AI NAMES ARE NOT JUST WEIRD, THEY’RE DOWNRIGHT APOCALYPTIC

Over the weekend, M.C. posted a story on this website's Forum about the fact that the names for some of those artificial intelligence data centers appear to be the names of the gods of mythology, and some of those were not very nice people. A case could be argued that in the popular imagination, this theme of associating artificial intelligence and surveillance capabilities with divinity began with two signal and overlooked events. One was a public appearance of Elon Musk years ago, when he made the pronouncement that he was worried most about the development of artiicial intelligence, and worried that there might be some kind of threshold that would be crossed, when all the networked A.I.'s online would transduce "entities" into our reality, and that these entities might not be so friendly, and vastly more intelligent than we mere furless monkeys. It did not take a linguistics expert to figure out what Mr. Musk was really worried about. He was literally worried about A.I.s somehow summoning the demonic, the terrible gods of mythology. A further implication of his statements were the ones many people overlooked while they were focused on the sensational aspects: Mr. Musk was also implying in a round about way that the gods and demons of human mythologies might have had some basis in reality, long ago, and that technology of some sort may have been involved in their "manifestations."  Think of the Hebrew high priest's "urim and thummin" and how they seemed to be used to communicate with "Yahweh".

The other modern benchmark was Mr. Peter Thiel's curious behavior in holding invitation-only conferences on the Anti-Christ, because he was worried that the technologies he was busily developing might have some sort of loose connection to that character, things like... oh, I don't know... bringing in a system of finance that is completely digital, requiring people to get their camp tattoos in order to buy or sell anything, and if they don't behave and burn the incense to Caesar, they could be cut off completely when their money became worthless under the social credit system, kinda like those scary chapters in the book of Revelations.  Oh, and for good measure (maybe even to throw people off the anti-christ scent) he decided to nickname his surveillance system "Palantir", after the "seeing stones" in  J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. You might remember that scene from the movie when Pippin sneaks a peak through one of them, and encounters the Lidless Burning Eye of the trilogy's cosmically-sized villain, Sauron. Not to worry, though; the use of the Palantir was completely harmless, because the wizard Saruman used the Palantir all the time to talk to Sauron and it had absolutely no deleterious effects on his own character. He merely became a more efficient administrator, and managed after these conversations to clear whole forests that had been messing up the landscape, and created an employment and jobs program for thousands and thousands of genetically engineered misfits called orcs, who otherwise would not have had any gainful employment. He employed them in a large armed police force, which he used to try to impose law and order on a nearby kingdom that liked to mind its own business and raise horses.

But now at least some people are noticing that at least some of those names for some of those artificial intelligence data centers seem to be named for some of those old gods  (story and article suggested by M.C., with our gratitude):

Why tech giants like Meta are naming data centres after Gods and sci-fi icons

When Mark Zuckerberg recently announced his grand plans to build enormous data centers in Ohio and Louisiana, two things stood out. First was the scale of the centers set to power Meta’s AI ambitions. Zuckerberg said that “just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.” While both will cost “hundreds of billions.”

The other was their names: Prometheus will soon pop up in New Albany, Ohio, and will be joined by Hyperion in Louisiana in 2030.

Where do these names come from? “Typically, the process is generally for most naming projects to go through a company’s brand team, though that doesn’t always happen,” says Dalton Runberg, a naming expert who has previously worked for big tech companies. “It could depend on the size of the company—at some smaller places, it might just be a function of other marketing people, but any big company is going to have a dedicated brand team, and may even have a dedicated naming person or team. Or they could work with a naming agency, especially for very high-profile brands.”

The article goes on to mention Thiel's "Palantir" system, and other examples from science fiction, and of course explains the obvious symbolism behind using the name "Prometheus", the figure from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, for which effort he was chained to a rock. The symbolism is obvious, because artificial intelligence is akin to the fire of divine intelligence, and giving it to man will increase his power to that divine and cosmic scale.

