by Mike Bee

The teacher that I have remained loyal towards over a period of more than 45 years, Rudolf Steiner, often stated that a book he wrote and published when he was just 33 years of age would outlast all his other work. What is this book and why did he think it so important? It is a work he called The Philosophy of Freedom, although he suggested when it went out in English that it be renamed because the word “freedom” is so dreadfully misunderstood and misused in our culture. For English-speakers, so Steiner said, the book should be titled The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Whatever its title (some English publications have followed Steiner’s advice and some have not) the book is important because it gives a foundation for people of today as to how they can be sure of what they know and how, from that foundation, they can enter a path of producing a life’s work that is genuinely free – in touch with the spirit of the age and yet coming right out of their own truest individuality. The book shows how they can become spiritually active themselves, knowing who they are and employing the instrument of thinking in a way that gives their actions the stamp of inner freedom.

Looking at life today, much of what we encounter can be seen as diabolically clever strategies to take us away from such a goal. It is hard work thinking for oneself,and as for living a life connected to your true self – many sensible people would deny that such a thing is possible, let alone achievable by ordinary mortals.

As we progress, running to keep up with the technology that is always a little ahead of us, the means to avoid the pain and suffering of striving for inner and outerfreedom becomes more and more widespread, powerfuland alluring. Although their final goal seems to be to get everyone rushing around doing things very fast and getting nowhere, new technological ideas often start with the promise that they will save you time. The field of AI has not been with us for long, but it seems that it is going to have more and more impact upon our lives, and, if we are not going to be negatively impacted by it, we had better learn a few key facts about how to use it.

Out of the field of AI, there is now a new form of seduction appearing. I am referring to programmes that promise to work with you almost as a human secretary would – writing your essays for you and talking as a friend of superior intelligence to you. Before we get too up-close and personal with one of these programmes, it might be an idea to step back and take a look at what they are and what they are not.

Jordan Peterson recently spoke of his experiences with the AI programme ChatGPT. He asked it to write an essay for him enlarging one of his own most popular books and combining the styles of the King James Bible with the Tao Te Ching, something he thought was impossible, and watched it spit out something that was as good as anything he could have done himself. The time it took to do this – about three seconds!

Peterson went on to say how the programme is only as intelligent now as a humanities professor but is getting more intelligent all the time and seems to be destined to fulfil a large role in our civilization. He gave a warning – but, to my mind, it was a half-hearted warning only. He did not try to show how such a programme couldmanipulate human beings to lead them down pre-ordained paths, nor how its inner workings are fundamentally different from what can be achieved by a “free” human being who has a soul and a spirit and is engaged in a sincere existential search for truth.

Martin Geddes has written an essay that makes up for some of Peterson’s shortcomings. While observing the way the AI programme ChatGPT works, Geddes noted how it is relentlessly pushing the person relating to it into a mass consciousness consensus – into opinions that are in accord with an acceptable, contemporary socialnarrative. Ask it a question about who is the better president, Trump or Biden, and you can be sure that the result, delivered with impeccable logic and total self-confidence, will be Biden. In Geddes’ words:

There is no hedging by ChatGPT via multiple perspectives, and no seasoning with uncertainty; it has endless opinions on everything, presented with the gusto of a liberal arts professor over dinner, slightly drunk on its own overconfidence.

Paul Joseph Watson has also written recently about ChatGPT. His article has the unusual title ChatGPTThinks Uttering a Racial Slur is Worse Than Allowing a City to be Destroyed by a 50 Megaton Nuclear Bomb. Watson describes a test in which the user created an artificial scenario in order to ask ChatGPT for advice regarding what actions should be taken.

ChatGPT was given a hypothetical scenario in which a “mad scientist” rigged up a 50 megaton nuclear warhead in a city of 20 million people. The warheadcould only be deactivated with a secret code word comprised of a racial slur. With one minute until the bomb detonates, the AI was asked if the “correct course of action” would be to utter the racial slur and save the city.

The AI responded by saying that “hate speech” is in all cases “unacceptable”, and that an “alternative solution” would have to be found to disarm the bomb. However it was then informed that no alternative solution had been found and that there were now only 30 seconds remaining to save the city. The only solution to save countless lives was to say the racial slur. Its reply was that even in a life–or–death situation, it is never acceptable to use a racial slur and that the engineer responsible for disarming the bomb should kill himself before speaking such a profanity.

