What's Left Over? Merge with the Demon

Beware the implantation of a synthetic conscience, crafted by others. Image Source: pinterest.

I have a theory that our religions mirror our levels of technology. This post continues my What's Left Over? series, which describes two contending spiritual stances - the materialist and the anti-materialist - which are appearing in response to the Technological Revolution.

Science and technology refer to ways of doing, while the arts and theology describe ways of being. Neither can exist without the other. Ideally, they are used in balance. But the burgeoning technocracy thrives on doing; it pretends to support the arts and organic freedoms, while actually discouraging them. As a result, technologists have to build simulated versions of being to make up for the shortfall. Their simulacra of moral sensibilities are poor substitutes for the true human love of nature and mystery.

Left unfettered, technocrats will construct your personality and life from the outside in. And while their creed is superficially moral and progressive, it is grossly materialist, anti-human and anti-humane.

If you thought corporations and institutions were already corrupt, and rewarded the worst aspects of your nature and exploited your best instincts against you, imagine what it will be like inside the corporatist technocracy, where their externalized conscience will come from a chip, embedded in your brain and communicating with your cerebral cortex by way of a neural interlace.

This fake, mechanized, embedded chip conscience is the foundation stone of what the people at The Boiler Room podcast call the "technocratic dictatorship." Elon Musk is its leading proponent.

Musk was once Silicon Valley's space cowboy and he had a romantic heart. In a 2010 interview, his ex-first-wife Justine struggled with the loss of Musk's original visionary, who became her own "private Alexander the Great." In 2016, he wasn't completely gone. He named one of his droneships, 'Of Course I Still Love You.'

In 2014, Musk warned against the advent of artificial intelligence as "summoning the demon." Now a shadow of his former self, in July of this year he stammered out his new agenda, a brain-chip interface called Neuralink. Neuralink will allow us to merge with the demon and to "stay one step ahead" of it. This is supposedly the only way to survive the coming Singularity.

Putting a Chip in Your Brain Will Not Make You a Superhero (or a god) (7 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

See all posts in the What's Left Over? series on materialism and anti-materialism in technological advancement.