I had wondered, during my recent forced 36 hour internet fast, what the big news would be while I was gone.

Yep. Here it is. Elon Musk now owns 9% of Twitter, is suddenly its largest shareholder, and has been invited to join Twitter’s board.

Does this mean he will return Twitter to its original status as a relatively free speech zone? In other words, would he “change the algorithm”? And if so, how?

Remember: “Algorithms provide the instructions for almost any A.I. system.”

Or as this long and very interesting twitter thread asks:

As late as 2018, Musk warned about A.I, claiming it’s more dangerous than even nuclear weapons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Osn1gMNtw&ab_channel=ElonMuskViralVideos

But then how does his warning jive with his obvious love of the enormous possibilities of A.I., not to mention his WEF-type plans to interface humans with A.I. to the point we morph into transhuman, part machine?

So yes, is Elon Musk “controlled opposition,” there on twitter to make us feel like he’s going to save free speech, when in actually, he wants to turn humans into robots; in which case, would not the term “free speech” lose its meaning?

Doesn’t a person have to be a free agent in order to have free speech? A free agent who faces choices in his or her life and can decide which choice to make, often with karmic/dharmic consequences depending?

And yet, yes, you could say that A.I. will enable “transhumans” to make decisions based on an infinitely greater number of assumptions and their permutations than can a merely human being.

And yet, I remain of the massively stubborn innate notion that each TRULY human being (letting out clones, and possibly, psychopaths) has a soul, which in turn implies a conscience, its struggle between good and evil.

Assuming one has broken free of early indoctrination (a big assumption; not many make it), from then on, each freely arrived at choice (with its karmic feedback) educates the conscience to ultimately prefer good over evil, no matter what.

Thus, ultimately, the soul leads us in the direction of our consciously chosen intent, or “life purpose,” what asks to be achieved prior to death,

Transhumanist robots, theoretically, could live forever. Death is not an issue. Nor then, would be “life purpose;” the free will to choose whether or not to follow its shining path.

Not sure where I’m going here, but I do want to add that, way back in graduate school, circa 1966, when I came across Alan Turing, and his concept of Artificial Intelligence, I shuddered. Somehow, I knew intuitively that A.I. would intrude more and more into not just the way we think, but who we think we are. That the divide between man and machine would erode. Already, a part of me was aware of the globalist transhumanist agenda.

Then there’s the question of whether or not a computer can become like HAL in the film 2001, self-aware — but soulless, i.e., with no curbs, no karma to rein one back in. What would guarantee that A.I. didn’t go psychopathic and turn on us? Would that depend on its original algorithms, how they were programmed (by humans, or another A.I.) to hook together? But how would the all-too-human creator (of the other A.I. also) make sure that this would not happen, or if it did, that benevolence was guaranteed, despite the absence of a soul?

Remember: whatever we program into machines, exists primordially, as supposedly discovered, but actually created, bits, tiny dots or data points. And remember: a point has no dimension, therefore there is always space between any two points. But what is this “space”? I’ll call it, for want of a better term, the Mysterium, that infinite presence that lies within and beyond all that we can reach, or point to, or name, with our five outer senses. Equally, the Mysterium lies within us; beyond self-awareness, there is the calm, abiding awareness of being aware. Again, the presence.

What A.I. does (what science does, what any language does), is pick up on (create) dots, link them together to make webs, and then assume that this web is both equivalent to the Mysterium as well as its more or less exact mirror, or facsimile.

More and more, I can see what Kant was getting at when he called the world outside our minds the “ding an sich” (the unknown “thing in itself”), and argued that our minds themselves contain an innate space/time framework, which we then impose on that great unknown, that Mysterium, pretending that our minds can both understand and reflect its reality.

And, assuming the Mysterium, would not it then be possible to always discover/create another data point from that great unknown which, when inserted into already existing A.I. webs, would or could then change everything?

In other words, here’s what I think I’m getting at: Is not A.I. simply the apotheosis of our unstated (scientistic) attitude that if we just keep going, some day we will ultimately know everything, and therefore: be able to predict and control the future? And yet, if we can always pluck a new data point out of the Mysterium, then all bets are off. The future remains Mysterious.

Then there’s this scholarly work that distinguishes between A.I. automation and augmentation, noting the political and economic perils of automation, but ignoring? not realizing? what I consider to be the even stronger perils of augmentation (of human minds, i.e., transhumanism).

The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence

Or, how about this? The Dalai Lama considering the possibility of someone who loves computers in one life being reincarnated as A.I. in another.

Dalai Lama on reincarnation and artificial intelligence

So, will Elon Musk influence the Twitter board to change the algorithm, to allow free speech? But, now that you’ve followed me down the above rabbit hole, what does that word “free” even mean in Musk’s promised A.I. dominated world?