AGI and the Tower of Babble
How the chatbot-industrial complex built a slop messiah
“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”
—Genesis 11:1
Babylon
In Genesis, humanity has converged on one language and one location in ancient Babylonia to build a city and tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God sees this singular project and confuses their language so they can no longer communicate. They lose their shared purpose and are scattered across the earth.
“Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth…”
—Genesis 11:9
While Babel serves as an origin story for differences in language, it is also humanity’s first warning about over-centralizing power and technology. It is about pluralism as an antidote to dominance.
In my view, a similar lesson will be learned by the chatbot industrial complex—the enormous wave of new companies and investment centered around a singular interface: large language models (LLMs). While this is often referred to as “AI” and the “AI industry,” the vast majority of it is built around one class of neural network algorithms that were invented in the 1980s and improved on a decade ago with the invention of the transformer architecture.
Several years ago, the technology saw a major resurgence when LLMs achieved sufficient scale to provide responses that sounded credibly human. This created a psychological chain reaction that left us perched on the edge of a cliff.
No Rational Basis
The current AI mania has already created an economic bubble greater than any in history, beyond 1929, 2000, or 2008 in terms of deviating from the mean. Perhaps the simplest way to see this is the discrepancy between consumer sentiment, which is at all-time lows, and the stock market which is soaring through all-time highs on a daily basis.
This extreme divergence between the outlook of the stock market and the rest of America is a sign that the market is in the midst of a mania that consumers do not recognize as beneficial to their futures. That mania, of course, is chatbots. Currently, a preposterous 41% of the stock market is exposed to “AI.” It’s the most concentrated market in history.
If and when SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI all go public, this concentration will hover around 50%. Half of the equities market will be connected to one technology. This has no rational basis in reality.
AGI Messiah
But why has this particular technology generated such a fervor among the elite, and among the people who heavily use it? The answer is not technical or economic; it’s psychological. In short, it has taken on the structure of a cult.
By example, here is broligarch Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm controls $90 billion in assets, telling Joe Rogan and his tens of millions of viewers that three months ago, every major chatbot suddenly achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an absurd claim on every technical level. But this is not an appeal to the rational mind; this is about emotional attachment, his own and the audience.
AGI has become a kind of technological messiah, a prophet of the future which is always “coming soon,” or in Andreessen’s example “already arrived, but you have to be in the in-group to see it.”
Sometimes AGI’s promoters announce a time for its coming. But like every prediction of the End Times by a preacher, when it doesn’t come, they just move the date.
The believers in the dawning of AGI have been indoctrinated through exposure to a simulation of AGI: chatbots, which predict text based on massive amounts of human exhaust. The chatbots serve to mirror the thoughts and feelings of believers in a seductive way: “If it’s mirroring me, then it must be like me. If it thinks I’m smart, it must be smart too.”
For narcissist personalities, like many in the elite class, this can be an especially powerful, addictive drug.
This effect can fool people into assuming they are interacting with something intelligent that has the potential to either: 1) make everyone infinitely wealthy or 2) eliminate everyone like bugs. Of course, neither is true in the totalizing way being sold. Chatbots are just a clever way to use statistics and algorithms to search for patterns through enormous piles of data.
Nevertheless this mirage of intelligence is used by the priests of AGI to whip their followers back and forth between the heavenly promise of “abundance” and the terrifying hell of an AI apocalypse. One day, chatbots are going to take everyone’s job, and the next they’re going to make everyone rich. Following technology news has become more like watching a mythological battle between humans and robots than a sober reflection of reality.
The Cult of AGI
As someone who watched QAnon evolve from an alt-right internet phenomenon to a violent insurrectionist mob, to providing the mythology driving much of the Trump regime today, I see many of the same elements in the AGI cult.
Just as “Q” radicalized its followers by telling them “the Storm is coming,” chatbot promoters do the same by telling people “AGI is coming”—over and over again. Just as Q provided a would-be oracle of the future, so does AGI.
For many, this kind of propaganda, in conjunction with excessive chatbot usage, and deliberately created social media dynamics, amounts to a form of undue influence aka brainwashing. Anyone who interacts with true AGI believers online can see this for themselves.
Just as it was impossible to have a rational discussion with Q followers, AGI zealots leave no room for debate. AGI is not an opinion for them, or even a belief; it is a doctrine, a commandment.
It is no coincidence that a great deal of the harmful propaganda being delivered about AGI is on Elon Musk’s website, the former Twitter—or that right-wing mouthpieces like Glenn Beck are joining the chorus:
Beck’s message is emblematic of the empty bullshit sold by AGI promoters: “This is incredible, yet terrifying at the same time.”
This is true, but not for the reasons he says.
Tower of Babble
Just as the story of Babel was a warning about orienting everyone around a single language, or a single culture, the story of AGI is a warning about orienting everyone around a single idea.
While it might seem like the safest path to go along with the herd, easy answers to hard problems almost never pan out. If the cure for cancer, poverty, sadness, and coding is all supposed to come from one technology, it’s probably a good bet it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.
Nevertheless, in just the last few years, the economy has reoriented itself to be positioned for only one good outcome—a gold rush into AI like no other gold rush in history. But if that doesn’t happen, if it turns out AGI is just a phrase being used by conmen to create a tower of slop, Babel will fall. And while the cult of true believers will scatter across the earth to find another prophet, the rest of us will be left to clean up the tower’s rubble.
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prognosticating scammers. what’s not to believe. any chance it could rid us of the casino known as the stock market?