Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism

Artificial Intelligence (AI) took the world by storm in 2024 and has been rapidly integrated into nearly every facet of modern society including but not limited to politics, healthcare, education, and of course technology development itself. With nations engaged in a competitive economic and military-driven race to 5G, 6G, and beyond, the Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics, AI is being rolled out with little to no democratic participation or consent.

AI and technology are major drivers of the meta-crisis and represent a significant point in humanity’s evolutionary journey where the convergence of multiple crises work together to guide us toward a change of direction. Without this shift in conscious decision-making, we will likely face deep and continued social unrest, geopolitical destabilization, generational disconnect, and large-scale ecological and environmental degradation.

Unless and until we figure out how to redirect AI towards more useful and Earth-friendly goals, we risk losing many perceived benefits of modernity. In theory, AI could be a tool for positive change if its goals were properly directed, and its footprint significantly lessened. But humanity’s track record which has prioritized might over right and profit over service to life doesn’t bode well for a pervasive technology that will impact nearly every facet of our lives.

The applications that have been rolled out so far have been both alarming and troubling as AI is being used an accelerant for corporate and military-driven unsafe and extractive technologies that focus power-over, citizen surveillance, population control, and war. As we evolve toward a civilizational and systems value shift, Big Tech and the military will necessarily need to loosen their control over the development and deployment of AI and the patterns and limitations of how it will be used and by whom.

AI brings into focus many different issues, and forces clarity and wiser decision-making in many key areas. The following are just a few of the important issues AI raises demanding our attention:

AI requires the build out of massive data centers which consume enormous amounts of energy. By way of example, Microsoft will have exclusive use of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI farms. Largely because of AI, Big Tech giants are planning to triple the world’s nuclear capacity by 2025. Equally concerning, these massive data centers will require the production of AI chips and yet more rare earth minerals both of which will lead to more mining and extraction further aggravating geopolitical tensions.

Robots and AI are being integrated our culture, politics, way of life and our relationships with one another. They’re becoming the front guard for a new and unprecedented form of governance known as technocracy, which represents the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected officials operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view.

Governments around the world will be tempted to use AI as a means of social control and as a tool to suppress speech critical of their initiatives. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has cautioned about this rapidly advancing use of information technology to surveil and control populations cautioning that it threatens civil rights.

Technocratic governance is fundamentally anti-democratic and lays the groundwork for a new kind of authoritarianism that we as a species are ill-equipped to recognize and navigate. The Brookings Institution fefers to this form of governance as “digital authoritarianism”.

Technology and AI have taken center stage in the current theatre of global geopolitics. The application of AI to autonomous systems represents a quantum leap in lethality from the current devastating impacts of modern weaponry. US citizens are told that AI is an essential element in the race between China and the US for economic and military dominance. AI in conjunction with 5G, satellites, smart oceans, and other emerging technologies is changing the character of 21st century warfare. The mainstream narrative is that whoever emerges superior in algorithms and AI will also prevail in military conflict. AI will be at the center of advances in unmanned aerial, ground, and undersea vessels, “super-soldier” robotics, and Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs), all of which are designed to enable greater precision, speed, and more lethal warfare.

The hyper-connected world we now inhabit has, in many ways, only served to diminish the very connections that make us fully human. According to the Washington Post, the average American spends 90% of their time indoors and prisoners spend more time outdoors than children. Globally, people spend a daily average of 7 hours online. This shift from the physical world to the virtual has brought about many negative impacts, many of which are particularly harmful to children. Health effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, harmful free radicals, DNA damage, reduced fertility, learning and memory deficits, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological disorders, lack of exercise, bad posture, impacts on blood glucose levels, sleep, mood, as well as an epidemic of depression and social isolation. Increasing our use and dependence on AI does not bode well for the growing problem of screen addiction and psychosocial effects of technology writ large.

Like any other technology, AI tools have the potential to be used for social transformation and creative purposes. However, one should note that every problem introduced by technology generates yet another technology “solution” in an endlessly recurring spiral of yet more isolation, consumption, extraction, and war. In AI circles, there is a school of thought that says: “To fight technocracy and the negative uses of AI, we must use AI”. The current best practice model for such a “breakaway movement” comes from Taiwan where former Digital Minister, Audrey Tang is positioning AI as a tool to strengthen democracy and counter authoritarian influence. Tang wants to use AI technology for online meetings, or kind of citizen assemblies, to ensure AI’s alignment with democratic values.

AI is changing how we use the Internet. Search engines herd us toward specific “truths” as if every complex question had a simple multiple-choice answer. The implicit assumption that AI will provide the “correct” answer nullifies the whole point of a user-empowered search experience and significantly collapses our understanding of the complexity and nuances of the world, something we can ill afford to do if we want to move toward greater understanding and relationship among all beings, which will likely require greater intuition and less AI. It also radically reverses the original proposition of the internet – i.e. to become a freewheeling tool for inquiry and personal empowerment threatening to turn the internet into little more than a high-level interactive online encyclopedia.

Two alarming trends, transhumanism and technocratic governance, are being rapidly advanced by AI overwhelm while most of us have been relegated to playing cognitive catch-up. In the US alone, there has been a strong push from the Executive Branch to replace many government agencies with AI.

Transhumanist is an over-arching philosophy (some argue secular religion) that purports to use hyper-technology to transform the very nature of our lives on Planet Earth. It involves the desire and capability to control and alter the natural world at will. Transhumanism includes genetic engineering, cryonics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. It also encompasses technologies to “enhance” cognitive abilities such as brain implants that connect humans to computers in the hope of creating “super humans.”

Transhumanism purports to improve and perfect every aspect of daily life including healthcare, relationships, government, economics, and political structures. Many of the most powerful executives in Big Tech are avowed transhumanists and as such believe they alone know what’s best for humanity and have the power and resources to impose their value system on the masses.

The notion of corporations creating a super-human species when we have barely scratched the surface of understanding the full capabilities and essence of human consciousness and potential seems unwise and troubling, to say the least.

Gregg Braden elaborates further in the following video talk on what we risk losing with an AI and Transhumanism takeover.