Can a master speak about the recent developments in generative artificial intelligence? For example, Chat GPT, and touch on what is the highest potential for this technology, and what potential concerns or dangers we should be aware of?
Answer from the Ascended Master Saint Germain through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 Easter Webinar.
Well, let’s first step back a little bit and look at technology in general. What is the higher purpose of technology? As I have said before, even in my last couple of embodiments, I clearly saw that as long as people spend as much time, as much attention and as much energy on just making a living, just making their physical bodies survive, they would not have anything left over to follow the spiritual path and raise their consciousness. I clearly saw that although in the long term there are different ways to achieve this. In the short term, the only way to achieve this was through technology, which, of course, had to come through science.
You see how when you look back at how people lived even 100 years ago and certainly 200 years ago, most people, who lived in farming communities, had to get up very, very early in the morning to feed the animals. They had to work in the fields, and when they finally could go to bed in the evening, they were so tired that even reading a book would be way too much for them, even if they could read. Which, of course, many could not. What has happened since then is technology has been used to give people shorter and shorter working hours, shorter transportation, more help to cook more quickly and do many other things, which saves time. This has freed up people’s time from these basic survival tasks.
Now, you may say, of course, that many people in today’s world feel busier than ever, because as they have gotten more and more free time, there has also been more and more things that are pulling on their attention. And, of course, much of this pulling on people’s attention is fed by technology such as the internet, television, radio, books and so forth. Nevertheless, you can see that people, at least in the more affluent nations, have the option to use their free time on personal growth, personal development, even following a spiritual path.
And you do see in many of the modern nations that more and more people are beginning to focus on personal growth, coaching, mindfulness, and many other things that are aimed at growing spiritually. They may not even call it spiritually, but they are growing personally, expanding their consciousness. This is the purpose of technology from a higher perspective, and in this perspective AI technology can be said in some way to be just taking this a step further, because the more AI technology you have, the more efficient technology will become, the more it can take over certain of these repetitive tasks that people have to perform. And that will again set people more free to focus on other things.
I know you can always debate whether it takes work or jobs away from people, but in the long run it actually will not be so that technology in general or AI technology, specifically, will make people obsolete. There will always be a need for people because there is a limit to how far you can take AI technology.
Now, we can look at the flip side of the coin which in its most extreme aspect is nuclear weapons. Why did we release the knowledge of how to split the atom and create a nuclear bomb? Well, partly because we saw that people were not transcending the duality consciousness fast enough, and you had these clear polarizations in the world between the Soviet Union, the communist bloc, and the freer democratic nations. So there was a real danger of war after war after war, and therefore, by releasing the nuclear technology, there was a whole new consideration that came into nations contemplating going to war. And that is: “If we go to war with a nation that has nuclear weapons, what could the war potentially escalate into? And could that lead to not only our own destruction but the destruction of the planet?” There were actually people in the Soviet Union who saw that if our goal is to spread communism to the entire planet then we cannot do that by destroying the planet in a nuclear war.
I can tell you that there would have been several very, very devastating wars after the Second World War if nuclear technology had not been released. You can say that the not so constructive aspect of technology is to bring situations to a more extreme level where people are forced by the potential of technology to reconsider and thereby learn some of the lessons that they have not been willing to learn voluntarily. You can say that one aspect of technology is that, in the School of Hard Knocks, it makes the potential knocks harder, so people have to think before they act.
And in this respect, AI technology also has a role to play, because there are people in the world who are investing in or putting their life’s resources, their attention and work into AI technology because they think they can create an actual conscious entity—they can create technology that is self-aware. This is a dream, and it has for a very, very long time, been a dream of the fallen beings. They have pursued it in various ways. One of them is what we, especially in a previous dispensation, talked about the mechanization concept, where they seek to reduce human beings to a state where they have forgotten their Christ potential, they have no discernment. They are blindly obeying their leaders. It is what Jesus called the blind leading the blind.
They have, as you can see in some nations of the world, they have some success with this, that people will not question their leaders, that they have made sort of a deal with their leaders who say to them: “You stay out of our daily lives, we stay out of politics.” And you see many examples of this throughout history where you have had nations where there was a small elite ruling a nation, and the large segment of the population were virtually slaves of the elite even though they may not always have seen themselves that way because they were deceived by some, for example a religion, to think they were doing some important work, which was really just to fulfill the ambitions of the leaders. The Egyptian pyramids were, to a large part, driven by some leaders desiring to create a monument for themselves even though they were not created as tombs originally. And many people followed this, and many people followed it because they were thinking they were giving some important service by doing this, and you see other examples of this throughout history.
Of course, another aspect of this dream that the fallen beings have of having these obedient slaves that never question them is, of course, to create a machine that does not have this “troublesome” ability that human beings have that you can step back, look at your situation from the outside, and ask: “Why am I doing this?” To take Jesus’s dictation: “I Am the open door, which no man can shut”. People can be very far trapped in the death consciousness or the mechanization consciousness, but they can never completely lose the ability to recognize the Christ.
The fallen beings have attempted to create this race of human beings that cannot recognize the Christ, and even though they have created large groups of people that find it difficult to recognize the Christ, they have never been fully successful. This is actually demonstrated by Jesus’s mission because many Christians believe that he appeared in Israel because it was the Holy Land, but he actually appeared in Israel because it was the place in the world where people had the most difficulty recognizing Christ. They were so much into the death consciousness, so trapped in the death consciousness, that they were the people who had the most difficult time recognizing Christ. Therefore, he wanted to set forth his example there, because if he could reach some of the most blind people then there was hope for others as well. It actually demonstrates that the fallen beings cannot be successful this way.
