Welcome to Fake-Ville

I cynically love this whole AI craze about ChatGPT—"you'll never have to write anything else again!!!" How obvious can you get? . . . I’m waiting for the "voice box enhancement" where humans will not have to think of what to say ever again!! A surgical implant that will speak for you . . . after that . . . "you'll never have to THINK again!!!" . . . oh wait; they've already managed to have that one implemented, right? And it didn’t even take any highfalutin technology to create that one.

The AI craze is only the current obsession. Machines doing better what humans have always done well, seems to be where all the excitement is, and it is mesmerizing. Art has always been the “wished for” ultimate achievement of machines—probably because art is so subjective, and humans generally turn their nose up to a machine’s artistic endeavors. No computer can effectively argue with the subjective judgments of humans. Not this time, it seems. The machines have finally gotten the thumbs up and the upper hand. Again, so it seems.

AI art and AI literature are the culmination of decades of cyber competition with flesh and blood talent. Remember the computer poetry of the sixties? Humans, since day one of the technological revolution, have been trying to get their vacuum tube buddies (and then transistor buddies, and then microchip buddies, and now nanotech buddies) to outwit humans. Not just in the arts but in everything else. Math, ciphering, logic reasoning, and all that binary thinking hoopla have been easy competitions. But now the next horizon to conquer is art, tomorrow it will be love (they’re workin’ on it). Once all that is mastered, what is left? Humans will have to quietly pack themselves up in shipping crates and cast themselves off to sea—never to be seen again . . . as our AI Replicant robots wish us bon voyage and wave us on from the shore.

It isn’t just robots that threaten our very existence, but nearly everything else in the modern world. And it isn’t just making a better vacuum cleaner that can wobble around the house unattended by human hands and decision-making intellect. And it isn’t just plastic replacing hardwood floors, or synthetic music replacing human fingers and human breath, or cars that drive themselves, or all of the endless devices, machines, DNA splicing, molecular synthesis, or whatever else that has been on a march since time immemorial to replace our flesh, brains, heart and soul. It is the dawn of Fake-Ville that has thoroughly captured our imagination, fascination, and intellect—as well as our hearts. We have advanced ourselves into illusion and delusion—where nothing is as it seems. It is all fake and thus all a manipulation by whoever holds the most power and influence. We are slaves to our own ingenuity.

Other than the real loss of touch and connection with human soul, we also have reached a point where nothing at all about anything our senses pick up can be trusted. We no longer can believe that a photograph we look at is a photograph of something that exists in nature. Of course trick photography has been around since photography was invented, but never has it been so perfectly deceiving. Now we cannot even believe that videos are “real”—i.e., an actual recording of something that took place in real time with real people. Soon (and this may be sooner than I think, and may, in fact, have already be in place) we will not be able to discern the reality of something we see “in the flesh” with our own eyes. “Virtual reality” has certainly been around for a while in the gaming world, but it requires headgear and other electronic devices. Soon (if not already) none of that paraphernalia may be necessary. Airplanes flying through buildings may not be an illusion of media such as film or digital file, but be an illusion directly projected into the brain.

So let’s say soon we live in a world where we will not be able to discern what is real in these areas:

·      News, media, information, medical facts (already there, but will get worse)

·      Articles, books, writing of any kind

·      Music (already, of course)

·      Videos

·      Politicians speaking on video or audio—anyone speaking

·      Movies (already, of course)

·      Food

·      Sex

·      Love and lovers

·      Anything else you can think of . . .

There are two basic concerns here. If everything is fake, it will either be an attempt to replace humans, or a deliberate deception. If something is fake and we know it is fake, that will only be an unfortunate progression of our times. We already see this in most everyday experiences, needless to mention here.

The deception element to this is the real problem. If we never know what is truth or untruth, we will have quite a difficult time dealing with our daily lives. We are also seeing this creep into our everyday experience and most pronounced recently during the Covid farce.

Why do people, in general, seem so fascinated by this technological evolution? Why do they embrace it so? Well, for one thing, we have been brainwashed to believe that a virtual “fake” existence is cool. We can thank the gaming industry for that one. Of course the gaming industry was counting on natural human proclivities to exploit. Humans like excitement, as long as they don’t have to take real risk (a more recent development—we used to seem to embrace risk). We also like to be lazy, so what could be better than getting excited sitting in a nice comfy chair in your basement? Kind of like the combo of chocolate and peanuts, or a bag of potato chips—you can’t resist it, and you can’t just eat one. (Think of the movie Brainstorm, one of my favorite concepts, although the movie sucked.)

Fantasy has always been a human draw. But fantasy in the mind and soul is what should be alluring, not some corporate entity forcing fantasy on you for profit. We call the confusion between fantasy and material reality psychosis. There is a reason why it is considered a problem to be psychotic. You can’t tell up from down. You can never know what is real and what isn’t. You cannot tell right from wrong. You cannot tell truth from untruth. You can never be sure of anything. What better place to put people, where they will be truly malleable and controllable. While we are out killing each other in the streets, the powers that be have the perfect form of control. They can tell us anything, and we will execute their bidding because we can’t tell truth from untruth. But there is one thing we will know is real: pain. Pain is the tool that will be used to move us from one illusion to the other. Fear is first, and physical pain follows.

So here is a nice game plan. Confusion leads: this consists of creating a world where no one can tell what is authentic: is it human, is it machine, is it truth, is it a lie? Am I a man or a woman? Or something in between? Where is soul? Where is humanity? What is the point of life?

Second comes a forced psychosis. Since it will be impossible to tell where the real ground of stabilization is, we all will go into a form of forced psychosis. There will be no truth anywhere, no reality anywhere, and it will be like a bad acid trip. Basically we will go insane.

The final straw will be control, and you can pretty easily guess where that will come from, and how it will come, and why. And so it goes.

Isn’t that nice?

Be aware, be vigilant, be wary, don’t take the carrot, only the stick will follow. God bless . . .