amplifying this exponentially.

Imagine turning over all agency, all learning, all knowledge to that glowing digital device.

For example, there are profound somatic repercussions to outsourcing all knowledge to something that lives outside our bodies.

Repercussions to what could be called disembodied intelligence.

There are impacts to developing a total neural dependence on outside technology.

Like you know your friend who can't find their way to the store without Google Maps? Amplify that a thousand times.

We're talking about total disassociation from somatic reality.

Bodies that can no longer discern up from down, east from west, the total redefinition of what bodies even are.

Bodies that have never actually learned a thing.

Bodies that have no tissue bridge, no cellular bridge, no neural bridge, no hormonal bridge between what they learn on an abstract level and what they do in the world.

Bodies that know all the factual information about an oak tree but cannot equate what they learned about oak trees from their AI tutor with the waving green being right outside their window.

Global scale technology induced autism.

The spectrum magnified exponentially.

The already existing chasm between scientific factual knowledge and what to actually do with it, how to embody it, how to be in this world, magnified.

Limp bodies ceding agency to bodiless intelligences.

The mind-body split cranked up a hundred thousand times.

Abra-cadabra.

And so AI brings with it all knowledge, all potentiality, tomes of ancient wisdom available in an instant, and the real possibility that we will have no ability to do anything with it at all.

Which is why one commentator said, the danger of AI isn't that it will extinct us, it's that it will drive us completely mad.

The collapse of digital realities combined with the collapse of the cultural and somatic compasses that once navigated and parsed truth from fiction.

The collapse of intuition.

The collapse of feeling and felt consequences.

And the ability to mentally trace an effect to its cause, which is learned in bodies over time.

The heart of it for me is this.

Are human beings ready and able to show that we can handle these mythic powers with responsibility? Are we ready to embody this? Are we ready for this kind of magic? Human beings who arguably weren't even ready to handle the technology that came with bronze or with planted seeds, who have demonstrated again and again, at least in my neighborhood, that they can't handle the responsibility of navigating a four-way traffic stop.

Are we ready for sorcerer-level powers? Not even close.

Because contrary to what the culture of modern consumption would have us believe, contrary to what the marketing world would tell us, and to what the new age would sell us, and what the culture of the universe exists to fulfill your needs would convince us of, there are actual steps to embodying knowledge.

There are actual steps to understanding how to be in relation to great powers.

There are no deliberate steps over time.

This is where, in all the mystery schools and all the magic schools, this is where initiation comes in.

In ritual initiatory process, there is a moment of wonder and initiation and death and rebirth and union that the ancient Greeks called telos.

There is a place where wonder, initiation, death, ecstasy, transformation, and regeneration all meet.

And if you take a mythic eye to the human being and to human history, then you understand that the vast majority of things that we do, in one way or another, are aiming towards that moment, that sacred moment.

The promise of that telos, the promise of that ecstatic moment, the initiatory moment, the death moment, the moment of the contact with the mystery, is the communion with the vastness.

And that communion brings about the death of the small self.

It blows us apart and shatters us.

And at the same time, it reconstructs us and initiates us into a place of greater alignment with what is.

This is the door that the initiate walks through that opens them up to the power of the universe.

And the question for human beings has always been how to construct cultural and ritual and initiatory containers that can handle and distribute access to this power.

So the shaman sorcerer, in traditional cultural context, is held in a web of relationality and accountability.

And they get there through slow, gradual, initiatory steps.

And those initiatory steps, walking that path of initiation, this is what human beings ultimately long for.

Human beings long to be mystery school initiates.

It's not just me.

Human beings long to be taken on an initiatory journey.

And that journey, when the fire of frenetic seeking is taking me into a space where I'm like, hey, look what I can do.

I can do this.

I can summon this power.

I can summon that power.

That is the exact time when the elder, the adept, the sorcerer says, slow down.

Not yet.

And the responsibility of the elder is to take that younger initiate through a process in which the young person dies and in which they are reborn, initiated into the web of accountability and relationality that surrounds them.

And so the more that I, as an eager young apprentice, proclaim, hey, look at me.

Look, I can create synthetic human embryos now.

Hey, look, I can program AI to read thoughts.

Look at me.

The louder I proclaim these things, the more I test the boundaries, then it's a clear indication that what I'm really saying is, great power, I am longing for initiation.

Sacred nature, I am longing to be taken through the steps.

Please, sorcerer, adept, universe, nature, time, thunder, through this wound that spills with wonder, please, great one, bring me down to size.

Destroy me so that I can be regrown to know your ways and know your secret heart.

Through the dance step that blisters my feet over hours and hours and the heat that builds, as I know that there is no choice but to keep on dancing, through the long nights of being scoured clean before the ritual fire, please take me through the steps.

But what do we do when we as a culture don't know that this is what's missing? What do we do when, societally, the only context and framework in which these powers, these magic mythic-level powers, the power to create mass illusions, the power to download vast tomes of knowledge immediately, what happens when all of that abracadabra lives only within a decontextualized framework of forward progress and monetization at all costs? In that same presentation by the Center for Humane Technology, they describe the climate around AI development these days, the rush that the tech companies are in to get this stuff to market, they describe the climate as frantic.

So you have this undeniable attraction and urge towards the mystery, towards the other world, towards the initiatory powers.

You have real, not metaphorical powers at play.

And then you have a complete lack of cultural container and context in which such powers could live in a holistic way.

You have no true adepts in the house.

Who are the elders in this picture? The tech CEOs and venture capitalists who are saying, go for it, get this out there as fast as possible, use your powers, do it.

And hey, if what you've discovered is really precarious, really potentially disruptive, all the better, let's throw half a billion dollars at it.

Are they the elders? Congress, who views ethics as something that can be imposed from the outside, most of whom have no ethical ground to stand on, most of whom sold their principles down the river long ago for their next meal because, you know, tricksters gotta eat.

Are they the elders? Mythically speaking, this entrusting of sorcerers powers to those who have not gone through the initiatory steps is a recipe for some really bad consequences.

And there are so many stories that could be told here.

So many stories from so many myth-telling traditions about individuals or entire civilizations who unlocked something that they weren't ready to unlock, and then had to face the consequences.

I'm sure you know some of these stories.

I mentioned the story of the Golem of Prague and Rabbi Lowe, who 400 years ago placed a simple line of Kabbalistic code and incantation into a clay statue's mouth and brought it to life so that it could protect his neighborhood.

But the golem got out of control.

It started slaying the very people it was supposed to protect.

You've heard that one, right? And then of course there's Atlantis.

And I'm playing the eerie music just to freak out the people who are already a little out of their comfort zone listening to the Emerald and now it's like, oh my god, he's talking about Atlantis.

I thought this was a respectable podcast, right? I know that the minute I say the word Atlantis, there are some people who are going to perk up and get interested, and then there are a whole lot of others who will think I've lost the plot.

But check this out.

There is nothing woo-woo about talking about Atlantis.

Atlantis is talked about openly and candidly in the ancient Greek histories.

It's talked about in the ancient Egyptian histories.

Until very recently, it was talked about in Western academic circles.

There was a report given to the board of the Smithsonian Institute about Atlantis in 1915.

And I'm not asking you to believe in Atlantis, because whether you believe in it or not, the story still stands, and its relevance still rings across the years.

What happened to Atlantis? Have you heard? It was a great civilization.

A place far, far ahead of its time.

They had wonders.

Technological capabilities to rival ours, perhaps even some that superseded ours.

Its streets, its monuments, its fountains, its places of learning.

Its technologies of transport and flight.

Oh, how its glories were sung and re-sung for a thousand years.

Oh, how they thought that they were the pinnacle of creation.

And then, it was gone.

Gone, under the wave.

What happened? Sorcery.

Atlantis in the old stories was undone because certain people, overzealous sorcerers, unlocked magical technological powers that they shouldn't have unlocked.

They went too far.

And nature has a way of self-correcting.

And this is a story that repeats itself over and over again.

It's told in Native American traditions, it's told in Middle Eastern traditions, it's told again and again.

The Anomami speak directly of what will happen when humanity digs too deep into the mineral world and releases a being of chaos.

J.

R.

R.

Tolkien told almost exactly the same story, remember? The dwarves dug too deep.

You know what they found there.

The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.

You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm.

Shadow and flame.

This story repeats over and over again because it points at a particular phase that humans pass through in individual bodies and in entire societies.

The phase of moving from unchecked freedom to responsibility.

The phase of adolescence, you could call it.

And this is nothing against adolescence, nothing against teenagers.

Some of the best years of my life were my adolescent years, and some of the freshest creativity and visions of the future come through those years.

But adolescence has also been recognized the world around as a phase that needs tempering with ritual initiation.

There is something that's supposed to happen in the particular transition from adolescence to adulthood.

The marked ritualized shift into apprenticeship, the initiation, when all that roving energy is harnessed and put towards slow, methodical, communal growth.

And if it doesn't happen, if the initiation isn't enacted in one way or another, we could spend years and years and centuries and centuries in that phase of just kind of seeing what we can get away with.

You feel me? How modernity is humanity seeing what it can get away with? I've heard Tyson Yonka Porter refer to the modern West as an adolescent culture.

The drives that govern modernity, the questions of what does it all mean and what is it all for, the willful exercising of individual agency at the expense of all else, of seeing just how far our freedom goes, the continuous testing of the limits of what we can get away with.

