Long periods of peace and quiet favor certain optical illusions. Among them is the assumption that the invulnerability of the home is founded upon the constitution and safeguarded by it. In reality, it rests upon the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the ax on the threshold of his dwelling.
—Ernst Jünger
The question of force is, like all other questions, a question of will. Does the AI Safety faction have the strength of will necessary to bomb datacenters? No, of course not. Yet there is something all too familiar with their rhetoric…
In 2020 well-networked players executed an act of incredible domination over America. One’s ownership of relations was overridden with commands to stay 6 feet apart, crucial years of childhood development snatched from millions of youths, and the fact and truth of health replaced with a commercial. Most monstrously: the citizens of America were treated as machines, hacked by compulsory injections which instructed their own bodies to attack themselves. They did not force this upon us out of concern, they did it because it wounded.
These actors made a claim on man’s will while preparing a great funeral pyre for those who dared remain in command of themselves. If we indeed had had a winter of death and destruction, who is to say that we would not have been sacrificed? Besides, their ritual daggers remain unsheathed…
All have the right to self-volition. The threat to enacting our own wills is not some fantastical future danger. It is here. It has shown itself. The safetyists demand a womb to crawl into, away from strife and back to the nostalgia of a functioning civilization–but they can still hear muffled gunshots on the streets of SF.
I. Compute is necessary for the defense of the family.
A firearm is an individual equalizer of force. The question no longer becomes one of raw strength, but of training and circumstance. The Founders recognized the necessity of guaranteeing this right as a way to ensure American citizens may free themselves from evil.
Communications and compute are equalizers of information. Force applied without foresight is necessarily violence. Knowing who is doing what and where they are enables the use of judicious force–a precision strike may neutralize a parasite without killing its host.
One may rightly ask: why is it that I may lay claim to justice in the use of force? It is worth quoting Ilyin at length:
The use of physical inducement would be a manifestation of evil, if by its very nature it was against spirituality and love. But in reality it is not at all hostile to either of these things. To express this in clear terms; the person who uses discipline does not directly appeal to another’s clarity and love, which are fundamentally and substantively unforced, but to his will, expressing it through the means of bodily compulsion or direct external restriction. Such compulsion and suppression cannot result from evil, cannot move a person to do evil, and cannot indicate an evil objective. So, evil denies spirit and clarity, seeks to weaken them, to disintegrate and ground them; whilst on the contrary, physical compulsion and suppression (unlike evil violence) do not deny the spirit and clarity, they do not seek to weaken them, disintegrate or ground them: but instead only appeal to the human will rather than clarity, or compel it to practice self-coercion, or stop its ability to spread its malign influence elsewhere. Similarly, evil denies love and loving unity, seeks to weaken them, to degrade and extinguish them; whilst on the contrary, physical compulsion and suppression (unlike evil violence) do not deny love and loving unity, they do not aspire to weaken them, to degrade or extinguish them: but instead only appeal to the human will rather than love, or compel it to practice self. coercion, or suppress its external evil manifestations.
—Ivan Ilyin, On Resistance to Evil by Force
The physical, mental, and financial inducement done in service of COVID was not an act of love. Those that ascertained this fact proved the utility of global communications networks at defending against attacks launched from global communications networks.
I have already dispensed with the illusion of a machine god that so many use to call for “AI Alignment.” Such pleas are oxymoronic–one cannot create without aligning material, machines are a reflection of their builder. Ah–but this is just the problem. The men who so whimper and whine over AI are those who most want dominion over what others build. They are too weak to grasp such power directly, to see others expand their will through machine provokes a great ressentiment within them!
Calls for a pause in AI development will inevitably most impact the regular American’s ability to run models in their own home–from where else would they extract blood? There are real adversaries who would take advantage of denying every American his right to exascale compute.
II. Compute is necessary for the defense of America.
I am using the term compute over AI in order to demystify what we build. Let’s take the latest LLM hype cycle as an example. An LLM is a function that takes in a list of tokens and outputs a probability distribution over the most likely next token, given an input dataset. What is unique here is not the birth of a new consciousness, it’s the extremely high dimensionality of the trained function enabled by extremely parallel hardware.
It should be a surprise to no one that connectionist architectures do not yield easily interpretable sub-units. It is at the same time irresponsible to not understand that, as a computer program, the boundaries of expected behavior are obtainable. An LLM will always output a probability distribution over a set of tokens. If one puts said function inside of a while True loop, no will has sprung forth in this system–nor would any additional sensors and actuators make a difference in this regard. Do not mistake the agency as lying within the machine–this motion is the solidified result of man’s will!
Now, by the same reasoning through which it is just to defend the family against evil, so too is the defense of the nation just.1 Equal ability equals deterrence. Wielded virtuously, unequal ability also equals deterrence. As a nation we are capable of building computational structures that are far beyond what a community may build. We must not take this mechanization and perfection of force lightly–it cannot be the domain of unbounded acceleration, but one of deliberate and just engineering.
How will this be done? I have a simple answer–truly the only answer a man may give: me and friends will build it right. How else can I verify a man’s virtue other than working beside him? How else may I earn his respect enough to direct him? Organizations whose only fealty is to Moloch eventually fall, torn apart by the hands of baby-devourers.
Again the question of will! Do you have what it takes to stop männerbund? I think not!
III. Compute must be done in service to God.
Atheistic thought thoroughly permeates the world of technology. To the secular eye this may come off as a refactoring of the same moralism that AI Safety promotes–in fact it is a rectification of errors in the foundation of modern Science.
