Does “AI” Stand for Amish Intelligence?

Smart Ass Take:

I came here to mock this and left mildly converted, which is both irritating and enlightening. When the CEO of a company that has made billions on a technology goes on record saying it may be a risk to humanity as a whole, and then ships the next version anyway, the rational response is not to upgrade. It’s to go find a barn. The Amish have been running the same experiment for about three hundred years: before you adopt a new thing, ask what it does to your neighbors and your soul, and if the answer is bad, don’t. That’s it. That’s the whole policy. Well shit. That’s actually brilliant. Perhaps if we had implemented a similar policy back in the 1890s, our technology decisions may not have screwed humanity so badly.

Article Excerpt:

Indeed, there may be no other way for people to save their souls from those who are trying to become as gods and building a hell in the process.

Article Summary:

Paul Kingsnorth, who writes the Substack “The Abbey of Misrule” (a name that already tells you how this ends), opens with the now-familiar spectacle of AI executives like Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk warning that their own products might be dangerous. Maybe it’s marketing. Maybe, more frighteningly, nobody actually knows what’s going on, including the people paid millions to know.

He argues these aren’t technical questions but spiritual ones. He drags in Marshall McLuhan, who sixty years ago predicted humans would become unwitting agents of an evolving machine intelligence, plus transhumanists like Martine Rothblatt (“we are making God”) and Ray Kurzweil, who says the answer to whether God exists is “not yet.” If the builders are talking theology, Kingsnorth reasons, the response should be theological too.

The solution he points to is the Amish and the more radical Mennonites, who judge each new technology by its effect on community and spiritual life and reserve the right to reject it. He doesn’t expect mass conversions to buggy ownership, but predicts that AI-free, fully human communities may become genuinely attractive, especially to the young, as the only way to save their souls from people building a hell while trying to become gods. Cheery stuff.

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