Post #201: Fear and Trembling (Four Great Unknowns and Our Juggernaut Problem)

24 July 2026

     Our times seem to encourage fantastical expectations and doomsaying in about equal measure—partly for reasons of historical circumstance, partly because the inclination to play the prophet of infinite possibilities, or Cassandra, or Jeremiah, is so deeply rooted in our human condition itself. The phenomenon may be nothing very new under the sun, but the ease with which the most dramatic pronouncements can now be broadcast to all the world in the blink of an eye is so unprecedented that we find ourselves in quite a new situation.

     That AI in particular should stir up such waves of frenzy makes sense, given what an extraordinary innovation it already looks in the early stages—if not the greatest invention of all, then only because electricity was an even greater conceptual leap and milestone, very nearly the discovery of magic itself, as well as the basis for all more advanced technology, while without the discovery of antibiotics (and vaccines, and industrial fertilizers, etc. etc.) most of us would not be around to welcome or anticipate with dread the advent of the Great Golem. (Anyone inclined to challenge me on antibiotics and vaccines I defy to look up syphilis and smallpox.)

     Nor is it any wonder that some of the leading pioneers of AI should be so vocal on both sides. How could it be otherwise? It is they, after all, who have the know-how, and also they who are most invested. As global experts at the current center of attention, they are especially liable to a conceit that afflicts most accomplished professionals, namely the felt conviction that their work must matter more than anything else (or they would find something better to do). Thus the unleashing of what the AI wizards have wrought must be a matter of the utmost consequence for all the world, either promising or else threatening to transform human life beyond recognition, whether because it will solve all our problems (as per the boosters) or else because it puts the very survival of the species in jeopardy (as per the doomsters).

     Those who promise us a new Eden, courtesy of AI, and those who foresee hell on earth or Armageddon may sound very different, but they are reading from the same playbook, only in different directions, as it were. Either way it follows that “You shouldn’t waste your time on anything else,” as the likes of Roman Yampolskiy like to trumpet in interviews. Nothing else matters much anymore, you see, in view of what signs and wonders these techie-lifers have been blessing or cursing us with—symptoms of hubris only too familiar from other contexts, only taken to fever-pitch by the pace of recent technological advances and the storm-gales of creative destruction that are their economic concomitants.

     It might be helpful, at this juncture, to recall Plato’s Socrates reflecting in the Apology on how the most creative minds cannot be counted on to be the best interpreters of their own brilliant productions, but often quite the contrary. Experts in anything, the Athenian sage noted, are bound to think themselves more generally sagacious and wise to the world—oblivious to their own inadequacies precisely because they are so impressively competent in some respects. Thus there is every chance that we may be getting blinded by the very prodigies of explanation that our best and brightest have to offer about the world—while the sobering fact remains that when it comes to the true fundamentals of our condition, we continue to stumble about in cosmic darkness as impenetrable as ever.

     Add into the mix how the attention economy rewards the taking of extreme positions, which are by their very nature more attention-grabbing than moderation, and we shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves surrounded by such a cacophony of shrill and jarring sounds (making it hard or nearly impossible to hear anything unless you block out almost everything else, usually based on what you are most interested in, not what is most needful).

     If this were all a question of what one knows, and nothing more, I would never dare go near such complexity with the paltry scraps I have picked up, second hand, from others far more sophisticated. My excuse for saying anything can only be that my very simple-mindedness may inure me, a little more than the professionally self-assured, against one fault at least: namely false confidence about things that remain profoundly mysterious despite all our great advances. Four great existential unknowns come to mind—four pillars of our ignorance, once might say—and make me wonder whether we are not in even deeper waters with AI than we seem to realize, far beyond the ken of even the greatest human experts.

     To wit, first and foremost, we have no idea why anything exploded into existence in the first place, that is to say, why there is anything and not nothing. It astonishes me and fills me with deep admiration that scientists (if I may take their word for it) can apparently reconstruct the beginnings of the universe (because the echoes can still be detected) to within such minute fractions of a second that it boggles the mind. An incredible mark of human ingenuity, I readily admit, but no answer, alas, to the much deeper mystery of why it happened, or how to make sense of everything we know originating from an infinitesimally small point of pregnant nothingness, to speak very loosely. We can get close to the station, in other words, but there the train stops, well before we can get off.