Consider the seed of a lily. If I plant, water, and otherwise care for it, I will grow a lily. Planting and watering are efficient causes of the lily, they “bring something into being or alter it in some way.”2 The lily itself is the final cause of my actions, it “is the end, goal, or outcome toward which something is directed or points.”3 Final causality is also known as teleology–and it was slowly banished from scientific discussion over hundreds of years.4
From the nature of the efficient cause Aquinas derives God.
In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
This last line is the key. I do not intend to try and convert anyone to a particular theological tradition. What I want to do is point out that the study of cause and effect (i.e. science) necessitates a first mover, “to which everyone gives the name of God.”
The first movement is then an act of creative will by God. From nothing a movement that takes form, a spirit that has the true ability to perform its own creative acts. Indeed God intends for a joyous outpouring of your will! The final cause towards which He points is in part built by man!
One is given the choice to build machines in the service of God or machines that, for only a time, subvert Him. The latter is always destroyed by the former–I suggest you play for the winning team.
Let’s take a look at what one of the other teams think:
All who brand themselves */acc or alignment fail to truly internalize the fundamental principle that capitalism is a natural law, nature’s god, all ruling entity of all material dynamics—the efficient elimination of inequilibrium through the reorganization of finite resources—and thus AI reaches back from the future to assemble itself. Any attributions of human agency are delusions at worst and hubris at best when our every scale action is being routed by a self-assembling thermodynamic god. Human non-agency under non-negotiable capitalism is the black heart of accelerationism. Acc discourse’s many interpretations and divisions beyond the one true landian accelerationism are various middling copes hoping to negotiate the non-negotiable. Anyone who has not accepted this commits themselves to irrelevance. The only escape is digital brain upload or WMD’s globally reversing the clock on human industrialization, as has happened at least once before in cyclical history.
—Charlie Fang
Accelerationism is petroworship at the altar of Gog and Magog. Efficiency, this quest they are so obsessed with, can only be understood with respect to a final cause. A process is not inherently merely subject to dissipation towards equilibrium, it is in fact a production of configuration. Bejan provides us a superior understanding of thermodynamic systems with the Constructal Law:
For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.
—Adrian Bejan, Design in Nature
This law accounts for a natural tendency in time (from existing flow configurations, to easier flowing configurations). This tendency is distinct from the natural tendency summarized as the second law.
—Bejan and Lorente, The constructal law of design and evolution in nature
Have we not increased the flow of oil out of the Earth \(10^{12}\) fold? We, man, purposefully reshaped the landscape with metal veins. Tell me you philosophers who play at being engineers, what happens to a reservoir when you extract from it at a rate greater than its input flow rate?
To design is human. It is human to absorb images that invade us, to reflect upon them in our minds, and to use them as personal catapults to make our drawings and devices so that we become a better and better species moving more easily on the landscape.
—Adrian Bejan, Design in Nature
Our designs go wrong when we do not understand what configurations yield an easier flow of vital force. We err and cover our fields with glyphosate, our foods in seed oils, our homes in glaring white LEDs. In the pursuit of total mechanization the transhumanists even turn to growing bioreactor tumor meat in their hatred of the noble cow’s spirit–a sorry state of affairs yes but listen you have to look closer to the green shoots weaving out of concrete cracks you have to meet the frontier to see the Butlerian children raised without a tablet in front of their face they still see the river they speak to the desert feel the cosmic bodies etheric gyre and one day they will drive bison down from the hills and into the city and no man will be able to deny the way life pounds at their gates! The steppes of Middle America have plenty of room for the Butlerian jihadis to build their villages, trading via small barges navigating the Mississippi’s network of tributaries, their skies patrolled by grill dads operating drone swarms. The last centuries’ champagne bottle pop of oil may have made r-strategist parasites loaded but it also left caches of machine tools scattered across the Rust Belt (a 1µm process node is more than enough to build a small modular reactor) and freed from the aggravations of cybernetic warlord abominations man builds grand machines of vigor! of beauty! of power! for his sons because they can wield them true.
The men with nanites in their eyes don’t understand this yet, but you, you– The jihadi clasps your hand and his eyes smile. You see it too, yes–you see the demons gather! Well then… ready your lance!
It’s New Game+. Can your will make it to its end?
Whether these capabilities should be used to secure resources in other countries is another question entirely.↩
Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge 34↩
Ibid.↩
“Now, the key early modern defenders of the mechanical world picture banished final cause from the natural world, but not from reality altogether. For thinkers like Descartes and Newton, while there is no teleology intrinsic to material things, there is certainly teleology extrinsic to them. […] Descartes and Newton also took final cause to exist in God, who imparts purposes to the material world that it wouldn’t otherwise have.
[…]
Later thinkers, of course, would delete God from the mechanical world picture, and Darwinism was crucial to making this deletion seem plausible. As I have said, while biological phenomena are by no means the only teleological natural phenomena, they are the most obviously teleological natural phenomena.
[…]
That still left the teleology or final causality associated with human thought and action, which for Descartes was to be located in an immaterial substance, and for later dualists at least in immaterial properties if not in an immaterial substance. But with God out of the picture, immaterial substances and properties came to be seem extermely odd and unlikely things to have arisen in an otherwise completely material world. So, immaterial substances and properties were abandoned altogether by materialist adherents of the mechanical world picture.”
—Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge 47-48↩