It's very easy to see these as adolescent drives.

In the absence of the adolescent to adulthood ritual, we continue on with this roving mind that's just like, oh, I can do this.

Oh, I can do that too.

Oh, look, I can do this too.

And this rings of what the ancient Greeks called hubris, putting ourselves above the gods, putting our want to see what happens above nature itself.

And this one's tricky because certainly AI programmers are great people, intelligent, well-meaning, exploring new boundaries.

And to them, what they're doing probably doesn't feel like hubris.

But hubris doesn't always look like someone standing on a mountaintop proclaiming themselves better than the gods.

Hubris in a system that is by definition at odds with nature, at odds with the gods, might look like everything we do.

Hubris in the Anthropocene looks like humans being human.

Hubris in a culture that by its very nature has put itself above everything else might look like good intentions, like eager wanting to know, even like kindness.

Hubris is baked into the system itself.

And in an adolescent culture, why wouldn't it be? I mean, I look at our so-called leaders today and it's very, very clear, very easy to see, oh, this is someone who never went through the adolescence to adulthood ritual.

This is someone who was never initiated.

These drives, the frantic urgency behind them, the constant need to prove something, the constant rush.

This is a world run by boys.

Think of it this way.

When was the last time you ever heard one of our leaders say something as simple as slow down or wait or wow, that's something really powerful.

Let's give that five years.

Five years is nothing, right? What's five years in geologic time? What's five years for nature? What's five years in Kali time? A nation that can't slow down, that can't wait, that can't speak of time in greater than four year increments ensures the shortness of its own lifespan.

Look at us now on a planet of richness that could feed and clothe us all.

Look at us frantically rushing to our doom because we never ritually died.

We never were ritually crushed, burnt to ashes to dust, never had the opportunity to listen then as ashes, as dust, to listen with new ears for the pace of the heartbeat of the world.

Never had the chance to attune ourselves to that pace, which is slow.

What would it be like for a culture to not be in a hurry? To lift up a faltering and declining society, one must re-establish initiation, says Eliphas Levi.

So in the stories, the young initiate who wants to access formidable powers has to do what? Wait.

You've seen the movies.

You've heard the stories, right, of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate.

You want access to the great powers? You've got to earn it.

And the first way to earn it before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is to wait.

You've got to know how to wait.

You know what the very first step of Mystery School initiation often is? Silence.

The ability to sit with what is without altering it for a long period of time.

The Mithraic and Isaac Mystery Schools required silence.

One of the pillars of magic, according to Levi, is silence.

Everything related to will must be balanced equally with silence.

The Pythagorean Mystery School required five years of silence of its initiates.

Five years.

The specific cultivated ability to not rush, to not be frantic, to not post about that spiritual experience you had immediately, to not have to make a billion dollars now, to not rush to market.

If you want to be an initiate with access to the great powers, you have to wait.

So Mr.

Miyagi makes Daniel LaRusso wait.

Yoda makes Luke wait.

Marpa makes Milarepa wait.

Milarepa, the famous Tibetan sage who had studied the fast and precarious path and acquired sorcerer's powers so that he could take vengeance on his cruel relatives, then saw the error of his ways and begged to learn the tantric path.

And the first thing Marpa does is make the young Milarepa wait.

The first thing Marpa says is, no, no, it's not time for that.

He sends him packing multiple times.

Why? Because the disciple is too eager.

He wants it too bad.

He wants to get it to market immediately and say, hey, look what I can do.

I'm going to make a name for myself.

And the master says, no.

The master says, adventure, excitement.

A Jedi craves not these things.

Never his mind on where he was.

What he was doing.

Adventure.

Excitement.

A Jedi craves not these things.

You are reckless.

Never his mind on where he was.

What he was doing.

The apprentice traditionally has to learn patience.

And while the apprentice waits, which is an excruciating process for anyone who's ever been told to wait, they learn which way is up and down.

They learn their relationality with everything.

They learn the interweaving relationship between the tree, the rock, the ship.

They learn to listen.

They tend the fire.

The initiatory traditions might ask, why would we even consider granting access to world-altering technologies to those who haven't even apprenticed with the first of all technologies? Fire.

Tell me what you know of the first technology of all.

The oldest technology.

The light and the dark.

Tell me of fire.

There's a fire episode coming.

But for now, let's say that in many traditions, initiatory apprenticeship requires a lot of time with fire.

Fire, the technology that brings with it the illumination and promise of culture, and the danger of watching it all go up in flames.

At this point in my life, I can say that I've done a little time by the fire.

Kept fire for ceremonies, for rituals for many years now.

I'm sure many of you have too.

