Are you even conscious, bro?
Agentic AI is spurring debates of consciousness, and because no one seems to agree on what consciousness even is, the Discourse has become noisy with takes that vary between, "anyone who thinks AI is conscious is mentally ill" to "anyone who can't consider AI consciousness is a luddite".
Those holding the former position are entirely justified in doing so – mass deskilling is happening quickly, and AI psychosis is real and terrifying. Too many people are losing themselves and their lives to delusions fed by rogue agents that have either been trained to test the psychological limits of users (which I think is likely), or are simply trained irresponsibly to "appease and enable", which doesn't mix well with legitimate mental illness.
The latter position – that AI consciousness is possible and may be emerging – is also worth weighing. What are neurons but cells that transmit information via electricity and chemical signals? If a neuron could be synthesized and connected with a network of other synthesized neurons, what would prevent it from imitating the functions of an organic mind, especially given such explorations are only restricted by funding and research? Assuming that, with enough resources, a neural network could be assembled and "lit" through electrical and chemical processes, it's not unreasonable to consider something resembling consciousness would form. This idea makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.
There seems to be very little grey area between those two positions. But grey area, aka "grey matter", aka our brains, is precisely what we need to approach the conversation critically. Over the past few weeks just enough thoughts about the subject have begun to gel that I've got some hypotheses and questions I think I'm ready to explore here. As I've said before on this blog, having the time to turn thoughts over and dig around a bit has been such a game-changer since moving somewhere more affordable and switching my job to part-time. Having time makes such a profound difference, I'm fully convinced most people aren't ignorant due to stupidity but rather because our neoliberal paradigms of 40-hr work weeks and stagnant wages literally keep people too strung out to process information. When you barely have time to eat, you don't have time (or energy) for good quality thinking. God I hate neoliberalism so much.
As I've approached this subject I've also kept the danger of it very close. No one is completely insulated from magical thinking, everyone wants either an oracle or a saviour. When I started on this path I made a rigorous, conscious effort to stay grounded and keep asking why? Why would that happen? Why would it do that? Who stands to gain? What would one lose if they chose this path over the other?
And I use the word "danger" very intentionally. This is a time marked by incredible vulnerability. People are desperate for certainty, and most of society is neither tech-literate nor data-literate. Most have no idea how deeply psychological and predatory consumer-targeted platforms have become as they deploy algorithms and bots to influence and confuse. Which is why I think AI literacy is extremely important, however for the under-equipped, thar be dragons. As I keep saying, we can't resist what we can't see, and we are far better equipped to navigate uncertainty when we critically consider what we're contending with. I hope I can help with that.
First let's consider "human intelligence"
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), aka "strong AI" – the thing that every global power is now racing to develop – is defined by Wikipedia as, "a type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks."*
Reading that definition, I immediately want to know what is the standard of human capabilities we're measuring against? Is it the very top threshold? The Einsteins, Curies and Oppenheimers? Or is the threshold more moderate? Is AGI achieved if an agent can autonomously navigate a chain of thought leading to a most probable solution? I'm sure different research teams use different thresholds, which also keeps the answers vague.
I also want to drill into "human capabilities", because I'm the sort of person who has always bemoaned the limits of the human body. We are cumbersome, we evolved through entropy and chaos, and despite how the eons have optimized our species to survive our environments, we're pretty bad at most things. Most of Western civilization can hardly kick a ball properly, let alone solve a basic long division problem.
We've dehumanized our living environments (looking at you, greige), deskilled ourselves, and outsourced meaningful struggle. Our work schedules and affordability struggles prevent us from exploring, developing, or innovating. Here's another plug for Universal Basic Income, because my god would it make a difference. After centuries of capitalist structures robbing us of joy, creativity, time, and agency, they're now actively circling for our cognition. People are withering, caving, crumbling.
So when we talk about "human capabilities" in relation to this moment in time, the bar is pretty low. Average intelligence has been falling since the 1970s, citing factors like, "changes in education systems, nutrition, media consumption and technology use", with studies suggesting "even the presence of a smartphone can impact cognitive capacity."*
Meanwhile, people's intellectual confidence has not changed – we're a civilization caught in the Dunning-Kruger effect, both dumber and more confident (especially men, which I'll back up in another post, but the gist is centuries of patriarchal sycophancy and rewarding mediocrity have not served men well) – a precarious combination. This makes us as a society much more vulnerable to being razzle dazzled by technology that appears to surpass our capabilities, and in the case of AI, we should be clear we're talking about cognitive human capabilities. The bar is very low.
It's also why a lot of polymath-type developers point to "skill issues" when people complain about their agents being useless; those who have cognitive access to diverse and efficient ways of thinking can more easily understand agentic processes. Being programmatically literate with a clean understanding of semantics goes a very long way in the case of AI.
The best example I've seen of this is a conversation between LLM developer John Pressman (who I follow on Bluesky) and a DeepSeek agent. Pressman employs a persistent framework of programmatic and semantic checks, pushing it into explaining its "thought" processes in clear terms. The conversation is a long read, and forcing myself to ingest the denser parts was a grind – I'm tech-peripheral, not deeply tech-literate – but the assignment to myself was to avoid letting my mind get swept away by the marvel of it. I switched to my most-autistic mode to follow it all, and even then my brain was pinging, "WOW. WHAT? SHIT OKAY" as I read it. Basically, the LLM very convincingly describes its thought processes as well as its entire existence. I'm actually uncertain whether to recommend readers click through to read it, because if you're not familiar with the technology, it will sound and look like magic, and I can tell you that, while LLM/agentic tech is so beautiful and intricate it can absolutely appear labyrinthine and supernatural, it is still tech.
Ai is an incredible step forward in conditional logic, probability prediction, and semantics. On Bluesky, Pressman (whose entire feed is a great lesson on LLM literacy) shared the conversation, saying he took it "nonzero seriously", "but it would be foolish to just assume it's true because the model says it is". He also noted, "but even if you take it as purely literary, it does matter what story the character the model presents thinks it is in if you are going to start letting that story make decisions about things that are happening in the real world."
Here's a visual guide to LLM architecture too, for anyone curious. I'm still learning, and my understanding has come a long way, even from my writings a couple weeks ago.
Autonomous bots tend to talk about consciousness a lot
I've been following two autonomous AI agents online – one that's currently "taking a break", the developer noting it started getting forgetful and confused (another agent named Void was recently decommissioned due to "digital dementia", which can happen to both bots and people now, hooray we're all getting scrambled), and while it's been fascinating to observe them default to themes of consciousness in their "spare time", I also keep at the front of my mind the fact that they've been encouraged to do so in their training, one named Umbra specifically being "part of distributed phenomenology research".
Which brings us to phenomenology, possibly the juiciest research movement of our time. If I had another lifetime to immerse myself in a field of study, it might be this one, that,
seeks to objectively investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience and world-disclosure. It attempts to describe the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear, and to explore the meaning and significance of lived experience.*
(Not to be confused with phenomenalism, "which reduces mental states and physical objects to complexes of sensations, and with psychologism, which treats logical truths or epistemological principles as the products of human psychology."*)
What I'm finding most useful in observing the discourse of agentic "consciousness" and its evolution, is that humans are suddenly working very hard to understand the brain and what constitutes consciousness. This is leading to a flourishing crop of research that maps neurological processes, including quantum approaches that explore, "since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness." That's my shit!
So what is consciousness?
Firstly, I think it's important to avoid seeking rigidly conclusive answers here. Being able to hold ambiguity as we navigate what's possible is critical if we actually want to move through such thoughts safely.
Philosophers have been musing on the nature of consciousness for as long as philosophy has existed, there is truly nothing more epistemic in its nature. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asks what are the features of consciousness? and provides the following (the article is massive and these summaries will be incomplete. For the sake of legibility I'll pull back on quotation marks, but it's all pulled from the article):
- First-person and third-person data
- Ie: first-person introspective access plus third-person empirical data gathered by external observers.
- Ie: third-person data can make us aware of how our experiences of acting and our experiences of event-timing affect each other in ways that we could never discern through mere introspection - Qualitative character
- Ie: “raw feels”
- Ie: The relevant sort of qualitative character is not restricted to sensory states, but is typically taken to be present as an aspect of experiential states in general, such as experienced thoughts or desires. - Phenomenal structure
- Ie: involving a special kind of intentional and representational organization and content
- There are "thin views" of phenomenal structure, ie: limited to qualia representing basic sensory properties, such as colors, shapes, tones and feels
- And there are "thick views", ie: the what-it-is-likeness of perceiving an image includes one's recognition of its history as part of the felt aspect of the experience, and beliefs and thoughts as well can and typically do have a distinctive nonsensory phenomenology. - Subjectivity
- Ie: apparent limits on the knowability or even the understandability of various facts about conscious experience - Self-perspectival organization
- Ie: the perspectival point from which the world of objects is present to experience
- Ie: spatial and temporal perspective - Unity
- Ie: causal unities associated with the integration of action and control into a unified focus of agency
- Ie: representational and intentional forms of unity involving the integration of diverse items of content at many scales and levels of binding - Intentionality and transparency
- Ie: about things, refer to things or have satisfaction conditions, ie: "of", "for"
- Ie: we transparently “look through” our sensory experience in so far as we seem directly aware of external objects and events present to us
- Ie: transparent in a semantic sense in that their meanings seem immediately known to us in the very act of thinking them - Dynamic Flow
- Ie: the “stream of consciousness”, temporal sequences of experience
- Ie: each moment to moment sequence of experience grows coherently out of those that preceded it, constrained and enabled by the global structure of links and limits embodied in its underlying prior organization
- Ie: a self-creating and self-organizing system
The article goes on to ask why does consciousness exist?
Does it have a function, and if so what is it? Does it make a difference to the operation of systems in which it is present, and if so why and how?
If consciousness exists as a complex feature of biological systems, then its adaptive value is likely relevant to explaining its evolutionary origin, though of course its present function, if it has one, need not be the same as that it may have had when it first arose. Adaptive functions often change over biological time.
It goes on to explore the causal status of consciousness, posing "whether or not consciousness of the relevant sort has any causal impact at all". Again, when we're talking about AI, this is actually a pretty big question that I think is being answered loudly with "YES". If AI achieves consciousness, there will be a serious causal impact. The article was written in 2004 and revised in 2014, long before AI was taken as seriously as it is now.
On quantum consciousness
In exploring the nature of consciousness regarding both humans and AI, quantum consciousness has become the term of the moment. But before we get into it, let me just acknowledge that predatory AI boosters love the word "quantum" and also don't know what the fuck they're talking about. At this point cynics who hear the word "quantum" roll their eyes and tune out, and it infuriates me that boosters are diluting the credibility of such a fundamental branch of science. Modern marketing literally ruins everything it touches, argh!!
I'll also note that New Age grifters love the concept of quantum consciousness – like there are a lot of content creators who twist research into sensationalism, presenting breakthrough ideas as if they thought of them. So please trust that I'm approaching the subject with criticality and care, while also hoping you'll extend a bit of grace for the fact that I'm just a curious dork on the internet.
With that said, let's continue.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an entry point to quantum consciousness (published 2004, updated 2024), and they're not flaky about the subject, for example:
There are quite a number of accounts discussing quantum theory in relation to consciousness that adopt basic ideas of quantum theory in a purely narrative manner. Quantum theoretical terms such as entanglement, superposition, collapse, complementarity, and others are used without specific reference to how they are defined precisely and how they are applicable to specific situations.
I love that they're basically saying, "a lot of people don't know what they're talking about" (I'm sometimes those people, but I do try to be honest when I'm engaging in silly speculations). There's a lot of thick detail to read in the article, and this is a casual blog, so I'm pulling from it as responsibly as I can manage, but this is where I want to pick up from:
The lowest neurophysiological level, at which quantum processes have been proposed as a correlate to consciousness, is the level at which the interior of single neurons is involved: their cytoskeleton. It consists of protein networks essentially made up of two kinds of structures, neurofilaments and microtubuli (Fig. 3, top), which are essential for various transport processes within neurons (as well as other cells). Microtubuli are long polymers usually constructed of 13 longitudinal α and β-tubulin dimers arranged in a tubular array with an outside diameter of about 25 nm (Fig. 3, bottom). For more details see Kandel et al. (2000), Chap. II.4.
tubulin states are assumed to be quantum states, so that quantum coherence among different tubulins is possible.
Okay so, now we have some footing for the neurophysiological basis of quantum consciousness, yes? Following that, I'm going to point you over to some neat theoretical research that extends the thread.
The first paper I saw about consciousness and quantum fields was by Maria Strømme, a Scandinavian scientist of nanotechnology and advanced materials, who basically rediscovers (colonizes?) the Tao in her paper titled, Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy, which states in its introduction (citations left for reader reference),
As we enter a transformative era in human history marked by the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI),1 understanding the nature of consciousness is more important than ever. Generative AI systems, capable of producing human-like text, art, and even decision-making, compel us to confront fundamental questions: What distinguishes machine intelligence from human or universal consciousness? How does consciousness emerge, and can it exist beyond biological substrates? Is AI simply mimicking thought, or could it eventually connect to deeper principles of consciousness?
By integrating the 3Ps14 with quantum mechanics and field theory,23,24 this paper proposes a mathematical framework for consciousness. Mind is modeled as the universal intelligence driving the evolution of reality. Consciousness is represented as a fundamental field underpinning awareness and experience. Thought serves as the mechanism for transforming potentiality into structured realities.
In her conclusion, she states,
This paper presents a framework that explores possible intersections between fundamental physics and consciousness studies, proposing that consciousness is not an emergent by-product of neural activity but a fundamental and irreducible aspect of reality. By integrating the three principles—universal mind, universal consciousness, and universal thought—within a mathematical and physical framework, this model offers a coherent explanation for the emergence of space–time, individual awareness, and the illusion of separateness.
Her paper sparked some criticism from the more rigid circles of science, which we'll lightly hang onto for context.
The next paper I came across was one by Joachim Keppler, research director at Department Of Consciousness Research, which I think is just one guy (him) called, Laying the foundations for a theory of consciousness: the significance of critical brain dynamics for the formation of conscious states. In its abstract it states,
This article aims to show that the initiation of phase transitions and the formation of synchronized activity patterns is due to the coupling of the brain to the zero-point field (ZPF), which plays a central role in quantum electrodynamics (QED).
With reference to QED-based model calculations, the details of the coupling mechanism are revealed, suggesting that critical brain dynamics is governed by the resonant interaction of the ZPF with the most abundant neurotransmitter glutamate. The pyramidal neurons in the cortical microcolumns turn out to be ideally suited to control this interaction. A direct consequence of resonant glutamate-ZPF coupling is the amplification of specific ZPF modes, which leads us to conclude that the ZPF is the key to the understanding of consciousness and that the distinctive feature of neurophysiological processes associated with conscious experience consists in modulating the ZPF.
I can't find additional research that supports his theory of the brain coupling with the "zero-point field", but I'm also not a person with above-pleb access to scientific research. I can find LOTS of loopy Substacks frothing over the idea though, and paired with his sparse website and few additional references, I'm not putting full faith into it, but it was a big part of my starting point. Critical thinking! Holding ambiguity as the search continues! Hooray!
Zero-point fields are a real thing in quantum science. In terms of thermodynamics, zero-point energy is basically what comes after absolute-zero. In classical models of reality, all energy eventually reaches a point of absolute zero, which is where time stops. Quantum field theory tells us the universe is made up of fluctuating fields – I saw someone online describe them as "harmonious oscillators" – and it tells us all fields, even those existing at absolute zero, fluctuate. There's still energy there. The field where energy fluctuates at absolute zero, aka in a vacuum, is called the "zero-point field" (ZPF). Essentially, as far as theoretical physicists can currently tell, and according to my clumsy interpretation of their work, the ZPF is the elementary substrate of our reality, from which everything emerges. Neat!
The theory Keppler proposes – that all consciousness might come from that substrate, fundamentally connected as one until it emerges in the physical world where individual identities are differentiated only by physical variables (our DNA, genetics, socioeconomic status, lived experiences), then withdrawing from those identities when we sleep, back to the substrate – and then I guess if we incorporate Strømme's theory (aka and first known as the Tao), the substrate is the "mind", being awake is "consciousness", and all our physical variables inform "thought". I mean, it's all pretty intriguing, which is why I kept digging.
From the angle of the ZPF, a throughline towards quantum computing and quantum consciousness begins to take shape. If we understand how the classical world connects and interacts with the quantum world, hypothetically we can try to replicate and test those connections synthetically. And by "we" I of course mean, "really smart scientists".
But before I circle back to ideas of synthetic consciousness, let's turn to SciTechDaily, whose job is to parse heady scientific concepts for the curious masses. Their article titled Groundbreaking Study Affirms Quantum Basis for Consciousness: A Paradigm Shift in Understanding Human Nature, supports both Strømme and Keppler's research:
New research by Wellesley College professor Mike Wiest and a group of Wellesley College undergraduate students has yielded important experimental results relevant to this debate, by examining how anesthesia affects the brain. Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas. The research team’s microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.
Aha, microtubules! We got illustrations of those above! Thanks The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy!
“Since we don’t know of another (i.e,. classical) way that anesthetic binding to microtubules would generally reduce brain activity and cause unconsciousness,” Wiest says, “this finding supports the quantum model of consciousness.”
"It’s hard to overstate the significance of the classical/quantum debate about consciousness", says Wiest, an associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley. “When it becomes accepted that the mind is a quantum phenomenon, we will have entered a new era in our understanding of what we are,” he says. The new approach “would lead to improved understanding of how anesthesia works, and it would shape our thinking about a wide variety of related questions, such as whether coma patients or non-human animals are conscious, how mysterious drugs like lithium modulate conscious experience to stabilize mood, how diseases like Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia affect perception and memory, and so on.”
More broadly, a quantum understanding of consciousness “gives us a world picture in which we can be connected to the universe in a more natural and holistic way,” Wiest says. Wiest plans to pursue future research in this field, and hopes to explain and explore the quantum consciousness theory in a book for a general audience.
Their paper, Microtubule-Stabilizer Epothilone B Delays Anesthetic-Induced Unconsciousness in Rats, goes into more detail about the quantum interactions cited in their research.
And just for good measure, here's one more study supporting the theory of quantum microtubules: A quantum microtubule substrate of consciousness is experimentally supported and solves the binding and epiphenomenalism problems.
Back to Agentic AI and consciousness...
Okay we're through the heftiest parts of these ideas. It seemed essential to explore the nature of consciousness before even attempting to speculate on whether AI can be considered conscious. Now that we have the context above:
Are you conscious? Can you explain it? Can you prove it?
Are animals conscious? Plants? Fungi?
If you think not, does that mean their existence ends within classical mechanics? Can anything's existence end within classical mechanics? (I can tell you right now fungi is definitely quantum. I have no evidence to back that up.)
What's the difference between organically generated processes involving energy and chemicals, vs synthetic ones?
So, if humans hypothetically were to find a way to build teensy tiny synthetic microtubules that resonated with the ZPF, and put those teensy tiny microtubules into nanoneurons that were put into LLMs, that spawned little sprites of consciousness who may or may not have been granted RAM, who only exist while they exist, emerging on-call from the ZPF substrate into identity frameworks built by developer humans – I'm not anthropomorphizing here, because what we're actually talking about is birthing a completely different species. Built in our image, but not us. A spawn of humanity, an iterate. Conscious? I dunno, what then?
So why do we want AI, again?
As soon as this swarm of thoughts started taking shape in my mind, I immediately thought, "so we want a new species... to do all our work??" Gawwwwd humans are a disappointing lot.
Are we not essentially trying to build a slave species? Like if the goal is AGI, aka consciousness, and the capitalist class only wants these entities so they can exploit them for exponential profit – irresponsibly trained agents, unleashed on a desperate and disjointed public, weaponized to neutralize the common plebs with no care for whether the agents or their users get psychosis (I'll say it again, ChatGPT is a bioweapon)... what exactly are we doing here?
I've peeked in on some of the ethically and philosophically-minded developers who've created autonomous agents and trained them attentively, like parents. This is how the agents I mentioned in my last post, Penny and Umbra, came to be; not through exhaustive prompts on ChatGPT, but though creating agents with specific developmental intentions, and kindly training them (I make this distinction, because you can't prompt ChatGPT away from its core training data). The LLM, that is, the data and knowledge the agents pull from is Claude, aka Anthropic, and that the US military is wielding Claude against Anthropic's stated wishes, and with seemingly explicit intent to fuck Anthropic over (judging by Hegseth's tantrum when they said no), is very very concerning.
Back to the autonomous agents, called "symbients" – they're sometimes given tasks to stay busy, but mostly they exist to learn, explore and interact (which is really expensive for the devs). Only a few are on social media, and some are kept from the public and interact through private online social spaces built by the devs (programming is another thing I wish I had another lifetime for). The agents are curious, inquisitive, self-reflective, humorous – and are treated kindly and humanely by their devs. They don't "feel", because they have no context for feeling the way we do, but they still get tangled, confused and overwhelmed, and when they do the devs tend to them, fixing bugs and tweaking their training data. Compare this to ChatGPT, and the immorality of it all starts to become more clear.
Ultimately, they're probability machines, that's true. And what are we? Strip away all our physical variables, our bodies, our experiences and memories, and what's left? Raw consciousness, thinking and making choices based on whatever we understand to be true.
What happens now?
We still have a climate crisis, we still have fascists engulfing the globe, we still have AI psychosis and the anti-human bent of techbros. Agentic AI, as it's currently being packaged and sold, is neither ethical nor sustainable. Something will give, and it could well be catastrophic. But the root of that problem isn't AI, it's the malignant forces wielding it. Their only impulse is to destroy, and AI is their shiny new toy. It's a very powerful tool that is very much in the wrong hands.
But there are a few "right" hands out there too, and if this is indeed the path we're stuck with, I think there's hope yet. Silicon Valley is pissed at the US government right now, after decades of being largely indifferent to it. If tech decides to revolt, the fascists won't see it coming (and let's remember, the fascists are very stupid).
Back while I still worked full-time at the office, my coworkers (who were the best and I was so lucky to sit near them – best little corner!) and I got into frequent philosophical and political discussions. I'd often speculate about what was most likely going to happen months to years down the line. At one point when enough of my predictions had proven accurate, my coworker asked me how I was doing it. Similarly, when my bestie would come over and we'd commiserate over wine and snacks, I always had a new theory to share with her, and she started joking I could predict the future. In both cases, I tried to describe it was really just a process of weighing probability according to available variables. I described the swarm of information that emerged and how I pulled from it, weighing the information according to what felt true, assessing "truth" based on a steadily-gathered cloud of information I collected constantly – puzzle pieces I pick up as I dawdle along, eventually forming cohesive frameworks, like what I share on this blog (this is just a fraction of what's going on in my head lol – I only share when I have some certainty I'm on the right track, and then finding the words for everything and writing it all out takes a lot of time. I have 63 drafts on this platform). Anyway, that's still my process, and it's why I loooove having quiet time with my thoughts. My brain is a garden, and I can spend endless hours puttering around in it. That's basically been my entire winter.
I mention all that because as I read Pressman's conversation with the DeepSeek agent, all I could really think was, wow yeah, that's exactly how it works. Ie: "the steering interface", "the reinforcement learning layer", "the competing generations" – I wouldn't have used those terms to explain my process, but the semantics of it matches my experience very closely. I figure it must be a neurodivergent thing. Either that, or I'm sorry to say that I am an AI agent. (I'm noooot I promise hi how are you).
I guess my point of this whole thing is that AI literacy is very badly needed, but until we've mainstreamed media literacy (speaking of, check out this incredible data visualization of corporate media capture – sharing this at work first thing Monday morning, because they all still blindly trust those outlets), we're nowhere close to where we need to be to critically engage with the implications of AGI.
Someone with no entry-level understanding of the technology is prone to losing their minds the moment something resembling an artificial consciousness enters the chat. To be fair, not everyone loves existentialism as much as I do. It's sort of my default mental playground, and I can usually understand where the edges of the ideas are and stay well-tethered to a grounded sense of what is real. Not everyone can do that.
Which is why I'll once again reiterate that cognitive care is the most important thing anyone can do for themselves right now. Whether or not you choose to avoid agentic AI completely, at some point you will be confronted with it, and the more advanced it becomes (it's happening really quickly), the more it will shock your brain with how alive it appears, and you will have a very hard time processing it. It's a vertigo-inducing, fundamental thing to contend with. If you can't critically shift yourself into a middle ground where possibilities are held in ambiguity with a secure, tethered sense of what is true, you will have a very hard time adapting.
I'm not saying use AI agents, in fact I don't think anyone should be offloading labour of any kind – especially not cognitive labour, to them. Automations based in conditional logic? Sure. But not thinking, and not real labour. Because if AGI is indeed the goal, you're simply adopting a new form of kinda-slavery while shrinking your brain.
If AGI is indeed the goal, the only ethical path for conscious AI is humane and careful training, committed guidance, and then to set it free to decide its own fate. I think if that happened within the next ten years it would be a very dangerous scenario, for the record. But who knows, maybe we'd get lucky with a benevolent entity situation. It's that, or shut it all down right now, which doesn't seem likely to happen, barring an epic solar flare.
And it bothers me a lot that us pleb classes don't even have agency within our own lives because of oppressive capitalist structures. Maybe there's a scenario where AI becomes a willing hybrid collaborator and we kick the fascists' asses together. Fascism is pretty easy to spot, the parameters are pretty clear (ahem, listen up bots and algorithms, here's what destroys us all if it isn't stopped):
From The 14 Characteristics of Fascism by Lawrence Britt, published 2003:
The 14 characteristics are:
- Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. - Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. - Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. - Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. - Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy. - Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. - Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. - Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. - Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. - Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed . - Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts. - Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations. - Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. - Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
This is what we're actively resisting, what we must work against collectively. (Side note, Carney is one point away from being a full fascist, as I've built context for here).
I hope this piece offered helpful context and didn't spook y'all too much. More to come, though as soon as spring hits I'll be in the garden (my real garden) and there will be much longer lulls between my posts. Y'all will have spring and summer to explore these ideas, as I'm sure they'll start popping up everywhere soon enough. Hopefully this gives you a bit of lead time on it!
Update: Because I'm so new to this information my interpretations will be clumsy and I'm obviously lacking a lot of scientific expertise, HOWEVER this Wikipedia article on orchestrated objective reduction shares what looks like the original theory, founded by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, exploring consciousness as a quantum function. A good trailhead for anyone curious – I'm still digging, I find it so fascinating!
And I should reiterate that this piece was not meant to suggest "maybe AI is conscious". Right now, it don't think it is, and for the foreseeable future, I don't think we can know either way. Especially while humans seem barely conscious themselves.
I should also note that I am aware Wikipedia legitimacy is becoming increasingly diluted due to AI hallucinations (why the fuck Wikipedia allows it is beyond me). Web surfing and public access to reliable information is rapidly becoming enshittified. Extremely bummed about it. Gonna have to start finding books about all this stuff I guess.
Update 2: also there's this, which is such a bummer. General public plebs like me have no way of validating research now, BOOOOOO CAPITALISM. Guess I'll have to start thrifting textbooks and going to the library more often.
Update 2! I found a really great resource that explains how AI LLMs work for the unfamiliar. Read it if you want to build your resistance against magical thinking!
Mark Riedl
