Exploring / Exposing the Great Upset | Reset | Lockstep
“It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system; thought and mockery here and now are required to prevent the mechanists [technocrats] from building another.”
As we enter the Fall of 2025, and contemplate what fodder is yet in the offing for James Corbett's 9th Annual Fake News Awards, let us review the nominees and winners from last year's "8th Annual Fake News Awards" and ask: 1) Is it any wonder that 2025 has unfolded as it has? and 2) Is it possible to wake up and break out of the lockstep?
Despite the synonyms, someone chose the name artificial to precede intelligence and then to hype this “artificial intelligence” as a neutral, fact-based, logical arbiter of all things true and just — (an invention of men & womenthat someone else envisioned as the coming-god of “a single right answer”2) — an “omniscient intelligence” that could sort through all forks and fallacies and present the questioner with the one and pure truth. No more multiple-answer “bugs”3 that confuse, distract, deceive.
Now don’t misunderstand. AI can do marvelous things with sufficient training and programming by we “creatures made flesh”— we creatures who, from recorded time, have fallen, all too frequently, (like Cain perhaps) into the enticements of R.I.C.E.: Reward. Ideology. Coercion[/Compromise/Corruption]. Ego.4 Thus, recent headlines have made me ponder on the equivalencies of R.I.C.E. for our software servitors — servitors that some claim are bound to become our masters; yea, our superiors (except superiors in what?).
What causes AI to make things up (hallucinate?! as some characterize it10)? If AI has no “scruples” in making up fake court citations and cases, fake books for summer reading, fake resumes, etc., etc., are we fools to enshrine and trust AI in health diagnostics, as financial wizards, as educators, librarians, editors, pastors, summarizers, negotiators, and on and on? If humanshaven't much improved in their moral scruples over millions(?) of years, do we think AI (an invention and trainee of such flawed beings) is going to achieve perfection within another year or two or three of more exponential training?
For too long we have been programmed to trust in the potentials and miracles of AI. Maybe we should take time to listen to a few questioning voices:
Could it be that the namers of AI were unwitting wise men and prognosticators per the proverb of Confuscius?
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name”
which we seem to have unwittingly done. So, let us ask: How artificially intelligent is it to make things up that can be so readily fact-checked? How many geniuses have turned into our worst criminals? Are we being gas-fogged11 again so humans can do their natural man,12 “Cain-thing” (you know: "steal, kill, and destroy") and then blame some unaccountable AI?
