Alt-QAnon -- The theory of WRAITHS

I'm going to take a moment to reprint something I just found on my computer which I had written some time ago, but never published.  It may seem a little repetitive of some of the foregoing, but perhaps it's a good summary, and it provides Asimov's 3 laws, as well as definitions of "artificial intelligence" and "organism," and "superorganism" (I've edited it slightly to point out that others have, in fact, had these ideas, and to add Alt-QAnon in as appropriate):

In this age of encroaching artificial intelligence, we would do well to realize that we have been living with various forms of artificial intelligence for millenia now, and we have not done a particularly good job of dealing with it.  For what are religions, corporations, governments, and other mass movements and aggregations of people if not forms of "artificial intelligence"? 

Almost 80 years ago, humans like Isaac Asimov recognized the potential threat to the human race that would be posed by artificial intelligence in the form of robots.  His three laws of robotics are:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Too bad nobody (other than Jeremy Lent) has yet recognized the artificial intelligence that I'm talking about, and composed similar rules.  Like robots, corporations, religions, and governments serve wonderful purposes.  But they also have an instinct for self-preservation and expansion that can be at odds with human life and human well-being in general.  So perhaps a similar set of laws should be drafted for these organisms, which are already with us.

Some people might say Alt-QAnon is not saying anything new -- people have always realized that corporations are amoral -- there is talk of a corporatocracy, corporate america, evil corporations, and even the need to control corporations etc etc.  But that's just talk, and the easy rebuttal is that corporations are necessary to support technological progress and our way of life.  What is needed is a clear understanding of the benefits of corporations and other organizations and the way that those benefits can continue to be harnessed for all the beneficial purposes, while minimizing the inevitable harm done by the organization's instinctive urge for expansion and profit.

Good illustrations of the damage that can be done by WRAITHS (wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hives) are (1) many world religions, (2) Nazi Germany, and (3) corporations in general and the pharmaceutical industry in particular.

The hallmarks of artificial intelligence are (1) potential immortality, and (2) learning and adapting from experience. Here is Wikipedia's definition:

Computer science defines AI research as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.  A more elaborate definition characterizes AI as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.

As you can see, various organizations from religions to corporations to political parties can easily be seen as meeting those definitions.

Consider religions.  At a certain point, the religion becomes greater than its greatest prophet.  The Old Testament essentially created a God who was bigger and badder than all the other gods, and looked after the Israelites.  And it gave them prophets and prophecies to believe in when things got rough.  The result of this was inevitably a series of false prophets, until a false prophet came along that a critical mass could believe in. That critical mass broke off and created its own religion essentially by elevating the  prophet -- a mere mortal -- to the status of God.

Yes, I am calling Jesus Christ a false prophet.  Our ancestors -- at least of those of us who have Christianity in our lineage -- can be forgiven for falling prey to this, because back then, so much about the world was unexplained, and it was natural to look for magic and divine forces to explain nature and human events.  Jesus himself can be forgiven for that matter.  But the rest of us should take a step back and look at Christianity and other religions for what they are.  They are organizations that came to life at a certain point in time, and have been diligently "surviving" ever since, doing both good and harm in turn.

To the extent that what I am saying can be made into a "science" -- the study of organizations -- then that science can be applied to explain the development of every religion in the world today.  If there is a "true religion" perhaps it will somehow elude the science.  But it seems unlikely that there is.

In each case, the organizational organism feeds upon the very human need and desire to belong, to believe in something, to believe in an afterlife, to believe in justice, to believe in a higher power.  To believe that good will triumph over evil.  Religions simply package that and sell it.  It is not an unfair exchange.  The believers gain something to believe in, and the community of believers provides social bonds, education, and other forms of emotional and material support.  Most of all, religions give hope.  But all the while, the organism is extracting payments from them and is using them to fill its various positions in pursuit of its own drive to survive.

If we were to study them scientifically, we would say that such organisms require an organizational structure.  The structure might vary over time, but there are necessarily "positions" within the organization, which are occupied by an ever-changing stream of humans, who make decisions regarding the course of the organization, including which humans to hire, and how to treat the humans that the organization encounters. 

There is no question that the humans who happen to fill these slots have some control over the direction and destiny of the organism.  But very very few of them are essential to the organism's survival.  The "leader" might be likened to the organism's "brain."  The leader makes decisions that affect the well being of the organization.  But at some point the leader retires, is supplanted, or dies.  At that point, the organization simply finds itself a new brain.  That brain might take the organism another direction, but the organism itself has survived -- the individual brains have just died.  Perhaps there is an analogy to genes.  On some level, even though we have all kinds of free will and do whatever we want, our genes -- which are inanimate -- do not, and yet they are what survive us from generation to generation.

Let's take a moment here to explore the definition of "organism: to see how well it fits:

Wikipedia starts off as follows:

In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that embodies the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".

It then explores the concept further:

An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction". Many definitions exclude viruses and possible man-made non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.  A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.

There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism and indeed about whether or not such a definition is necessary. Several contributions are responses to the suggestion that the category of "organism" may well not be adequate in biology.

Quite clearly, biology has already given us the proper term -- the organizations I am talking about are "superorganisms" -- and the obvious analogy is an ant colony where the intelligence of the group is more than the sum of the individual ants.