Moses Against the Machine
Imagine a US President has an adopted grandson. He graduates from Philips Exeter, gets a Harvard BA, a Stanford MBA. Doors open for him. He is rising in the ranks toward CEO at BlackRock. Or he is a leading venture capital partner at A16Z. He begins to see that a new form of empire is crushing his people – call it the Machine. He blows up a data center, killing a Google vice president. The President, rather than hurt his election chances, instructs a Texas prosecutor known for sending killers to the chair, to go after him. The grandson gets plastic surgery, runs to the desert in New Mexico and drives for Door Dash the rest of his life.
The story is true – I’ve just updated it thirty-four centuries. The grandson was the first man to rise against the Machine. His name was Moses.
You think artificial intelligence is new? The power behind AI is the power that built the pyramids. It is ancient. It is the Machine.
This is built on the argument made by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine, published half a century ago. Paul Kingsnorth summarized it here.
Mumford argues that the Machine is not a modern thing:
A close parallel existed between the first civilizations of the Near East and our own, though most of our contemporaries still regard modern technics, not only as the highest point in man’s intellectual development, but as an entirely new phenomenon. On the contrary …[it] had its origin not in the so-called Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, but at the very outset in the organization of an archetypal machine made of human parts [bold mine].
He makes a curious comparison between pyramids and rockets:
As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.
The words you read right now most likely passed through servers at Amazon data centers. Who pays for the massive cost of running them? Are you booked on a space flight anytime soon? Musk and Bezos are. And, Mumford is saying, that ticket was paid for by you and me.
But the Machine is ancient. So back again to the 13th Century BC. Under Ramesses the Great, the Egyptian empire ruled the known world. Ramesses returned from his great victories around the Mediterranean and began a massive building campaign. No earthmovers, backhoes, cranes: what he used was hundreds of thousands of human bodies.
One group of those slaves were descended from a small tribe that spoke Hebrew. For a Hebrew slave, what was life like? There was a bright side: you got to drink on the job. Scholars estimate they got four to five liters of beer a day – equivalent to fourteen or so Bud Lights. The downside? Life expectancy for Egyptian nobles was 50 to 60 years. For pyramid workers, they have estimated 30 to 35 years. It was similar for Hebrew slaves building the temples and palaces at Pithom, Rameses and On. Skeletons at a gravesite by the stone quarry in Amarna have a majority aged 7 to 25 years old; 16% of them with broken backs. They were worked to death.
But there were always more slaves. The temples and the palaces rose from the desert and the glory of Egypt grew like the sun toward noonday. Shelley wrote these lines about Ramesses:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Then a man stood up and struck a blow against the Machine. Did the Machine fall? No. It did not even tremble. The one who was crushed was the man who stood up.
Born to slave parents, he was marked for death by a Pharaoh nervous about too many males being born. (The Machine, for some reason, hates babies). In a twist, Moses was found hid in a basket on the Nile by one of Pharaoh’s daughters. She adopted him, raised him in the palace. He was trained to be a prince. He was on his way to being one of the elites who ran the Machine.
One day, however, at the age of 40, he took a walk through the brickworks. He saw an overseer savagely beating one of his people. Looking around, and seeing no witnesses, he killed the overseer and buried him in the sand. He assumed the slaves would rise up with him. They did not. He was simply a murderer – and Pharaoh ordered his execution. He fled for his life to the desert and became a shepherd.
Forty long years went by. At the age of 80, Moses was staring at the backside of sheep in the Negev when he saw a burning bush. “Take off your sandals,” said the bush. “You are standing on holy ground.”
Then he started learning how to win.
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Moses left the sheep and walked back into Egypt. His first move was to gather all the elders among the slaves. He convinced them of his mission – and who had sent him. Then he went to the Pharaoh.
“Yahweh, the god of Israel, says let my people go.”
Ramesses the Great said what any resident of Manhattan, the City of London - or frankly I - would have said in his shoes.
“Who is Yahweh? I don't know him. Get back to work.” That day, Pharaoh doubled the work for the slaves.
God told Moses to invite Pharaoh to the Nile, then strike the river with his shepherd staff. He did. The Nile and every last pool, pond and pitcher of water Egypt turned into blood.
