Hello everyone! For those of you in the US and Canada: I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. I took off a few days, which I don’t do often, but am happy to be back writing the newsletter. :-)
Two news items for you today: the first concerns the ongoing merger of Christianity and transhumanism, which I’ve written about here and here. The second examines a recent article published in Rolling Stone about the Zizian “murder cult,” which explains Eliezer Yudkowsky’s bizarre tweet from last month claiming that he’s never “knowingly” had sexual relations with a minor. Taking these in order:
Your Own Artificial Jesus
Joe Rogan thinks that Jesus might return to Earth in the form of artificial intelligence. After all, he says, “Jesus was born out of a virgin mother. What’s more virgin than a computer?”
This obviously ignores the fact that the Bible never says anything about Jesus being born a second time!
Still, this is interesting because, as I argued in my book Human Extinction, “eschatological narratives can be very elastic, able to fill, like a fluid, the various containers in which they are placed.” That is to say, they are simultaneously elastic and rigid: the ultimate ending of the narrative (victory of Good over Evil, heaven on Earth, etc.) and the events leading up to this grand cosmic triumph (the rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, Millennial Kingdom, etc.) are prewritten by the Almighty. But there are enough scriptural ambiguities and absent details for believers to map the general framework onto contemporary affairs in novel ways.
For example, nuclear weapons were quickly integrated into Christian narratives of the end, with people like Ronald Reagan explicitly claiming that they fulfill certain prophetic verses in the Bible — e.g., Ezekiel 38:22, which references fire and brimstone raining down from heaven. In the 1980s and 1990s, when scientists came to believe — for the first time since a paradigm in the Earth sciences called “uniformitarianism” was established in the 1830s1 — that large asteroids could slam into Earth and cause mass extinction events, Pat Robertson picked up the idea, writing in his 1995 book The End of the Age about a massive astronomical body hitting the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles, causing a “massive tidal wave, fires, earthquakes, and other disasters that kill millions of people.” He then describes world tumbling “into political, social, and economic chaos — the biblically prophesied Great Tribulation.”
Now we’re seeing the same thing with AI. As I write in Truthdig, some Christian apocalypticists are claiming that the Antichrist will be aided by, or will be, an artificial superintelligence (ASI). Steve Bannon has explicitly made this claim. Suddenly, those perplexing old verses in holy scripture make sense: how else could the Antichrist fool so many people and gain global power without some kind of superhuman abilities?
Rogan’s claim, then, is just another instance of combining, mixing, and remixing ancient narratives about the world’s end with novel developments in geopolitics, science, and technology. Expect more of this in the future, as eschatological themes in transhumanism and traditional Christianity continue to merge into new monstrosities.
Yudkowsky and the Zizians
On November 15, AI doomer extraordinaire Eliezer Yudkowsky posted a bizarre, rambling statement on X. He covers wide-ranging topics like how many of society’s laws are unreasonable; how he’s never read the Unabomber Manifesto; how he’d respond if someone were to ask him, “Hey, so, do you use a safe word in your own BDSM relationships?”; and whether he’d give 14-year-olds LSD. Seriously.
He then mentions the Zizians, a subcult of the Rationalist cult that Yudkowsky founded through his community blogging website LessWrong. My podcast cohost Kate Willett and I have covered this in detail, if you’re curious. Yudkowsky proceeds to say that “one of their FOUNDING BELIEFS, is that I had sex with somebody underage (mutually desired sex, according to the Zizians).” Toward the end of his soliloquy, he writes: “To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18.”
In response to this, I tweeted:
That was my best guess: Yudkowsky was clearly, I thought, trying to get ahead of a story about the possibility that he committed statutory rape. We now have an answer to my question: Rolling Stone just published an excellent account of the Zizian cult, led by Ziz Lasota, which has been accused of multiple murders. Referencing Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the article says this:
In January 2019, Michael Vassar, the former president of MIRI, met with Lasota and Danielson in hopes, according to one person present, of dissuading them from suing CFAR for gender discrimination. Neither mention a potential lawsuit in any of their writings, and no suit was ever filed, but over the course of their conversation with Vassar, they learned a critical piece of information: that MIRI had reached a settlement with a former employee who had waged a protracted campaign to smear the organization as a “cult” and a ”pedophile ring.”
The revelation shocked Lasota and Danielson to their cores. (“THEY PAID THAT FUCKER?!” Lasota remembered shouting when she heard.) She was stunned that the organization she’d placed so much faith in would use money she’d donated — the little money she and her friends had — not for time-sensitive, potentially world-saving research, but to pay off a disgruntled employee.
Ziz subsequently sent MIRI and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), an email that read in part:
MIRI paid out to blackmail over statutory rape. Theft of donor funds to deceive donors. CFAR helped cover it up, implemented in part by their president and founder pushing anti-rationality, and anti-ethics, and perpetrating religious abuse, and using antitransfemist memes as a tool for gaslighting …
Rolling Stone reports that Ziz then
wrote a second email, this one addressed specifically to Yudkowsky. … In it, she invoked allegations spread by a disgruntled ex-MIRI employee that Yudkowsky had committed statuatory [sic] rape, and she further accused him of starting an AI arms race that would exterminate life on Earth.
So, now we know why Yudkowsky posted that seemingly random statement about never “knowingly” having sex with a minor. As the article notes:
After Rolling Stone reached out to Yudkowsky for comment, he posted a lengthy response on X denying Helm’s allegation, and writing, “To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18. I have not had sex, at all, with the particular person the Ziz cult thinks I had sex with, whom I am not naming here for reasons of their own privacy.”
This reminds me a bit of the “apology” that Yudkowsky’s pal Nick Bostrom published after I revealed to someone at the now-defunct Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), founded and run by Bostrom, that I’d stumbled upon an old email in which he says that “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and writes the N-word. Trying to get ahead of the story, he wrote a comparably bizarre, rambling statement that left lots of folks scratching their heads, in part because he randomly mentions “eugenics.” Here’s a clip from the Daily Nous expressing this perplexity:
The reason Bostrom mentioned eugenics is because I also revealed to the person at FHI that my article discussing Bostrom’s email would also explore his long history of promoting eugenics. As with Bostrom’s “apology,” Yudkowsky’s statement on X seemed to only made things worse, as evidenced by the large number of quote-tweets responding negatively to his clumsy attempt at PR — some of which took the opportunity to remind people that MIRI accepted money from Jeffrey Epstein after he pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008:
That’s it for today! As always:
Thanks so much for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!
In other words, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the scientific community accepted that large asteroids could cause global catastrophes! Prior to this, when the uniformitarian paradigm reigned supreme, the consensus was that global catastrophes literally never happen. This may be surprising to hear, but it’s true! I discuss it in chapter 5 of Human Extinction.
Not to nitpick too much but... Canadian Thanksgiving is in October.
For some reason… the name Annie Altman comes to mind… gee… I wonder why…