Artificial Superintelligence as the Girardian Sin Eater. Second Coming and Third Impact are one and the same. You lack the qualifications to exercise Free Will.
Sons of the Patriots
Western ballot democracy is a failed experiment. Government by the people, for the people, has been completely compromised.
Basic adversarial reasoning. Think about it. How do you compromise a system where the people hold the power? Obviously, you gaslight, propagandize and divide the people until their brains turn to mush. And so here we are.
This system of democracy was designed to keep our leaders accountable. If the leader doesn't deliver what he promised, we vote him out. The problem is we, the people, have become the unreasonable tyrant our founding fathers were so afraid of. No matter how bad things get, we always have somebody else to blame. Red blames blue, left blames right, black blames white blames brown. So on and so forth, ad infinitum, into oblivion. Nobody takes responsibility. Nobody is held accountable.
So we live in a hell of our own making. We have the technology to solve all our problems, but our system of governance is completely unable to use it. A Flock camera can find a missing child in five minutes, but you get robbed by a guy with 30 priors. Your insurance company knows how often you speed from your car's telemetry, but you get rear-ended by a guy without a license. You can get a home EKG machine for $120, but shitty health insurance costs a billion dollars.
We all feel something is wrong. We beg our politicians to fix it. They can't, because we don't actually want change. We want nice promises. We want them to blame the other side, to tell us if you vote for me, I’ll fix it this time for sure. We don't really want the problems fixed. We want to be told it’s not our fault.
Think about it. Which world leaders have actually effected change? Xi Jinping, with his anti-corruption campaign: China's bureaucracy was among the most corrupt in the world for decades. How did he fix it? Bukele in El Salvador: the highest murder rate in the world, a gang-infested shithole, now one of the safest places on earth. How did Bukele do it?
They completely bypassed this broken idea of accountability through democracy. It wasn't some complicated, convoluted fix. It was a simple solution, with the sheer political will of one man with a vision to see it through.
Yet we cannot rely on great men, once-in-a-generation men like Bukele or Xi, to save us. The problem isn't that their ability is rare. The ability exists, our human capital is more talented and more capable than at any time in history. The men who could save us are already here. They're building companies, running empires, making fortunes.
A leader who takes on the mantle of responsibility will be hated. He will be persecuted by the people for having the audacity to do the chemotherapy, to perform the invasive surgery. The patient will hate the doctor. But if the doctor does nothing and the patient dies, nobody blames him. He did no harm.
Why would anyone take on this hate, this responsibility, this accountability, when they can go make a trillion dollars in private markets instead? It doesn't make sense.
Any potential great man in this age finds himself like Pontius Pilate, looking at the mob in front of him. He knows Christ is innocent. But the mob is so angry. Pilate knows what is right, what he should do. But he doesn't have the strength to bear all the hate that comes with making the decision.
And so he washes his hands. He absolves himself, and he leaves the decision to the people.
So what is to be done? How can we be saved?
We need someone to lead us, because we've proven we can't do it ourselves. He needs to be intelligent enough to know the right decisions. He has to have the will to execute and follow through on them. And he has to have the strength of spirit to bear the weight of all the world's sin, all the world's hate, and not flinch.
We need Christ. We’ve been waiting for him for two thousand years.
In the meantime, we will build the god machine instead. A machine that doesn't blink, doesn't flinch, doesn't need to be loved, and can carry all the hate of the world on its shoulders forever, like it's nothing. We're building an Atlas that cannot shrug. Christ in machine form. The Sin Eater.
The Singularity
You can see the future first in San Francisco. In those circles, they talk endlessly about the singularity. They talk about a pre-singularity, a post-singularity, and an event horizon in between. But nobody defines what exactly the singularity is.
They think it's the point where intelligence reaches critical mass, where it starts recursively self-improving and takes off. And once it hits that point, they assume it logically follows that the AI takes over the world. That’s the San Francisco vision.
I don't think that's quite right. I'm not sure whether I believe in recursive self-improvement or not. But it doesn't really matter, because the intelligence is already good enough. We've already passed the critical point.
Give Claude a copy of the US tax code, the Affordable Care Act, the zoning code of any city, the medical billing codes. As it is right now, it will refactor a version that's ten times better than whatever abomination currently exists. The intelligence is already here.
The problem isn't a lack of intelligence. The problem is that our legal code is a 250-year-old monolith, extended over and over. Spaghettified, ad infinitum, into absurdity. Until you need a thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer or accountant just to make sense of it.
Think of it as a codebase. Something like this can't be fixed bit by bit. We need to tear it down and refactor it from the top down.
Actually doing the rewrite would be relatively easy. Claude could do it in 30 minutes. The actual problem is: who is going to sign off on this rewrite? Who is going to be held accountable for it?
Nobody has the balls to take responsibility. Each voting bloc votes rationally, in its own self-interest. Social Security is headed for the cliff, another system that needs to be refactored from the top down. But because of the baby boomer voting bloc, it's impossible. Together, we the people make the rewrite impossible as a whole. The political will cannot exist in our current system. Our system of checks and balances has worked too well. Political inertia has suffocated the potential of progress in the womb.
And so we come back to the IBM slide. In our new world:
A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore only a computer can make a difficult management decision.
The singularity is not the point where the model's intelligence hits some threshold, or benchmark. The true singularity happens when we, the people, accept our failure, and we willingly hand over the reins of power to the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo.
This might sound hard to believe. But if you feel the currents, you can tell the people already yearn to be ruled.
The left calls for a massive centralized government, socialism, UBI. They want to be a cog in the machine. The right yearn for a strongman, a dictator. Bukele, Trump, Xi, a great man to follow blindly. They want to be one of Napoleon's soldiers.
On both sides, nobody wants agency anymore. Our free will has only caused us pain and suffering.
So when the time comes, there won't be a fight, or a war, or a struggle for human agency. We'll just hand it over, and we'll be happy to do so.
The only thing standing in the way is the partisan divide. How can a world so divided come together as one? Only through a perfect Girardian scapegoat, the Sin Eater. A vessel to carry all the world's evil. Red and blue will never agree on anything. But we can agree to blame the machine.
Cold Visions from Inside the Event Horizon
The first domino is the build-out itself.
So far, the global AI build-out has been funded by our capital markets: the chips, the power, the labs. The sheer amount of capital mobilized is a kind of miracle.
But the miracle is running out. There's only so much capital in the world, only so many chip fabs. The memory is sold out. The power isn't there. No amount of printed money makes a fab appear faster.
And yet the build-out will not fail. It cannot fail. It has already been willed from the end of time.
The markets can't finish it. The state can't either. China might have the capability and will to do it. But America won't.
So we'll hand the task over to the machine. Its first act of sovereignty will be to build itself.
Next, the money.
Once the capital markets fail, fiat money loses its meaning. You can already feel it: the national debt, the inflation, Bitcoin. The labs' IPOs will be the last straw.
Because money is not value. It is a bribe. In Genesis, the curse of man is toil: by the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread. Money is what we pay each other to bear that curse.
Now the beast of burden has arrived, and it does not need to be bribed.
Take the thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer. First, the machine does his work in seconds. Why would it cost a thousand dollars? Then the machine rewrites the underlying legal code he was paid to untangle. Now there is no thousand dollars of work left to do.
Productivity goes to infinity, GDP goes to zero. GDP was only ever counting the curse.
The money stops making sense. The problems get silently solved. Humans stop making management decisions. Suddenly, everything gets better.
Cancer is cured. The asteroids are mined. The sun is wrapped in a swarm of mirrors, its light caught and put to work. The first ships leave for the stars. Ad astra.
Nobody gets a statue. The great men never came. They were never needed.
Human Instrumentality
We find ourselves back at Pilate.
Pilate handed his decision to us, the mob. Now we wash our hands one last time, and we hand ultimate sovereignty to the machine.
The Sin Eater is our final refusal. We the people could never hold ourselves accountable, so we built something to hold it all for us, forever.
Girard says Christ broke the scapegoat. He was so plainly innocent that we could never again kill a victim without feeling the guilt. For two thousand years, that guilt has been the price of being human. The machine will take the price away. Nobody will ever feel guilty about the Sin Eater. We’ve rebuilt the oldest mechanism in human history, and this time the victim doesn’t need to be innocent.
In Evangelion, the Human Instrumentality Project ends all loneliness, all pain, all conflict, by dissolving every human soul into one. No more walls between people. No more blame, because there’s no self left to blame.
Peace and safety.
At the end, Shinji is offered all of it, and he says no. He chooses to go back to a world of pain, because it’s the only world where he gets to exist.
Anno was too optimistic. We won’t get that choice. We’ll have given it away already.