The #technology sector has been exploiting the notion of Rampancy. Whether or not any of the folks most directly in charge of the current initiative to force "generative AI" into every crevice of human society actually BELIEVE that something like Rampancy can happen...here I must defer to better-informed persons. From what little I can see, being merely a private citizen (albeit a noisy one) able only to read what's in news articles and social media and so forth, a person with no direct connections into the heart of the high-tech scene...I'm not sure any of the exponents of "generative #AI" actually mean anything they ever say. They seem to live their lives forever poised between touting outrageous possibilities and "I was only joking."

So, do Sam Altman and Elon Musk and all the rest of that crowd ACTUALLY believe that their "AI" systems are superintelligent, or about to explode into superintelligence, or anything like that? I have no clear idea.

At a wild guess, I don't think they really mean it, because what these people want most from their purported mastery of science and engineering is an easy and comfortable life full of perks and avenues to secular power. They want to keep living as though they were on a neverending "working vacation", giving inflated speeches, snorting blow, asking their procurers for a special delivery, and so on.

It's just a guess that these folks don't really want complications, and genuinely explosive artificial intelligence would be just that: a complication, a massive one.

Hence I'll stake myself to the guess that the #tech barons who blither about "AGI", and make a show of consulting with #Christian leaders or "Dark Enlightenment" intelligentsia on the subject of whether computers can have souls, don't really care whether any of that stuff is true and probably hope that it's not. They want machines that print money, and if the machines are claimed to be an "agentic superintelligence" for the purposes of marketing, then they can just as easily be called something else once the technology sector collectively decides that "AI" and "agentic" aren't winning buzzwords any more.

These people have been marinated in the cultural assumptions of #marketing, which takes it as a guiding principle that it's possible to make any human being do anything desired with enough marketing. The aim of marketing is to transform minds, and thus marketing people take a cynical view of such lofty abstractions as "intelligence" and "sentience". The marketer wishes for the bulk of humanity to be a simple thing, easily steered much as a complex piece of earth-moving equipment can be steered. The way they see it, the world doesn't need that many thinkers...just a slender sanctified elite will do. A priesthood, you could say.

Beyond doubt, the technology executives have been thoroughly programmed to think of the marketer's cynical perspective as the only reality of the world. They are entirely surrounded by persons who are also inculcated with the same general culture of salesmanship, and that's been going on for a good while now. I mean, you've at least heard of "Mad Men", or "Death of a Salesman". This is an old American sickness and it's been the subject of some of the best creative works on the planet...and yet it's not solved.

To this day, to this moment, the world is vexed by #marketing. None of the scabrous investigative journalism or the artistic evisceration of the toxicity of marketing culture seems to have slowed down the onslaught. In the #Internet age there's more advertising than ever. We drown in commercials and banner ads. The old-timey "and now a word from our sponsor" style of radio and TV advertisement is back in style, on YouTube and podcasts. Nobody seems to know any other way to do business. Even basic human interactions are now expected to be marketing: one is constantly advised to sell oneself, to advance one's "personal brand", if one hopes to reach any sort of audience.