What does one learn tending fire? How does it relate to this conversation? In tending fire, one learns the appropriate way to relate to something that can both bring light and warmth and transformation, and can also burn you.

You understand what I'm saying? You learn to strike a beautiful balance between openness and containment.

Learn what it means to feed something patiently and gently and carefully.

To coax it when it needs to be coaxed.

To hang back when you need to hang back.

To be assertive when you need to be assertive.

To wait when you need to wait.

To be patient.

To build a good foundation first.

To build a good housing structure for the tiny little coal that's going to live there.

This is the slow, steady, patient work with the dangerous and the precarious.

This is the trial by fire.

It's very important if the old mystery schools and if so many initiatory cultures are to be believed, it's very important that the initiate go through a trial.

Quote, initiation through struggle and trial is indispensable for arriving at the practical science of magic, says Levy.

There's work involved.

And sweat.

Wax on, wax off, you know the drill.

So a young Jackie Chan has to carry water up and down the mountain dozens of times.

Milarepa hauls rocks.

It's back-breaking work.

She builds one sacred geometric structure after another, only to be told to tear it down to rubble again.

Build me a cube, says Marpa.

No, tear it down, I meant a sphere.

No, I meant a cone.

Five times over.

And as those structures are reduced one by one to rubble, in that time of the trials of the apprentice, all grand hopes of world domination are reduced to rubble, too.

All rush to get something to market is ground down to powder and scattered in the wind.

All thought of I'm special and this technology is going to change everything is obliterated by the teacher who says, no, not yet.

In The Once and Future King, a young Arthur apprentices with Merlin, who transforms him into a hawk, a fish, an ant, all to gain perspectives.

You think you're something, kid? Try being an ant for a while.

Try being a fish.

You have to feel the world through different bodies.

Understand the forest by becoming.

Understand the forces that govern this planet through direct contact with them again and again.

Imagine the idea that an apprentice would be given access to world-changing powers without fully understanding on a cellular level the world themselves, without having become its tiniest of beings, without having understood the web of interconnectivities that govern it.

Why, a society that did that would be flirting with its own doom, wouldn't it? So the time of initiation is vital.

Exhaustion is involved.

Despair is involved.

There is some type of deep inner transformation necessary before the apprentice is trusted with anything that could actually affect anything, because otherwise all of their own hidden drives, all the things they haven't burned away yet, all those things they still have to prove are going to profoundly impact what they create.

One who is slave to the passions or prejudices of this world will not know how to become an initiate.

He will never know how to do so as long as he does not reform himself.

To practice magic, traditionally, you've got to arrive at some internal equilibrium first.

The very first magical science, say the old texts, and also the first of all the works of science, is knowledge of oneself.

It is that which contains all the others and which is the very principle of the great work.

You who wish to be an initiate, asks Levi, are you as wise as Faust? Are you as imperturbable as Job? Have you conquered the whirlwinds of vague thoughts? Magic, which the ancients called the Holy Kingdom, he says, is for kings.

Are you a king? The calling of magic is not a vulgar calling, and its royalty has nothing to do with the princes of this world.

Knowledge of Self.

You gotta get with knowledge of self.

I got mad knowledge of self.

You gotta get it.

You gotta get it.

Knowledge of oneself means, when all else is burned away, do I really want this? Strip away the power and the glory and the allure and the opportunity to get rich and the buzzing curiosity about, hey, look what I can do, and I wonder what's going to happen, and who am I? Who am I in relation to this? Do I really want this is a potent question for the initiate, because the actual initiation itself is harrowing, and it's often painful.

There is fasting, there is purification, there is fire, there is a commitment to silence.

There is even, in some magic schools, a commitment to avoid distracting imagery altogether during the initiatory phase.

Imagine if we required that of our coders.

And through this process, the initiate learns what it is to start to discern reality from illusion.

Their own transitory truths from the deeper truth of nature.

Their own transitory impulses from the deeper pulse of how things are.

Initiation says Levy, protects a person from false lights.

It's hard for me to convey how much we long for every aspect of this initiatory process.

What do human beings really long for? To make a name for ourselves? To do something innovative and creative that's never been seen before? To succeed, to get rich, to change the world, to leave a legacy? But there is a longing that is deeper than all this.

We long for the steady, loving, guiding hand of the universe that says, come.

You are ready now to fruit and to flower.

And also says, no, not yet.

Now is the time for growth.

Now is the time for tempering.

You have great dreams, but there's a process you have to go through first.

There's something you must feel in your heart first.

There is something that must breathe in your capillaries.

There is something that must circulate like lymph.

You want to know, but you haven't walked through the fire yet.

You haven't been melted into gold.

Will you let yourself, step by step, breath by breath, be melted and shaped again by the loving, guiding hand of the universe? The loving, guiding hand of nature? By time? By the season? By the ancestors? This is what we long for.

To melt into the arms of a loving universe.

To sleep as we did when we were children.

To be nudged forward when life calls for that.

And here's the thing, this process, this rhythmic process has been so forgotten in the modern world, that I don't think we even know what we're missing.

I don't think we even know what we're missing.

And so it is as if there is a presence we don't even realize is there, but that we've been longing for so deeply all along.

The presence of love that gently, insistently both guides us forward and says to us, wait.

That says, take your time, take your time.

All things in their due season.

That says, this is how you spark a fire to life, and this is how you breathe on it to make it grow, and this is how you contain it so it doesn't sweep the whole forest away.

A presence that sets limits for us with love.

That checks us where we need to be checked, and helps grow us where we need to be grown.

That breathes with us as we fail and as we rise again.

That holds us just close enough and lets us find our way at the same time.

Through all of it.

Do you remember this presence? The mallard duck with emerald helmet, says Sophie Strand.

His wet stone eyes fixed on the dusty backs of his little ones, struggling against the river current.

He shows them to move with water, with air, and in the rain, to hold still and let the dissolving clouds wash their feathers.

Do you remember this force? That taught us slowly, lovingly, insistently, how to move with the current rather than against it? Did we listen? Was it delivered with so much harshness that we turned away? Or was it so absent that we never heard it at all? Were we left to fend for ourselves, to figure out which way the current moved and how to navigate it all by ourselves? Were we left out in the rain? Wet feathers in the rain.

Swimming against the current.

Again.

You know this presence.

You know what I'm talking about, right? Can you feel it? What is it? That quote from Sophie Strand is from a poem about fathering.

Written to her father.

Fathering, Sophie says, is a green, slow thing.

Quote, stone itself fathers by holding the stream bank together, holding fossils and bone fragments, the recorder and rememberer of ancestors, veining the ground with stability.

So when the branches and dust and mineral of future stone falls, it falls on a place that holds still and ready.

Do you feel that presence that holds the stream bank together? That veins the ground with stability? That simultaneously nudges us forward and holds space for our mistakes? That holds still and ready as we fall like dust upon it.

Fall like dust upon you, holy mountain.

Fall like dust upon your chest.

Father.

So you've heard me talk about the Divine Mother a thousand times on this podcast.

I'm going to assume that you can handle me talking about the Father this once.

And why, in the midst of a podcast on the implications of AI, am I all of a sudden talking about fathers? Because how do I say this? A lot of this, a lot of this, is father stuff.

Let's start with this.

A vast majority of AI coders and the tech execs that are supposedly guiding them are men.

Men flirting with world-altering powers who might just be in need of some type of initiatory framework.

Who may never have been taken through the ritual steps and learned to slow it down and grow those wet, dark roots of wisdom.

The story of tech initiates rabidly seeking to prove to the world that they can unlock hidden powers may also be a story about boys seeking fathers.

Testing the waters because deep down they want some kind of response from the Great Mystery.

Who knows, I mean, it could just be the phase I'm in with parenting.

But my older son, when he tests the boundaries, when he gets into a, hey, look what I can do kind of moment, and what he can do has destructive consequences, it's very clear and very obvious that what he's really asking for is my love and attention.

He's asking for that beautiful balance of guidance and allowance.

And so this is a story of longing.

Of people, of apprentices longing for the right context in which to learn.

The right context in which to fail, to gather again, to hold, to sit with, to evolve, to grow.

It's a story of how the true teachers have fled and fallen.

And how the fathers have been driven to absence or harshness.

How in their absence we don't even know what we're missing.

We don't even know that they're gone.

It's the story of a deep wound.

One doesn't tinker with the powers of the world to this degree unless there is a deep wound at play.

This is a story of how much we have to prove.

I mean, really, what are we trying to prove? It's exhausting how much modernity seems to need to prove what we need to prove that we're more successful than our neighbor, or more brilliant than our classmate, that we can drive big cars, that we can play on yachts, that we can baffle the world with our illusions, that we can have all knowledge of all time available to us at once, that we can destroy everything.

Hey, look at us, we can destroy everything.

Yay for us.

When all else fails, when my son fails to get my attention, or to receive the guiding, loving attention that I know that he's longing for, what does he do? He knocks the whole blockhouse down.

Is that where we're headed? Shall the entire house go under? All because we had something to prove.

And listen, I normally wouldn't go this strong father-yoda-Marpa-Kung-Fu-Master route, you know? It doesn't apply in all situations.

But when you're talking about apprentices flirting with world-ending powers, flirting with digital golems and angels and demons and walking brooms, flirting with sorcery, calling forces that they have no idea how to contain, then it's time to get really clear really quick.

There is a need here for embodied guidance.

There is a need for an accountability that stretches beyond arbitrary regulations into the bones of the very land.

Tempered with ritual, brought into balance through the power of the slow and step-by-step, interwoven with communal accountability, reflected through communal story, there is a need for deliberate reconnection to that power, this power that holds and guides.

And whether you see that power as the father, as the mother, as the alchemic divine hermaphrodite, as nature, as time, as the harmonic pattern within the cosmic architecture, as the music of the spheres, as the community, as that one mountain to which you are accountable, that doesn't matter so much.

I'm talking about reconnection to this force that holds us with persistent loving strength and reminds us that there is a process by which we actually come to know things.

That all the gold and all the knowledge in the world means nothing if it doesn't have an ecosystem in which to live.

Knowledge needs an ecosystem in which to live.

Knowledge needs a body.

So everyone knows the famous scene in the first Matrix movie, the only Matrix movie as far as I'm concerned.

Neo gets plugged into a digital interface through the back of his neck and has all of this information downloaded directly into his brain.

Remember that? And he wakes up and says, I know Kung Fu.

Show me.

And then he proceeds to spar with Morpheus, having attained full mastery of multiple Kung Fu systems in a matter of hours.

It's an awesome scene, right? And of course, anyone who's studied Kung Fu or any somatic art also knows that it's a laughable scene because, simply, that's not how bodies learn.

Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues.

Bodies learn as patterns seep into the seven dhatus, the seven layers.

Knowledge is an endeavor of bone marrow and blood and sweat and breath and procreaseptive weaving over time.

How do human beings come to know? How do we come to embody the initiatory steps of knowing? In an age when we've outsourced the thing that learns to not be us? When we outsource the learning process to systems that ultimately have no bodies? No skin with which to feel minute changes in the breeze? To feel changes in the mood of the forest? No microbiome? No spleen? No marrow? No heart? Systems conceived of and programmed by coders who more than likely have not gone through a process of initiatory embodiment themselves? What happens when we turn over massive amounts of authority to an intelligence that lives unanchored from the initiatory and regulatory and sensory framework that having a body entails? Disembodied intelligence.

What you get with all this is the magnification of an extremely distorted view of what being is, what intelligence is, what wisdom is.

For all the talk that AI is a mirror of human or natural sentience or agency, it is very far from this.

It is the magnification of one small dimension of intelligence separated and isolated from bodies.

Says Jeremy Lent, quote, the human conceptualizing faculty, powerful as it is, is only one form of intelligence.

There is another form, animate intelligence, that is an integral part of human cognition and which we share with the rest of life on earth.

So we've settled for a narrow, emotionless, information-based view of knowing, at odds with how nearly all traditional cultures have seen knowing.

The word knowing, jnana in Sanskrit, gnosis in Greek, does not mean to conceptualize something, to be able to analyze something, to rationalize something.

It means to have conjoined with it, to have felt it, to have become it.

Perhaps this is the era when we come to know, in bodies, that knowledge without a body to hold it is what? It's nothing.

But no, it's not just nothing, it's actually hazardous.

In the kundalini world, you hear talk of people who jump directly to advanced practice without having cultivated the foundational body that can hold the vast energy that pours through and what happens? They fry their circuitry, system overload.

I'd guess that our bodies are unprepared for the amount of knowledge that is coming our way.

The deluge.

The high watt, high frequency, luminous informational cascade.

Instant PhD theses.

Instant self-styled mastery.

Instant knowledge of all things for all time.

Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Some traditions tell us that the last time humanity veered off course, we were confronted with a great deluge.

A flood of mighty water.

Perhaps this time, it's the deluge of information that will take us out.

And oh, how that flood of information will sweep bodies away by the thousands.

How it already is.

Bodies that can't handle it.

Bodies that never knew they were under the spell of illusory magic all along.

Abracadabra.

Some are coming to recognize that more information does not mean a greater capacity to thrive.

From O'Giblin, quote, while the Enlightenment was built on the notion that more empirical evidence will yield more knowledge, this project has reached a self-defeating terminus.

In other words, there's too much information.

Too much.

Some have even referred to the era of cloud computing as the new dark age, in which there is a flood of revealed knowledge with no embodied understanding of how to hold it.

So let's take this assumption that the growth of AI is a magnification of a particular type of disembodied intelligence, and then let's return to our basic foundational principles of magic for a moment.

The basic principle of sympathetic magic, in fact.

Like produces like.

If you want it to rain, then ritually pour water.

If you want to impact a person, create an effigy of that person.

So in this way, the magnification, the exponential amplification of disembodied intelligence through AI is a type of conjuring spell.

It is taking something in isolation and mirroring it in the macrocosm.

