Musk, Page, Altman... Antichrist?

What is AI safety to men trying to usurp the Kingdom of God?

The Antichrist is, to be sure, no laughing matter. I’m no professor of Antichrist Studies, but the figure is inching closer to the center of at least a subset of tech’s preoccupations, courtesy of René Girard, and so far I haven’t encountered in my own studies much sign that the hallmark of the Antichrist is an on-trend sense of humor. This despite the fact that, as others, I bet, would agree, if the Antichrist were in Elon Musk’s situation today, he would probably be in good humor.

This is probably something Elon himself has contemplated — something I’d like to ask him about one day. Reflecting on how agreeably our shoes might fit Antichrist is a worthwhile check of head and heart for us all, as St. John of Damascus reminds us:

It should be known that the Antichrist is bound to come. Every one, therefore, who confesses not that the Son of God came in the flesh and is perfect God and became perfect man, after being God, is Antichrist. But in a peculiar and special sense he who comes at the consummation of the age is called Antichrist.

To speculate concerning the Antichrist is to enter a hall of mirrors of our own characteristically vain device. I certainly won’t do it here: the case for betting a not insubstantial sum on Musk being or turning out to the Antichrist is, on the facts, an easy one, but for the meme humor at the heart of his sense of the point of being alive; then again, could anyone today really become Lord of the World (the title of Robert Hugh Benson’s visionary novel on the topic) without being a wisecracking meme-maker? Certainly Stephen King’s would-be Antichrist in The Stand liked to maintain a blood-curdlingly good cheer, to slip in the occasional practical joke at the most fatal of moments.

But PredictIt markets for guessing the Antichrist feel at once like Antichrist accelerant and like a surefire way to humiliate the pride and false avaricious “hope” of so many canny bettors. Musk made the at least superficially not very Antichrist-like point at the recent World Government Summit that concentrating humanity into a single planetary civilization would actually increase the risk of the destruction of the human race — civilizations being what they are, history showing plainly enough that even the mightiest rise and fall, often without much warning, characteristically leaving hopes for another stretch of flourishing to another adjacent, even marginal, civilizational heir: “I think we need to be a little conscious of being too much of a single civilization,” he ventured in his affably halting style, “because if we are too much of a single civilization, then the whole thing may collapse.” Multipolarity — not very Lord of the World!

Then again, a certain incredible oddity must be observed in Musk’s choice of example to underscore his point. “While Rome was falling, Islam was rising, so you had a caliphate doing well while Rome was doing terribly. And that ended up being a source of preservation of knowledge and many scientific advancements.” Surely not even Orthodox Christians alone (although who knows better?) should object that the proper illustration regarding Rome’s successors — despite the Ottomans’ feeling that they indeed were the Third Rome — begins with the “second” Rome.

The Eastern half of the Empire was first in becoming Christian. Through its Christianization Constantinople preserved the continuity of the Empire as Constantine, through his own, preserved the Empire itself. Perhaps more controversially, but truly nonetheless, that continuity was maintained after the catastrophes of the Fourth Crusade and the Muslim conquest not by the Ottomans themselves but the Russians — among whom considered judgment often holds that the murder of Emperor St. Nicholas II, the last of the Tsars/Caesars, removed the famous katechon of St. Paul’s counsel in 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7, clearing the way for the advancement in our late days toward the rule of the Antichrist.

What marks out the path of that advancement if not the relentless “progress” of scientific knowledge? How else can an Antichrist rise to consolidate world control? The time has come for technologists from Musk on down — who rightly recognize that the established “political” classes are defaulting on their political obligations — to see that preserving civilizations is a matter of preserving spiritual experience, not technical knowledge, and the advancement of institutions which protect and mobilize us within it. When all else around us — not just our politics but our engines and towers of technical knowledge — grows corrupt, turns against us, and falls, what is needed are weapons and sanctuaries of the fundamental type, that of the heart in the spirit, not of the head detached from the heart:

The one loses himself in abstractions, in cleverly twisted words, in contests of logic and in mental gymnastics, while the other focuses his whole mind on the Living God and on the salvation of his soul. The one is abstract and dead, while the other is practical and alive.

OPEN QUESTIONS

A few key figures loom large in the scramble to automate the construction of these towers still faster than they might fall. Musk recently, in his chat with Tucker Carlson, named one: Google co-founder and former CEO — and international fugitive from US Virgin Islands subpoena, pursuant to its federal lawsuit against JP Morgan for the firm’s role in the Jeffrey Epstein ordeal — Larry Page.

The Tesla CEO said Page "got very upset with me about OpenAI" — the company Musk helped found as a competitor to Google's AI efforts.

"When OpenAI was created, it did shift things from a unipolar world where Google's DeepMind controlled like three quarters of all AI talent to where there is now sort of a bipolar world of OpenAI and Google DeepMind," Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson during an interview that aired on Tuesday. "Now we're at least seeing OpenAI is maybe ahead."

Musk said that he hasn't been able to talk with Page "because he doesn't want to talk to me anymore."

Why so serious?

Elon told Tucker he’d “talk late into the night” with Page about AI safety, a habit that led him to perceive that “Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough."

He wanted to created "digital superintelligence, basically digital god," Musk said. The Tesla CEO said it was "the last straw" when Page called him a "speciesist" for wanting to implement safeguards to protect humanity from AI. A speciesist is a term for an individual who believes all other living beings are inferior to humans.

Musk said his disagreement with Page ultimately motivated him to help found OpenAI. Though he left the company in 2018 and has been critical of it ever since. 

Most recently, Musk announced that he plans to create a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."

TURN THE PAGE

Digital superintelligence, digital god, humans inferior — all very plausibly Lord of the World material. Yet why, if Musk is so right to shudder at Page, was he aced out for control of OpenAI by Contestant #3, Sam Altman, currently hard at work (when he’s not funding motherless human reproduction) convincing Congress to let him capture AI regulation via the AI equivalent of the Atomic Energy Commission?

Cullen O'Keefe, an OpenAI research scientist, proposed in an April talk at Stanford University the creation of an agency that would mandate that companies obtain licenses before training powerful AI models or operating the data centers that facilitate them. The agency, O'Keefe said, could be called the Office for AI Safety and Infrastructure Security, or OASIS.

Asked about the proposal, Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, said a trustworthy body could "hold developers accountable" to safety standards. But more important than the mechanics was agreement "on what are the standards, what are the risks that you're trying to mitigate."

Perhaps Musk lost control of OpenAI because of his more “modest” ambitions — but what does it mean when shooting for a truthmaxxing chatbot tasked to grasp the whole cosmos counts as aiming low in AI? On what basis are we to trust that plan will work? Because, as George W. Bush admonished a wayward reporter uncertain about the so-called Surge in Iraq, “it has to”?

Is there no one in tech at a level of serious agency who currently grasps that the so-called nature of the universe (being the creation of a God Who is “ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same,” unknowable through mere knowledge and intellection but revealed and manifested through His outer disclosures to us and our inner experience of the heart in the Spirit) is itself not maximally knowable by even a truth-seeking intelligence, especially one that is in fact an automated simulator of intellect, and not that of a living human being created by God?

Or is there such a person in tech, but not yet?