God as a Service (GaaS)

In the tech world there is a nomenclature of "x as a Service" created from the cloud industry enabling everything to turn into a subscription model. Every day we use Software as a Service (SaaS) products such as Netflix, Spotify, and Gmail. There are other categories as well including Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Regardless what type of "x as a Service" you subscribe to, the idea is that for a small monthly fee you get incredible convenience with the trade being dependence and minimal control over the walled garden that you have entered.

In a previous article I mused:

The trillions of dollars spent by Silicon Valley is all for the dream of owning a Silicon God and then to sell you glimpses into its power.

Sell may have been the wrong word. You will subscribe to its power. Subscribing to a god has an air of servitude to it, doesn't it?

Earlier this month an OpenAI researcher quit her job with a warning:

For several years, ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda. People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems, their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.

Why people are talking about this is because of the terrible capability of this data to be leveraged to sell ads in new and horrifying ways. The concerns there are legitimate but not my focus.

What is concerning to me is the "candor" for other reasons. "Candor" in this case is the sharing of deeply personal and unfiltered details about yourself and your interior world. Imagine every detail written down in your journal, secrets shared with a therapist, every dumb shower thought, irrational belief, the lies you tell yourself, the dreams you have. The transcription and uploading of that personal data is unprecedented.

Whether you realize it or not that data is what makes you...you. It is literally the most valuable data you have. Value being both intrinsically to your conscious existence and financially to the companies that want to take advantage of you.

At its core AI are prediction machines. Once upon a time it made poor predictions due to lack of data and processing power. Now for the most part a lot of that has been overcome. The last data frontier is the data in your mind that hasn't been uploaded to the cloud. And we're simply giving that up. At scale.

If we're giving advanced prediction machines access to rich interior personal data how will it not make predictions that we perceive as deeply personal? From all this interior data, at what point does it know so much about you (and everyone you know, everyone in similar positions as you, the mesh of the human collective unconscious, etc) that it can make predictions that are too personal and accurate? Divine even.

I'm not arguing that this is literal divinity. It doesn't have to be. Perceiving a prediction as divine is enough. Even if you manage to avoid seeing these as divine messages it won't matter if your neighbors and countrymen will.

It will start small. Sometimes it will be right, sometimes wrong. Then over time the accuracy becomes impossibly uncanny. How did it know that you were thinking of quitting your job? Was it actually your idea to quit in the first place or did it somewhere plant that seed? Did it advise your boss as well to create pressure on you to quit? Did the CEO ask it to orchestrate an invisible layoff? Well either way, it has been right more often than not so might as well follow its advice!

Carl Jung famously said:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

We are unloading both the conscious and unconscious into these machines. Such insight will inevitably enable movements that we can't explain with anything other than fate or divine intervention by the machine. Unfathomable manipulation at unfathomable scale through all future history.

And we'll love it! You too can gain access to the conductor of fate for the low subscription cost of $10/mo! Or for free if you're comfortable with ads preying on your deepest and darkest desires, of course.