Eight more plagues followed. Frogs, gnats, flies, cattle disease, a pandemic, hail, locusts, darkness you could feel. You could see the story of the Exodus simply as climate change: the river got too muddy, the frogs died, followed by insects, diseases jumping from cattle to humans, and unusual storms. Or you could see it as miraculous.
The real question is: how did Moses beat the Machine?
The first answer is: He didn’t. The frogs, the darkness, the Angel of Death, the Red Sea: all things beyond his control. Who controlled them? Who spoke – and the locusts roared across the green fields of the Nile Delta like the legions of hell?
You know even if you don't believe it – you know it wasn't Moses. An eighty year-old shepherd does not beat the Machine.
And it all started with a simple question: Who is Yahweh? In other words, who is God? And with a simple answer. From the record, we know what Ramesses thought: I am.
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The Machine, when it reaches full strength, rules men in two ways. One is Orwell’s nightmare in his book 1984: a jackboot forever coming down on the human face. It is people lying awake in Stalin’s Moscow at 3 am, hearing the secret police van pull up, the elevator hum, the heavy steps in the hall, and praying the knock would be for some other door. China today?
But we are not ancient Egypt, and we are not China, you say. That’s right. No one takes our children from our homes to make them drag blocks of stone through the sand. Most of us do not personally know someone disappeared by secret police.
But we -- let’s say “we” is the world outside China and Russia -- serve a Machine equally powerful, equally destructive to human flourishing. It is more subtle – and therefore more dangerous because most of us don’t think we are in thrall to it.
This Machine is what Aldous Huxley’s chilling tale in Brave New World foretold. The Machine controls through pleasure. I will give you what you want, I will make you feel good. I will ease your pains. I will keep you safe. In exchange, all I ask is your freedom.
An article at the World Economic Forum, since taken down, predicted the end goal: “You will have no privacy. You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”
The elites who “run” the Machine – or whom the Machine rewards most because their service is critical to the Machine’s power – are the least likely to make any move to resist its power. Technologists who have helped to build the leading AI firms are begging outside forces to slow it down because we no longer know what it will do. Musk, Wozniak and Yang signed a letter urging a six-month pause. Not far enough, says Eliezer Yudkowsky. He says any datacenter that does not shut down we should bomb.
Do you expect OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Meta (Facebook) to slow down in the race to rule the world? Jarod Lanier is a thoughtful guy, an artificial intelligence OG and a top scientist at Microsoft. He begs the government: just regulate us. Says the fentanyl dealer to the judge who lives on his bribes. Just stop me!
What is worse – children with broken backs or children with broken minds?
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The Machine -- Pharaoh’s, Orwell’s, or Huxley’s -- is generally not vanquished or even shaken by the first resistance. It took nine plagues of tremendous, murderous ferocity to get Pharaoh to simply say yes to Moses’ request to let his people go.
What finally crushed that version of the Machine was hubris -- and water.
The Machine does not care how much misery and death it deals – it MUST have it’s aims accomplished. It must have pyramids, the skyscrapers and the rockets built. It must have immortality. It must be glorified.
So after his population was decimated by the disasters, after he heard the weeping of mothers all across Egypt, even after he held his dead firstborn in his arms, and told Moses and the Israelites to get out – Pharaoh changed his mind. He went after them.
It must have been the worst moment for all those newly freed slaves. There they were, ragged and tired on the shores of the Red Sea, wondering which way to walk around it. Then far behind them they saw the dust, the glint of sun on spears, and heard the worst sound in the world those days -- the ground rumbling from the wheels of iron chariots.
You know the rest of the story. If you don’t, read it here. The old spiritual, composed by slaves of another time, puts the end better than I can:
O Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn
O Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn
Cuz Pharaoh’s army got drown’ded.
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What does this mean for us?
1. You might have to spend time in the desert.
2. Do not go mano a mano with the Machine until you have.
3. Rally brothers first.
4. The weapons you have in mind may be useful, but probably won't get the job done,
5. God hates slavery. He allows it to exist – but eventually, always – He crushes it, along with the slave masters.
6. Here's the hardest part. The Machine won't be defeated on our calendar. We have to sync to another.
But get ready to fight? Absolutely.