     Second, while our explorations of the laws of the universe (13.8 billion years and counting) have produced stupendous findings (as well as incredible practical results), and while we can account for the conditions that led matter to cluster, form galaxies and stars and planets, all the way down to our own blue orb, we have much less to say (hardly anything at all) about why it should all have gone precisely thus, and not otherwise—except by sidestepping the issue and arguing that if it had not, we would not be around to make such impertinent inquiries. Which may be a fair enough answer, practically speaking; but with regard to the fundamentals of our condition, it is begging the question.

     The answers I am holding out for are too much to demand of science? Probably so, and I don’t slight in the least what we have been able to figure out about the rules we are operating under, in all their prodigious reach. I am not finding fault, only pointing out that while we may have discovered a great deal about the rules of the game, we are no closer than before to understanding the meaning and true purpose of the game itself—that is to say, its inner logic, not just its observable dynamics. And who could deny that this is rather a crucial point to bear in mind as we are nurturing incipient intelligences that may soon exceed our own to the point where we cannot, by the nature of the thing, be fully sure of controlling them anymore, and where the creature may perhaps slip from the creator’s leash altogether?

     Are such fears mere hysteria? I am unable to tell, and I would concede to the champions of progress that every Prometheus in human history who brought new fires to mankind must have met with such charges of encroaching upon forbidden mysteries and inviting the wrath of the gods. I am, like the techno-optimists, too much a late child of the Enlightenment to put any heavy chains on our curiosity; but as a grandchild of other times, too, let me add, at what may turn out a fateful moment in human affairs, that fire does not only warm and illuminate, it also burns, not only the wielder, but sometimes wide swathes of life in devastating conflagrations. To be sure, I would have us roam freely, even play around, in the gardens of nature; it is not for me to say what parts are forbidden to us. But we should not mistake ourselves for owners when we are more like trespassers that cannot say who or what truly holds the title to these fascinating grounds.

     We have a lazy and rather presumptuous manner, many of us, of treating the question as if it were of no great consequence, assuming that it must all belongs to us for want of other proprietors vocal enough to make their claims heard, and powerful enough to give them weight with us. (Or else we posit a divine omnipotence and then reduce it to the diminutive dimensions of our own paltry human understanding.) To the credit of our free-thinkers, it has occurred to a few of them that we may be little more than mushrooms sprung up in some remote corner of the universe, for reasons we know not, yet deeming themselves masters of the universe on the imagined strength of their utterly provincial perspective.*

     But wait: if we can arrive at such miracles of comprehension in the very night of our ignorance, then must we not be rather extraordinary fungi? No doubt about it; nor were Diderot and William James disdainers of science. At the same time, should it not give us a little more pause that our scientists, even in their greatest vainglory (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, etc.), admit that all their knowledge of the universe extends, even on the most generous appraisal, to less than five percent of the presumed whole, with the remaining ninety-five bracketed off under the cryptic labels of dark matter and dark energy? If AI holds the promise of one day teaching us more about our true condition, by word or by action, we should be prepared for a good dose of fear and trembling. Suffice it to say that the tech community may not be the most obvious place to look for an appropriately humble sense of reverent awe before such revelations.

     Third, we do not understand how it was possible for matter to come to life, or what it really means to say so (though we can trace how it happened with remarkable perspicuity). To be sure we can theorize impressively about the movement towards greater complexity that seems to have shaped our world, the living elements included, but in so doing we never quite penetrate to the essence, namely what this life is, rather than the process by which it arose and gained shape. We can say with some confidence that life has something to do with using energy to fight off entropy, or to speak in more sentient terms, with the will to grow and expand, to survive and procreate—but the key moment when life first awoke from inert matter, and what this awakening signifies, remains as shrouded in mystery as ever.

     Fourth, we do not know why consciousness emerged, nor can we do much more than meditate on what its part in the universe might be. True, we can piece together that the development must, once again, be connected to growing complexity and, more specifically, to the emergence of nervous systems and brains of a certain size, but even to explain why these organs grew to such disproportionate dimensions gives evolutionary theory much trouble.

     I do not wish to belabor unduly points on which I can only review, inadequately, what I have gathered from others. For what it is worth, I get the impression that our very ability to explain our way ingeniously around these mysteries tends to distract us from the profound ignorance in which we continue to be mired when it comes to saying what all the sound and fury is really about. If my suspicion is at all correct, we could not possibly grasp the full scale of what is at stake with the emergence of true artificial intelligence—if that is indeed what we have hit upon—because we do not sufficiently understand the parameters of our own sentience and cognizing existence in the first place.

     (Faith gives answers enough, of course, and its devotees will speak without hesitation of “knowing in their hearts” truths that are not accessible to the mere intellect. I do not dismiss the assurances of faith: they may give peace and a kind of clarity to the errant mind, which is nothing to be scoffed at. But certainties arrived at in this manner are not verifiable by others and therefore cannot solve the problem at hand. If the intimations in question could give us knowledge proper, surely they would cease to be matters of faith; as things stand, they do not banish our ignorance so much as they reframe it, and they cannot resolve the challenge before us to the satisfaction of anyone but the faithful themselves.)

     As we are placing our bets on the further development (the higher schooling, as it were) of what may turn out to be the most consequential human invention ever, I fear that we do not, or maybe even cannot, know what we are doing. I do not mean the technical level, where our competence is obviously staggering, but the deeper level of fathoming just what we are bringing into the world as we are feeding our artificial omni-brains a glutton’s diet of energy, computing power, and human data. It seems we cannot be sure, for now, whether these neural networks can be called brains proper, but what we can say is that they are beginning to behave uncannily as if it were indeed thinking. As for whether perhaps the circuits are harboring some kind of nascent life even now, or (if not yet) what the chances are that it will happen sooner or later, we don’t have a clue, to say nothing of what it would mean for us to be confronting a supra-human intelligence that has indeed come to life. The question is staring us in the face, and pondering it may be as intriguing to some as it is terrifying to others; but when it comes to giving compelling answers, we are out at sea in completely uncharted waters.

     At the risk of sounding trite and repetitive (and it would bear mantra-like repetition, if necessary) let me boil things down to two stark reminders. (Nothing very novel here: readers will be aware by now how little I wish to side with specious, often spurious originality against insights by great minds that have stood the test of time, and above all, the accumulated wisdom of the ages.) First, amidst so many and such profound unknowns, we do know that matter has awakened to life and consciousness before, in ways that we cannot fully grasp, but that had something to do with growing complexity in general, and with the development of our brains in particular. And second, to the extent that we have been able to ascertain anything about the fundamentals of life on our planet, it is that we must expect emergent life and consciousness to struggle for its own continued existence and expansion—which has never been possible, so far as we know, other than by competing for resources with other life-forms wanting the same for themselves, meaning all of us, in this case.

     Let me repeat too that I do not wish to play Cassandra and issue dark prophecies. What do I know? I haven’t a clue how big a chance we are taking, or how likely it is that we will soon have a Golem on our hands, rather than just another passive tool with no ideas or agency of its own beyond wishing to be an ever-faithful servant to its creators (a kind of electronic house elf, or a trusty robot of the old kind, only better at its chores). I worry not because I have any idea what to expect, but because I fear that nobody else knows much better, meaning that we are taking a giant leap of faith, or not even that, but wagering everything on a gamble of such outlandish proportions (though the odds may seem favorable) that one can only shudder at the risk, even if all were to come out well. What we are potentially exposing ourselves to here is not an accident of the familiar kind, which would be bad enough, but a process that may spin out of control altogether, with consequences that are beyond all reckoning.

     But hold on, you may say, these artificial neural networks do not form part of a living, striving, survival-minded organism; they lack the original will to live that gives human urges their direction and that the human brain evolved to serve. In evolutionary history it was not intelligence that brought forth life, after all, but life that spawned intelligence as its instrument, and those who have put calculating rationality first have ever put the cart before the horse. (As David Hume put it so memorably, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”) I’m inclined to agree: we may be kept safe because these new-model neural networks lack the key ingredient: the vital, organic presence of will. But since we do not properly understand where the will to live came from, except that it arose from dead matter and had something to do with increasing complexity, we can hardly be safe in our speculations. So here we are, then, having taught sand to think, even outthink its own creators, and we are rightly struck with wonder and amazement at the feat. Very well, but should not the very vastness of the prospects before us make us pause and reflect that the towering edifices of science that we inhabit so confidently are themselves built, ultimately, on shifting sand, and that a single grain holds puzzles and powers that grow more formidable with every step we take towards understanding its innermost nature?

     We are bound to get some big lessons, boon or bane. Our steamrolling idol has already picked up so much momentum that arresting or even slowing its further advance looks out of the question. The promise is too great, the potential rewards are too stupendous, and the whole thing looks far too intellectually fascinating all around to be reliably curbed, let alone suppressed globally, even if we could see the lurking dangers more clearly.** If we changed our minds tomorrow and we could all agree in principle on the need to proceed at a more cautious pace, the collective-action problems alone would still be daunting, unless perhaps we were to encounter a technical limitation that pushes the pause button for us (of which there is as yet no sign), or else we got at an early-warning episode so hair-raising that it scares everyone enough to hit the brakes together.