Then of course we get partially-informed view of the evangelical-with-a-lexicon:

Billionaires Are Naming AI Data Centers After Biblical Demons... The Question is Why?

In this article we get the following interpretation of some of the names:

Two data centers the size of Washington DC are under construction right now. One is called Stratos. One is called Hyperion. And when I show you what those names actually mean in ancient Greek and biblical texts, you’re going to understand that Doom wasn’t predicting the future, it was showing you the blueprint.

...

Stratos comes from the ancient Greek “Archestratos.” Archon means demonic ruler. Stratos means army.

...

Hyperion means “the high one” or “watcher from above” in ancient Greek. In the Book of Enoch, the Watchers were fallen angels who came to Earth before the Flood, took human wives, taught humanity weapons and sorcery, created the Nephilim, and corrupted creation so completely that God drowned the entire planet.

Well, sort of.  In the word "archestratos" the "arche" part stems from the Greek word root "arch" (which is related to "archon), which is also related to the word "arche" which can mean many things: source, origin, font, the "principal principle" of things, so to speak. It is in fact the word "arche" that is translated as "beginning" in the prologue of the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," and so on. Indeed, the word "arche" was understood by some church fathers to refer to the personal source in the godhead, the person of the Father. But in any case, it obviously does not necessarily mean a "demonic ruler".  Stratos can mean an army or host, or even a commander of a host, as with the related Greek word for a "general", "strategos."  The similarity of roots and the origins of our own English word "strategy" should be obvious. "Archestratos" thus does not mean directly a "demonic ruler", but is perhaps best translated in this context as "chief" or "main commander".

But while one might indeed nitpick at the author of the second article's urgent tone and how it mars what otherwise might have been a much more tightly argued point and nuanced etymology, his main point cannot be brushed off so lightly, all the more especially when one does the sort of etymological review as I attempted in the previous paragraph. To seize the fire of the gods and give it to (some) men, to claim - even if only by allusion - to be God or to replace Him with technology, is to play the devil's game. Or as the author of the second article put it toward the beginning of his article:

Demons fused with technology. Portals opened by scientists. Hell’s armies unleashed on Earth.

And that of course returns us to Mr. Musk's statement years ago, that he was worried that artificial intelligences might cross some threshold, and transduce some really nasty entities into our reality.  He was being perhaps more true than even he guessed, for as I've pointed out in other very different contexts, the Hungarian-American electrical engineering and mathematical genius, Gabriel Kron, made an amazing observation decades ago in connection to all electrical circuits, no matter how complex or simple, they were all, without exception, "hyper-dimensional machines" for the very simple reason that the mathematics used to describe them was, in its heavy reliance on "imaginary" numbers, hyper-dimensional. Everything from a kitchen toaster to the large hadron collider and to... yes ... artificial intelligence data centers, are electrical circuits, and perforce, hyper-dimensional. They're already in touch with those "higher dimensions".  So it's easy to leap from one dot to another: Lucifer is, after all, the "light-bearer". And light is an electromagnetic phenomenon.

So "demons fused with technology" and "portals opened by scientists" are just a different way of expressing what Mr. Musk was worried about all those years ago when he made those statements.

But what if we have, in fact, been misinterpreting those statements? Most people took Musk's words as a warning.

However, like the author of the second article, I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that it was not the annunciation of a warning, but the statement of an agenda disguised as a warning. The parallels are indeed there for anyone bothering to read and look: "And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months." (Rev. 13:5) I don't know about you, but I cannot help but think that the enormous power consumptions of data centers might be being referred to in the second part of that verse, while the mouths speaking "great things" are all the artificial intelligence hype.

So,  time will, of course, tell. But for the moment, I'm perfectly happy to see what others are claiming to see, and like them, what I'm seeing is a lot of hype, and some very apocalyptic implications. I've said it before, and I will  say it again: "they" are using certain types of interpretations of the bible, not as prophecy, but as a template, an agenda, as a plan of action.

Musk wasn't warning us. He was announcing the agenda.

See you on the flip side...

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