The other way they have pursued this is, of course, to try to create machines that do not have these moral considerations that human beings have, and therefore will blindly follow orders. It is the dream of having the super soldier as a robot who will kill anybody it is told to kill because it is not like a human being. And this is, of course, a dream that the fallen beings have been pursuing for a long time on other planets, and there have been examples of planets where they have been able to create something similar to what you saw, for example in the Star Wars movies about the clones, the Clone Wars of these cloned human beings who did not have any moral considerations. This was not created by cloning, it was created through technology, but nevertheless, the idea is the same.
There are many people who are not fallen beings who still are fascinated by this technology creating this dream. You have from Star Trek the person called Data, who was supposedly a robot, and science fiction, of course, is full of examples of this. There are many people that are trapped in this dream, and if you take what I just said, you can see the contradiction. You can see the flaw behind the entire concept that you could ever create a machine that is self-aware. What did I say the fallen beings wanted? They want to create a machine that has the intelligence of human beings without this “troublesome” moral consideration. But what gives you intelligence in an outer way at least is the brain, and the complexity of the brain and its functioning, but what gives you wisdom and moral considerations is your higher being. Your soul as they would say traditionally, but as we say, the Conscious You.
You have what the fallen beings call the “troublesome” aspect of human beings because you are self-aware. It is perfectly possible to create a machine that has a seeming intelligence, which you can already see in the chat robots and other computers, but you can never create a self-aware machine, which, of course, is not what the fallen beings want, and they know this, but they have fooled many people into thinking that it could be possible to create a self-aware machine. And this is what drives many people’s interest in the field, even though they are not fallen beings.
You see that the dream behind AI is just that. It is an illusion, a complete illusion. There are even scientists today that are neurologists or physicists who have started publicly saying this⎯that we will never be able to create this. There are scientists that have come out with a new way of explaining the world by saying that the world is not a result of an unconscious mechanical process, but it is a result of the actions of conscious agents. They are even talking about this, there are conscious agents at different levels of consciousness, different levels of awareness. There are some that are beyond the human level that also have an influence on why the world exists and why the world is the way it is.
This is a new development that springs because some scientists have experimented with either artificial intelligence or neurology and they have seen that there is not actually any scientific evidence behind these materialist claims. And therefore, they have become open to saying: “Well if we cannot explain what we observe within the materialist paradigm we need to look beyond it”.
This is one of the potentials of this technology. You can take the chat robots on the internet and you can see that what is happening right now is that people are becoming aware that there are things out there on the internet that were just created by a machine, an algorithm. And that algorithm was programmed to gather information a certain way.
It may be that for certain practical purposes this can be useful and as I said it can be useful, but it does not mean that you can count on this being the full view of an issue or even a higher view of an issue. Because people are beginning to become aware that these algorithms can only gather information that is already there. They do not come up with something original. They cannot think creatively. They can gather information⎯they can make conclusions based on the information that is available but if there is no information about it, what is the algorithm going to do? It is operating on data information. It cannot operate on no information or pull information out of a hat.
This can also lead to more of an awareness that you cannot trust everything on the internet. And this is very necessary because you have the concept of troll farms where certain nations have these installations with a lot of computers where there are people who are sitting there posting things on social media that are based on the propaganda of that nation—what they want to propagate out there.
And more people are becoming aware of this and AI, the chat robots will make people more aware that you need to consider when you are on the internet⎯who are you talking to? Who are you interacting with? Where are you getting information from? And what is the background for this? What are these people trying to do?
There will in the future be much more of a debate about the fact that you can create a chat robot or another algorithm that can present quite sophisticated information. But what are the criteria that are programmed into the algorithm for how it selects information and how it presents it? And this leads to the awareness that when the criteria or the parameters for the algorithm are programmed, the person programming them can actually do this with a specific agenda—can have a specific agenda of presenting information that is very selective. For example, you could easily create a chat robot that could present you with information about the war in Ukraine entirely from a Russian perspective. And could disguise it in various ways but make it seem like Russia’s intentions for moving into Ukraine were genuine and benevolent and that their actions have also been benevolent. And it is only because the Ukrainians have resisted that people have been killed. You could easily create such a robot. And, of course, many other causes that you could promote this way which has to some degree already been done but it has so far mostly been done with these human troll factories where there are human beings posting things on social media or the internet.
Again, technology when it is taken to the extreme can cause people to rethink and re-evaluate. And eventually this can lead to the point where people begin to realize that you have to be very discerning, very critical about where you get the information from that you use not only for important life decisions but also to create your world view. And this can ultimately lead to a point where people start thinking: “Well how do I find a really reliable valid basis for my world view?”
And this can lead them to see that ultimately it can only come from beings who are beyond the human level who do not have an agenda, who do not have egos, but it can also only come if they raise their consciousness.
In other words, AI technology is basically gathering information that is already there, but that information is created by human beings and it is created by human beings in a certain level of consciousness that have a certain agenda. There comes a point where people, more people than the spiritual people today, will begin to evaluate: “How do I find information that is not colored by these human agendas, these human opinions and beliefs? How can I find something that comes from a neutral source?” This is at least some of the potentials for this AI technology. More could be said, it is a large and complex topic but at least there is a foundation for re-evaluating the entire dynamic of this technology.
Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels