This is very loosely in response to Dave Pollard writing about the falsification of everything.

In the story of Babel—which might as well be future as past—man develops one language in one city until “there the LORD confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” That's His story, at least, which repeats throughout history because mortals decease so quickly and forget. As the Tanakh Translation of the Old Testament comments, “In our passage, one senses both astonishment at the advanced technological level of Babylonian culture and a keen sense that technology poses grave dangers when it is not accompa­nied by reverence for God.” Sound familiar? Can you hear the rhyming upon the wind?

In the history we're writing today—which might as well be science fiction—our language is autotranslated into one while we build a global village out of concrete and oil. As John Milton (Satan) said in the film Devil's Advocate,

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God... and where can you go from there?

Nowhere but down. Science unmoored from sense, humanity unmoored from animals, animals unmoored from the elements. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, as Yeats said, tapping the rhythm in 1919. Babylon reincarnates only to be struck down. Civilization seems to be destroyed regularly, only to regenerate remembering nothing but unbelievable stories, which we repeat helplessly as mere mortals. As the prophet Isaiah chastised the king of Babylon long ago,

Once you thought in your heart,
“I will climb to the sky;
Higher than the stars of God
I will set my throne.
I will sit in the mount of assembly,
On the summit of Zaphon:
I will mount the back of a cloud­
I will match the Most High.”

You might as well tell this to the Emir of Dubai, building the world's tallest tower and flying Emirates airplanes through the sky. Or the apostate of 'Israel', delivery boys for imperial bombs, exiled to Israel by the same people that hated and genocided them, to areligiously and amorally hurry the apocalypse on. Might as well tell this to yourself, who tacitly participate in this global civilization with cynical distance (like this article, scrawled on the bathroom walls of Babylon, for a bad time, call indi.ca).

Today we live in an age when languages are effectively autotranslated into one, and where rapid delivery and instant connectivity make the world effectively one city, at least for carbonaceous cosmopolitans on the good side of the bombs. But this is just a peek at the peak, which we're rapidly overshooting over.

The technological utopia we were sold, the end of history that was called, the death of God that was declared, it now all looks presumptive. Global, industrial civilization missed any chance at moderation with suppression of global communism and now, baked into individualist capitalist bricks we go down like Babylon. Infinite growth on a finite planet isn't possible, this is just basic math, but basic myth told us the same story long ago. Don't try to have it all. Keep your head down. Pride goeth before the fall.

AI speaking human languages is actually a sign of collapse, not a way out. Literal Cliff's Notes from the devil, not deus ex machina to save us all. As many studies have shown (vomit, I hate that phrase), AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense, or, more boringly, AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Garbage in, garbage out is one of the first things I learned while failing Computer Science and this dictum doesn't change just because we're using neural networks now. Mad Cow Disease is an obvious example of how eating your own brain works for neurological systems. It's not good. The Internet post 2021 is completely incestuous, and we're just a few cycles away from the digital equivalent of Hapsburg noses.

There are ways out of this, in practice (train a model on another model, segregate artificial content), but in principle that's just delaying the inevitable. The pre-2021 Internet will stand (or more precisely, fall) as our Tower of Babel, the moment we came closest to perfect information and then ruined it through incestuous debauchery up top.

You can experience how shit the Internet is already. Search doesn't find anything, news is naked propaganda, and everything can be faked as convincingly as the real now. Too much information seems to produce even worse results than too little. They have ‘flooded the zone with shit’ as Steve Bannon said quite openly. Within a few generations, the world has lurched between information constipation to digital diarrhea, neither of which is a healthy balance. The idea of balance, as always, eludes the capitalist algorithm entirely. And so, without balance, the whole thing falls.

AI is just the icing on the cake, the temperature rise that's already baked in, the goose that's already cooked, along with a million other species that were holding life as we knew it together. All of the things we measure are merely a sign of the ecosystem we did not treasure at all, and the God who warned us but we forgot. And so, as Britney Spears said, ooops, I did it again. Or as every major faith has told us, there will be blood. Religion and science both predict an end of the world, whether you believe it or not is largely immaterial. At this point, you can just observe. After a few decades of babble, Babel come down.