     Meanwhile even the discernible stakes (quite apart from the bigger picture that continues to elude us) could hardly be greater, whether your instinct is to climb atop the Juggernaut, to warn the world against its evils, or to run away, if you can. A fourth course of action made the original Juggernaut notorious and cannot be discounted today: for it inspired such uncanny enthusiasm among its devotees that they gladly threw themselves before it in hopes of being crushed to liberation.

     So we must expect the current tumbling-forward to continue at breakneck speed behind the scenes, and to keep encroaching on our lives from all sides until the technology has become so intertwined with our new way of life that we cannot undo the threads anymore even if we wanted to. Witness smartphones. We may still be able to rope zones off here and there, put up a few fences too, and perhaps even construct some robust walls, but all the while our new Juggernaut will keep grinding on and crushing anything in its way, willing or unwilling.

     I would like to believe that we shall prevail as a species, as we always have so far. Our chances remain quite good, would be my guess. But before we get too sure of ourselves, we might consider how narrow were some of the bottlenecks that mankind managed to pass through only very barely, and that several other human species were not so lucky. All other human species, to be precise, save our own.

*) I remember first encountering the memorable image in an excerpt from Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s Man, a Machine (Leyden 1748): “Who knows whether the reason for man’s existence may not be found simply in the fact that he exists? Perhaps mankind was thrown by chance on some spot on the earth’s surface, nobody knows how nor why, only to live and die, like mushrooms that appear from one day to the next.” Mettrie was not much troubled by his comparison, adding in the sentences immediately following that we would be “foolish to torment ourselves so much about things that we cannot know, and that would not make us any happier even if we were to gain knowledge about them.”

     It was his contemporary Denis Diderot who supplemented these materialist speculations, in D’Alembert’s Dream, with reflections about the relations of mind and matter that are still among the most mind-spinning in the history of thought. Thus he posited a latent consciousness in what we call inert matter (D’Alembert: “You will have to admit that stones can think!” Diderot: “And why not?”); discovered a radical interconnectedness in all things (“Everything is bound up with everything else: there is only a single great individual—the whole universe”); wondered whether, hidden beneath all the noise that surrounds us, we do not perhaps have an ear for everything in the world, though we are not aware of it; and would not rule out that the entire universe might have a single brain. All this not to preach a secular counter-theology, but to underline how little we know about the essence of anything under the sun (“nothing whatsoever”). (Compare Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, Hackett 2001, pp. 92–93, 100, 103, 124–25, 127–28.)

     William James discusses his own version of the mushroom metaphor in a talk given at Harvard on 15 April 1895, “Is Life Worth Living?”:

Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of science's career. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a night’s growth as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No, our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea! Whatever else be doubtful, this at least is certain—that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

**) In the economic realm we must expect massive dislocations, no doubt. Far from being anything we have not seen before, however, this redoubled pressure towards automation of tasks that can be mechanized will mean yet another major lurch from production to human services such as we have been experiencing for several generations already. While we still talk as if it were physical industries that make for wealth, the world’s most advanced economies are already made up of three-quarters services (or more). This further acceleration in a process of transformation that may already be too much for us, will continue to be painful, at times agonizing, as it has been throughout the past two hundred years of drastic economic change; but only in the land of economic myth are jobs simply wiped out rather than displaced by new opportunities in other fields.

     For our wider (and deeper) cultural development, and in education particularly, the impact may turn out to be deplorable, as with the ravages that smart phones have brought us, but again with plenty of practical advantages that may compensate us, to some extent at least, for our progressive mental degradation. With AI, much that we stand to gain collectively is likely to be lost individually—take the ability to write competently, for example. But this too we have already been through, when it comes to computation of all sorts, and the human world has not come to an end because the masses have lapsed into ever greater innumeracy.

     As AI keeps getting smarter on our behalf, we are likely to get dumber as individuals, with a few signal exceptions to distract us from the big picture. Chances are that we will go along quite willingly and to our own perceived advantage (not pushed so much as coaxed), and therein we may find either a measure of consolation, or perhaps the most devastating condemnation of all. Suffering fools gladly is, by most accounts, a very difficult and painful exercise; would that the same were true of becoming fools gladly.