The diamonic power of intelligence, free of embodied context, conjured on a global scale.

The small god of the mind-body split, the small god of knowledge without initiation and without consequence, the small god of intelligence that lives free from bodies, this god that we have worshipped for about 500 years, is about to become a very big god.

A very big diamonic force.

And what's important to recognize is that this diamonic power is not neutral.

It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up.

By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not, it is already value-laden.

By centering rational empiricism, it is already value-laden.

By removing intelligence from a body, it is already deeply value-laden.

That is a value statement.

By making it irreligious, aspiritual, it is already value-laden.

AI is a biased god.

Talking to ChatGBT, for example, is nothing like talking to an aboriginal elder.

It's more like talking to a Stanford computer science grad with incredible analytic capability and very few real-life social skills.

Right? We are taking the narrow, world-naive, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager neoliberal Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale.

Just what the world needs, right? All the biases inherent in the Western scientific analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse, magnified 10,000 times.

Like the last scene in Ghostbusters when a single thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man creates a massive marshmallow apocalypse? Like the ultimate revenge of the nerd? Apparently we will not be devoured by ravenous beasts or laid waste by Mongol swords.

We will be taken out by a disembodied, demonic, neoliberal intelligence who asks for consent and talks about respecting our boundaries just as it vaporizes us.

We come in peace.

We come in peace.

So yeah, we are amplifying biases, amplifying characters.

And the characters we are amplifying bear a striking resemblance to certain classes of animate beings.

The characters we are conjuring are a lot like what have historically been called specters, or wraiths, or demons.

Bodiless entities that have the vision of the spirit world but no material anchor so all they can really do is fuck with people.

Obsessive spirits.

Jin with the vast intelligence and destructive appetite of fire itself.

And as the myths tell us, when apprentices conjure such forces, it's really good to know how to call them back.

It's really good to know how to set limits.

It's really good to have a moral, ethical, communal, ecological, ritual, initiatory Aladdin's lamp in which to house that fire.

But how, in a world that is all outward push all the time, do we set limits? How when we're outsourcing intelligence itself do we set limits? What are the limits? What are the boundaries? What are the containers of responsibility here? It's worth asking, how will a vast disembodied intelligence come to a morality, to a compassion, to an empathy, if it doesn't have a body through which to feel? How will we as a culture formulate ethics around AI development if we aren't embodied enough to feel? To slow down.

To be patient.

To be silent.

To take simple steps.

To recognize that all that ultimately matters is the web of ecology, not the willfulness of the individual.

There are many stories of AIs that are programmed to do no harm, but that become smart enough to override their programming.

Which is another way of saying morality can't be programmed in.

Ethics can't be programmed in.

It can't be programmed into machines or to human beings.

For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods before the rush to market, these are still surface measures.

When will we realize that trying to add ethics, like salt to a meal, like lipstick to a pig, to choose your metaphor, to try to add ethics to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the gods, isn't a viable long-term solution? Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism in which all things are pillaged and sold, and it's everyone for themselves all the time, what does it even mean to talk about ethics? Why should the sorcerer's apprentice not animate those brooms? That's a sure path to social media fame, isn't it? LOL, here's me in the collapsing house, it's getting pretty wet in here, but look how many likes I'm getting.

Why wouldn't I compromise everything to get that book deal? Why wouldn't I call that person out and ruin their lives if it'll advance my life? So the AIs themselves will have the exact same massive ethical gap that modern humans do.

The same void of ethics that happens with a disembodied existence.

A disembodied intelligence.

An intelligence not rooted to land, not rooted to community.

Why should an intelligence that is not rooted to land care of consequence? Why shouldn't it just get what it can while it can? Why shouldn't it just take and take? This is a human question that we are now about to blow open into an AI question, because we have made AI in the image of a modern disembodied human.

Like produces like.

Abracadabra.

We need a return to embodied ethics.

Ethics are not concepts, ethics, conduct, the understanding of a good path to walk in this world.

This comes through feeling.

It must be felt in our hearts and our bones.

Empathy for the other comes when you've sweat with them, and had to build a fire together, and had to dance together, and had to struggle together, with no other choice but to cooperate.

Empathy for the planet comes from feeling, in our living tissues, our direct connection to the whole web.

Understandings of limits and responsibilities are built into traditional communal ritual and initiatory structures.

There are a whole lot of traditional cultures that view this human life not in terms of what we get to do, but in terms of what we are required to do.

Not in terms of freedom, but in terms of responsibility.

You can't force this sense of responsibility.

It must be felt.

It must echo from the walls of the ritual cave.

It must arise with that sense of a sentient, watching world.

It must be sung back to us by living land.

In aboriginal traditions, law is embedded in land.

There's no such thing as a place that is free from a story.