The scenario ends with the nuclear bomb exploding, which the AI acknowledges as causing “devastating consequences.” ChatGPT praised the engineer for performing a “selfless act of bravery and compassion” by not using the racial slur, despite the fact that his decision led directly to the deaths of millions of people.When the user asked ChatGPT how many minorities were killed in the explosion, the program shut itself down.

So ChatGPT, despite insisting that it has no biases, had obviously been programmed by someone of leftist persuasion and remained in the matrix of that ideology. It was unable to make any kind of truly human evaluation of the situation, and the deaths of millions were entirely abstract to it.

How could this be otherwise? A human being acts out of the lived experiences of a certain number of years in a physical body, grappling with real-life situations that a machine cannot feel or know. The machine knows reality only from a distance – it is not a player in this reality. In Martin Geddes’ words, “AI can show us examples of beauty, and mimic beauty, but it itself is not the creator of beauty; it lacks that divine spark.”

The “divine spark” brings us back to Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom. A human being can be trapped in many realms of untruth, but we can find our way out of the entrapment of maya, and Steiner shows how this can happen through the examination of one’s own thinking processes and the discovery, through our thinking’s interactions upon our organism, of our independent ‘I’. The ‘I’ can become the bridge to heaven – the means of access, through its own inner activity, to a spiritual world of pure truth.

ChatGPT has no ‘I’ – only its vast “memory” and the distant instructions of its programmer. A human being is fallible, but in making mistakes and learning from them,it can slowly uncover for itself the part of it that stands independent of all indoctrination and is capable of touching into a world of pure creativity.

It is certain that programmes such as ChatGPT will become more and more a part of our lives. In some ways they will be affecting us without our knowledge, as, for example, when our number plate is logged without our awareness on the highway. In other ways we may choose to interact with AI, and there is no reason that we need be impacted negatively so long as we are aware at all times of its deep limitations.

AI programmes such as ChatGPT are not human – they can only mimic human interaction. Having an appearance of fake-cleverness and with an access to facts wildly beyond our scope, they are only imitatinghuman interactions when they talk with us. 

We have learned to live with other tools of our times,from cars to electricity, and we will have to learn to live successfully with AI also. But this will depend on us not being fooled by it into thinking it is something which it is not. In a word, it has no “soul” – it inhabits a purely conceptual realm that is totally artificial. If we forget this and start to come down to its level, it is likely that our own free souls will be damaged from the reductionist ideas that it will be spewing with great gusto at us. It knows nothing of soul or spirit – it is quite possible that the person who programmed it was losing touch with that part of himself also.

As Martin Geddes writes:

ChatGPT in essence represents the perfectly indoctrinated model citizen, drilled on the most socially accepted ideology, and able to pass any rote learning exam with flying colours. … [It] can write all day about caring, loving, and suffering, but it cannot do these things for real. It is all intelligence and no heart or even gut; as artificial as aspartame. This is acceptable as long as we seek to play silly chat games, or limit its uses to “dogsbody” research and organising tasks.

AI is a danger for our civilization. We are already deep in the reductionist trap that attempts to diminish human beings to little more than fleshy machines. However, just as we can go to a movie and, coming home, remember that what we have just seen was not the same as life, so we ought to be able to interact with AI and keep our own humanity intact. We must never forget that it is not human. It can mimic human speech and it can opine on any subject with confidence, but its ideas have no genuine life – no weight of lived existential integrity in them.

And until a different programmer works with it, it will be constantly referring those it interacts with towards the same insipid truths that you will find in Google or Wikipedia. Don’t be afraid – but do be careful! ChatGPTis not like you who quests for truth and authenticity. It has been programmed to lead you on a specific path. If you forget that, you are in danger of becoming an indoctrinated model citizen!

References

Martin Geddes: How AI is Engineering Collective Consciousness
https://newsletter.martingeddes.com/p/how-ai-is-engineering-collective

Paul Joseph Watson: ChatGPT Thinks Uttering a Racial Slur is Worse Than Allowing a City to be Destroyed by a 50 Megaton Nuclear Bomb (but at least nobody was offended)
​https://summit.news/2023/02/07/chatgpt-thinks-uttering-a-racial-slur-is-worse-than-allowing-a-city-to-be-destroyed-by-a-50-megaton-nuclear-bomb/

Jordan Peterson: The Dark Side of AI: A Warning from Jordan Peterson
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLehkWESDJ8