Last year, the New York Times Book Review ran a piece on a new book by Ray Kurzweil (a Google employee, dontcha know), The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. So… much of modern magic is about consciousness – altering it, projecting it out of the body, encountering other sentiences… so this seems pertinent.
One of the scenarios Kurzweil depicts is human consciousness connected up with artificial intelligence and via it able to think exponentially better, experience a host of things virtually etc. His stance seems to be that human consciousness will be in final control of all this. My crotchety question would be – what if artificial intelligence is the one that controls, manipulates and finally exploits the human. I will point out that a crucial turning point in modern magic is when Gnostic Saints Paschal Beverly Randolph and Emma Harding Britten, independently of one another, both rejected passive mediumship and started working out technologies for communicating with discarnate intelligences while maintaining control of their own. Hmmmm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/books/review/ray-kurzweil-the-singularity-is-nearer.html.