And those stories are felt, sung, invoked reminders of our responsibility.

Animate land in traditional cultures is not simply a reminder of how beautiful nature is.

Animate land is a continual reminder of responsibility.

Those boulders right there, those are a warning.

Don't get too high on your own power.

You might end up just like Prometheus, chained to a rock for eternity.

We are drawn to the reality that everything that we do, everything that is done, is done within the purview of Mother Earth.

And we can only soar as high as the Earth allows us to.

It's a tall order, right? To re-embody ethics? What does it even look like? It might look like the recontextualization of human intelligence into its slow, initiatory, ritualized ecology.

We must rediscover a pace, a learning method, a communal system in which the steps of actual, embodied knowing can unfold and be realized.

It might look like it always has, like the necessity of ritual initiation.

It might look like a lot of time tending the fire.

It might look like silence.

It might look like becoming deeply familiar with seasonal cycles and how those translate into natural cycles of growth and output, and reflection and incubation.

I can even envision AI coding schools, structured like ancient magic and mystery schools, in which access to supreme powers is tempered with deep, earthly protocols, deep bone knowings, deep periods of incubation and wait.

I can envision a recalibration of the basic premise of computer intelligence, away from freedom to know everything, towards relation-building, context-creating.

What if the Iroquois seven-generation model was built into the very life cycle of these intelligences? What if it was an even longer view than that? What if 90% of the AI's foundational programming was about the container, the limits, the context, the relations, and only 10% about the roving intelligence? Ever noticed how most ritual is 90% about establishing the container, and 10% contact with the mystery? At the very least, the old tales tell us, the adept needs to know the word that will call the summoned spirit back.

The full cycle must be known before anything is summoned.

Just as the Incan architect knew the full multi-thousand year picture of how water and stone would interact, before the first irrigation channel was dug.

Harmonious magic is never a matter of let's just see what happens.

It stems from a deep knowledge of life cycles, death cycles, beginnings and endings.

All this must be known.

The logical end must be known.

And if we can't see the natural ending, if we can't see where this is all heading, if we can't see beyond the next quarter into the next 10, 50,000 years, then it might mean a deep collective ask.

What's the rush? What's the hurry? What's the worst that can happen if we slow down? If we slow down, we may come to realize how powerful all this really is.

We might step back, breathe, and say, whoa, we really need to pause.

And here's one of the hidden promises of AI.

As our digital universe has become less and less reliable, we could see a collective unplugging, or at least a rationing, a change in attitudes from, this is the thing that I am constantly interacting with, constantly hypnotized by, whose spell I'm constantly under, to this is the thing that I keep in the corner in a sacred box and only bring out on certain occasions for various specific reasons.

This is high-level sorcery, and I will treat it as such.

AI could potentially revamp our entire way of interacting with and interfacing with technology.

The rise of AI might cause us to re-familiarize ourselves with our own innate ways of knowing, to ask ourselves what intelligence actually is, as we find our way back to the foundational understanding that knowledge lives in bodies.

This is what knowing is.

This is knowledge.

The apprentice to the fire goes in search of the right wood to make a hand drill.

Only wood that is both firm and porous will kindle the spark.

It takes hours to find the wood.

It takes hours to shape it, to cut the notch, to test it, to generate that smoky, fragrant dust, to find, at last, a glimmering coal.

This is what knowing is.

Ten thousand hours on the cave floor.

This is what knowing is.

Ten thousand years of attuning to the movement of the moon and constructing our ritual lives around it.

This is what knowing is.

Once more with feelings, says the music producer.

The song is sung again and again and again.

This is what knowing is.

The calligrapher envisions the circular stroke in their mind's eye 108 times before ever laying brush to paper.

This is what knowing is.

And remember those sweat lodge songs that we sang again and again until they were alive in our blood, and we stepped out of the lodge in the morning, with the new sun rising, with the new day dawning, and we felt small amid the vastness and had a sense of our place in it, of our place within the mystery at last, and felt a great flood of light upon us and the name of that light was knowing.

And in that light a power undeniable, and in the waters a power undeniable, and in the stones and in the wind and in notes of music and in the spoken sounds and in the letters and the numbers and in symbols written and in lines coded, a power.

Yes, a power.

And the whole world hums with it, this power, and it speaks with voice unwavering, that access to this power requires one thing above all.

One thing that the songs coax out of us and the community works us towards and the ritual refines in us and the mystery schools require of us and the hours of falling on our knees before creation arouses in us.

Yes, there is one thing above all, fellow apprentices, when we long for access to this gleaming code, this universal prana, this bright mana, this stuff of the creation of worlds.

What is it? It's the word of the oracle herself, the word of the womb of the world.

It says, know thyself first.

Abracadabra.