Epistemology is a real problem these days. How do we know things, especially when we depend on things to know things? This goes back to Socrates and forth to AI. From the Tower of Babel to people babbling on Reddit. Are we really thinking through the tools we use, or are they extincting us through ignorant abuse?

Today, you can put any question into AI and get an immediate piss-take. You then check a search engine to see if it's a mistake, only to get the same AI result on the first page. This is followed by endless pages ‘optimized’ for the search engine, increasingly written by AI. How do you come to know anything within this system that inherently knows nothing, and doesn't care anyways? They're just calculating numbers to make other numbers go up. There's no concept of a concept anywhere in this system. This information technology is just trying to appear smart to you, and you're ignorant by definition. You're the one asking questions in the first place!

What we are rapidly reaching is an informational ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. We fed all the world's pre-2021 information into an information machine that now has to consume its own output, like a dog returning to its vomit. If you used Reddit or Stack Overflow pre-2021 you're effectively a long-lost Vedic scholar to the future, there is no more purely human internet to be trained on. Models going forward will be trained on the output of other models and get increasingly detached from base reality. The things that are supposed to know things are eating their own offspring and can only become more inbred. Like a snake eating its own tail or, as the Computer Science people say, garbage in, garbage out.

I increasingly think we're in Tower of Babel territory, when all the world's languages are reduced to the universal language of math. The Bible talked about a time when people “had one language and the same words” and God said “Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” Doesn't that feel like what's happening now? There has never been more information, but we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, where nothing is reliable. We can translate every language now, but even our own language is hopelessly confused.

You don't necessarily need to get Biblical, biology abhors oneness as much as noneness. COVID-19 was a reminder of this, if we're going to knit into one global city, we can die in one global plague. Nature abhors a monopoly about as much as a vacuum. This story didn't start with AI, it's just the latest story heaped on top of a tall tower that began when we first built walls, and brought the livestock inside with us. Ever since then we have attracted plagues, and courted disaster. The apocalyptic Abrahamic religions all get at the same truth, pride goeth before the fall.

As the Quran says, “Alas for human beings! They ridicule every messenger that comes to them. Do they not see how many generations We have destroyed before them?” God knows there's geological proof enough, of as They said, “there are indeed signs for people who use their reason.” Not just in the various Ozymandem saying, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair”, but in the fossil record itself. We foolishly burn this legacy as fossil fuels, expecting different results by running the holocaust engine in reverse. The carbon holocaust today is just a mirror image of the Great Oxygen Holocaust of 2.4 bya, with us emitting carbon by burning the bodies of latter-day oxygen polluters.

Whereas photosynthetic life nearly froze the Earth to the equator, we are nearly melting it to the poles. It's the same process, and we can't say we weren't told. Besides science documenting its own devastation, religion has told us clearly in the only language we understand—stories. But we insist on adding more stories to our Tower of Babel instead, because we are led by “those for whom the evil that they do is made to look beautiful, and who follow their own desires.” The invisible hand of capitalism is, in hindsight, just Satan, and the love of money is the root of all evil.

AI is just the latest brick baked into this tower, consuming the most water and energy to produce the most useless brainfarts. Socrates, in fact, predicted insufferable tech bros long ago, in his critique of writing (and reading). Channeling the Egyptian gods, he said (in Phaedrus),

The loyalty you feel to writing, as its originator, has just led you to tell me the opposite of its true effect. It will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.

This all-consuming brainworm we call technology could mean knowledge of how to make things, but what if this embodied knowledge has a life of its own? Life is always emerging out of other life in ways hitherto impossible. Alien life discovering our planet might conclude that the cars were driving us more than us driving them. Indeed, looking from afar, how would they know? Everything we measure proudly as advances in human progress, like swords and jewelry buried with people, is literally our own funeral. Today we've got humans delaying their reproduction into their 40s so they can reproduce capital instead. We're ruining the climate we're adapted for as primates for some great golden god called The Economy, which is really just an artificial ecosystem that does not even perceive the natural. Who's controlling whom? Are we using these tools, or are the tools using us?

You can make a convincing case that language itself is a virus, given physical form with writing, given legal personhood as corporations, given an entire world to feed on with colonialism, and giving the whole planet a fever with what we call climate change. The last fever dream is Artificial Intelligence, machines speaking our language back to us, only to discover that we're not that intelligent at all.