The Faustian Pact with Artificial Intelligence

These ideas find willing support not only in the USA but also among the Western elites gathered around Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. As part of their ‘Great Reset’, which was announced in July 2020 during the COVID-19 measures, Western societies — and, according to their wishes, the entire world — are to be transformed in the spirit of the new Liberalism 2.0, which some observers describe as ‘billionaire socialism’. Schwab and his co-author Thierry Malleret openly speak of the need to capture people’s consciousness since this is the only way to drive forward a major societal change. A massive green transformation of the economy, population reduction, and feeding people insects instead of meat for a ‘climate-friendly’ diet — ‘You will own nothing and be happy!’ is the mocking slogan of the Davos people. Here, the latest technological developments come into play, intertwining with strategies of censorship such as political correctness and ‘cancel culture’.

In the eyes of the transhumanists, humans do not possess a divine soul or free will but are merely an accumulation of algorithms — sets of instructions for solving a problem or an entire class of such — and thus are not only understandable like a computer but also programmable (i.e., manipulable). Political correctness serves as such an algorithm to restrict independent thinking and transform people into machines that obey the will of the liberal elites.

In the tradition of cybernetics, corporations like Google/Alphabet, as well as European governments, are interested in collecting as much data about their citizens as possible — not only to better monitor them as ‘transparent humans’ and thus nip dissident movements in the bud but also to better control them. Globalist companies like Google/Alphabet — whose name has become synonymous with internet searches — obtain this data remarkably easily and without pressure: billions of users feed the company’s search engine daily with their data, use their emails, etc., which Google then converts into cash, similar to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which thus know more about their users than they do themselves. The voluntary sacrifice of privacy and anonymity potentially turns ordinary citizens into fair game for internationally operating corporations.

The Israeli spy program Pegasus, used for total surveillance of a target person, led to the assassination of Saudi dissident Khashoggi. Also, the chatbot ChatGPT, which many people in Germany use for their homework, reports at work, or even scientific papers, benefits from the openness of its users — and thoroughly trains them out of independent thinking, which it takes over for them. In return, humans receive the ‘black wonders’ of comfort and voluntarily become slaves to artificial intelligence. But what is free today may cost tomorrow — and even chips like those from Neuralink are potentially not only used for treating diseases and enhancing human potential but also carry the risk of being hacked and subsequently remotely controlled. And the future concept of autonomously driving cars ultimately also has the potential for ‘autonomous’ car accidents, which then might be caused by secret services or governments hostile to oneself. So, we do not need to wait for the possible realisation of an AI created by human hands, which would then, as in the Terminator movie series, set out to exterminate humanity. We can already see in Israel’s war against Gaza how artificial intelligence (in this case, the program Lavender) identified 37,000 supposed Hamas targets — the majority of the 33,000 Palestinian dead were women and children. The latest episode of genocide against the Palestinians is also attributable to artificial intelligence. While undoubtedly the effects of a technology depend on the intentions of its developers — in the case of Lavender, for example, the deliberate slaughter of civilians — every form of technology also has an inherent logic. In the case of AI, it is the Promethean thought of transcending the limits of humans, where humans are literally replaced by technology, and in the end, nothing of them remains. This ultimately means that peoples are sacrificed on the altar of transhumanism and AI to the machine superhuman, whose often prophesied appearance is still at least very uncertain. But those who want to preserve the German people cannot easily join enthusiasts of the machine dictatorship like Nick Land.

In light of recent developments, it is by no means exaggerated when Vinod Khosla says that artificial intelligence today is of greater importance than the atomic bomb during World War Two. Accordingly, it is urgent to establish international agreements to channel its benefits into orderly paths, thus preventing the extinction of humanity by AI. In the long run, humans must be directed more towards their inner life, their spiritual and soul life, and away from the focus on the material. In German folk and cultural history, we find the Faust material again, which describes the conflict between faith and technology. In ancient Greece, it was the sculptor Pygmalion who embodied the human desire to create a being in his own image. This all-too-human desire is, however, hubris — so far, the pursuit of transcending the limits of humans and divine creation has ended in disaster. A proper view of humanity should not only strive for the observance of boundaries in foreign and immigration policy but also in terms of technology. Let us best remember the words from Goethe’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’: