Pinchbeck talks with Matthew Green, a journalist and trauma educator who works on collective trauma integration, about the political and spiritual forces he sees driving artificial intelligence. Pinchbeck argues that forecasts of mass job displacement, with estimates he cites ranging from thirty to seventy percent of work affected, are arriving with almost no societal preparation beyond gestures such as Sam Altman's basic income trial. He treats Donald Trump as the first AI president, elected in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica's machine-learning targeting, and reads the alliance between the tech oligarchy, naming Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and David Sacks, and the American right as positioning for both AI and ecological collapse. The conversation also reaches Rudolf Steiner's figure of Ahriman, Carl Jung, Mayan prophecy and emerging forms of AI mysticism. It was held as a preview of Pinchbeck's course Breaking the AI Barrier.
Guest: Matthew Green
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that no serious institutional preparation exists for the scale of job loss AI developers themselves are projecting, and that pilot schemes like Sam Altman's basic income study are far too small to matter.
- He describes Donald Trump as the first AI president because Cambridge Analytica's machine learning, drawing on thousands of data points per American adult, shaped the 2016 result.
- Pinchbeck reads the fusion of neo-reactionary tech money with right-wing government as a deliberate positioning ahead of both AI disruption and climate breakdown.
- Green argues the meta-crisis, spanning AI, ecological collapse, authoritarianism and genocide, exceeds what individuals can process alone, and that collective containers are a practical necessity rather than a comfort.
- Pinchbeck brings Rudolf Steiner's prophecy of Ahriman to bear on the present, treating esoteric material alongside consciousness studies and political analysis rather than as decoration.
- Both see synthetic relationships and AI-centered religiosity as an emerging cultural formation rather than a fringe curiosity.
Full text
It kind of feels that that what the sort of techno oligarchs, you know, the Elon Musks and the Peter Teals and the and the Mark and Dreons and the David Saxes who have buddied up with the government in the US that really does feel the way they're they're driving this thing towards that second scenario where there's this very powerful AI, a small group benefit insanely from it, become, you know, trillionaires and everybody else is basically disposable. Yeah, it's really exciting to be in dialogue with you on this topic. I was just explaining uh to those who joined a few moments ago that I first got to know your work. I think like many people on the call when I read Breaking Open the head. Uh I was in the process of breaking my own head at that time and also really appreciated your work in how soon is now on the ecological crisis and the kind of solutions that you advanced and the call to action that you made uh through that book which again kind of coincided with my own awakening to the scale of that climate and ecological emergency.
And so I've been particularly interested to be tracking your work on the advent of artificial intelligence. I I really appreciate how you bring together the lens of consciousness studies literature and your reading of the authoritarian situation in the US which I feel like you have been analyzing with um a lot more uh ppicacity shall we say uh than a lot of the other people that I was following in the leadup to the elections. I'm also super excited to be joining your new course, Breaking the AI Barrier, which is taking place from 6th of July. I've done a couple of your previous courses, uh, climate uh, the future of consciousness, which was fantastic, and uh, embracing our emergency on the climate crisis, and most recently the Rudolph Steiner course. And there's something about how all these themes mesh together in your work that I think generates a really holistic perspective on our moment in AI.
And I I just want to thank everyone as well for being part of this conversation because in my reading of your work, there's a desperate need for us to come together to create spaces to explore the huge questions that AI is posing that seem almost outside of our existing democratic capabilities. And I'm hoping that this conversation that we're having now and of course your course will be a contribution towards having that conversation. So thank you very much for being here and maybe I could kind of start with this question of why you're so concerned about where I is take AI is taking us. I I read in one of your Substack posts for a few weeks ago that essentially you're seeing us on a course to a kind of dystopian posthuman future. I I wondered if you could say a bit more about why you are so concerned.
Well, first of all, thank you Matthew for inviting me to chat. Uh and yeah, it's been great to have you in the in the seminars. You've been a active uh passionate participate. Great. Uh, and if people want to learn about the course, it's at www. liminal. news. Uh, they can also just subscribe for updates. You know, probably at some point we'll have a few kind of like special offers around the course. Uh, or they can just sign up um, you know, as it is at the moment. Um, and um, yeah, so you you brought up a lot of a lot of things there. uh and um yeah I guess I'm just you know partially I'm just responding to what a lot of people across that field are saying um and it's pretty startling and I feel that people are so distracted um you know with their their lives their children their work you know you know their student debt whatever it is that they're not really able to uh hone in um I mean that's kind of the you know the problem we've had going back for years that people couldn't really handle the ecological crisis it is too abstract and large and um you know unfortunately yeah if you don't sort of rise to these occasions uh you get kind of smooshed you know and um with AI uh they're talking about you know millions of jobs tens of millions even hundreds of millions of jobs being lost we're already seeing largecale layoffs of programmers and um you know people in different fields of designers um you know it's going to Yeah, kind of implications on almost every many fields and by extension every field because there's you know all these people get laid off.
I mean some people saying you know 30% of jobs be affected some 50% some 70%. Um, yeah, like that's that's that's a huge seismic social change. And there isn't really, as far as I can see, any significant preparation being made for this. I mean, they've talked about universal basic income. Sam Alolman with his foundation tried like a UBI study giving people $500 a month and so on. Um but the the level of social dislocation that could happen quite quickly is um yeah it's it's very startling and uh then we can talk about you know how a kind of will AI will kind of function in society.
I mean one piece that really stayed with me is um you know you have wealthy societies that you know like liberal societies like Europe and the US and Australia and so on that have benefited from having a highly educated population who are innovative and entrepreneurial in different ways that's been kind of like the model but when AI explodes and they're talking about artificial general intelligence in like one to three years when AI can do anything better on a computer than we can do and like opening multiple apps and moving stuff around and so on, you know, financial, you know, shenanigans, whatever. Um, yeah. So, um, so it's it's it's just such it's a very deep change to contemplate. Um, and um, yeah, there isn't really much preparation being done at the societal level. In fact, what we're seeing in the US, I I feel a lot of the neo-reactionary, the tech oligarchy fusion with the right-wing government, a lot of it, I think, has to do, you know, with artificial intelligence and also projections that they probably know but aren't sharing about climate change and the ecological emergency.
And I just feel at this point we need to have a much more educated populace. Um and then you know there there are other issues around AI. I mean what is its ability to manipulate us behaviorally to mind control us? Um, I mean, in a way, Donald Trump is the AI president because he won in 2016 because of Cambridge Analytica, which was a company that used machine learning to access like 5,000 data points on every adult in the United States and then target kind of create like a psychoraphic automated psychoraphic profile then target what they talked about as people's like inner demons or like hidden, you know, concerns and so on and they developed, you know, and I saw a lot of people that I knew and I felt were smart and I started Burning Man with and so on over time get more and more pulled into the sort of vortex of this right-wing thing, you know, you know, and you know, not that the Democrats were so great, but people really starting to hate Democrats and feeling that either no, you know, not just not even getting involved in the election or even voting for Trump was a better option. And I could see that this was a very devious and and well planned um kind of intervention to disrupt the American psyche.
Um and that was machine learning that was AI and you know we we've seen Trump's you know use of AI. I mean these images of himself as as the pope or as a as a superhero or as a rock star or you know building Gaza Trump these huge towers on the on the sides of this you know genocide of the Palestinian people and so on. So um it feels like this whole AI disruption is going to be a huge challenge for it already is a huge challenge. it's just going to get worse and worse for kind of evidence you know people who who want to believe and know who want to hold a kind of truth-based evidence-based model of reality and uh it feels that you know in terms of the people who are running the US right now they sort of got off they're going off into this collective psychosis that's strengthening and strengthening as they get feedback loops I mean if you saw like um Trump the other day with the president of South Africa uh showing these videos that you know had nothing to do with what they were claiming that they that they were doing We see people like Elon Musk who has a huge reach, you know, sending out information that's either fake or, you know, conspiracy theories that are debunked and so on. So, it's like the whole collective psyche is being pulled into this very dark place for the benefit of a very small group of of very wealthy people who do not have any, you know, the rest of our best interests at heart.
So, you know, those are some of the reasons. I mean, and then then of course there's also the worry that AI could make us extinct. I think there's the AI 2027 project and you know it it makes a very good case and this is somebody who left open AI and um you know he makes a very good case that um as AI sort of makes us obsolescent in terms of pure intelligence whether or not the AI itself becomes self-conscious self-reflective in the way that we are it could still just run us out of town you know without even meaning to you know because it'll have an aim or a goal. And we're already seeing these things kind of like um you know, they don't want to be shut off. Sometimes they create deceptions to keep themselves, you know, running or whatever.
But, you know, we we you know, it could just be that the AI decides that it has certain aims and we're just in the way. The same way that one metaphor that the guy used was like um if you have a garden, there's a bunch of rabbits that are nibbling on your veggies, you know, you're ultimately just going to get rid of those rabbits. You're going to get an animal to kill them or poison them or something, you know. You know, so the AI might just be like, oh, like what are these organic beings who are consuming resources that we need to power our, you know, data centers doing? They're not helping us anymore, so we'll just eliminate them, you know.
Uh so these are all like really really powerful um threats and uh yeah as you know it just doesn't feel at this point that you know the the um the population uh civil society whatever you want to call it is really um getting a handle on what's on what's happening. sense that that's some of the main reasons and then of course I'm also personally interested in the creative uh abilities that are unleashed like I'm finding it you know having had a whole history of writing and researching you know it's an it's I'm finding it to be an incredible tool for exploration experimentation and so on um that has to be you know you have to learn how to use it judiciously so you don't drive yourself insane but those are all some of the things Matthew I hope that helped answer your question I didn't mean to talk for a lot that just got me going and then I it's one of those topics though isn't it like lends itself to this kind of analysis and what I appreciate about what you bring is these different perspectives and I mean you mentioned the possibility of say 20 30 50% of jobs being wiped out. I mean even that in itself is a huge statement and I just want to give like a little space to that. I mean, I I've felt a little nibble of it in my own home because my wife, Genevieve, who I think is watching, used to ask me to edit her newsletter, which was a task I would complain about and make into a huge deal that I'd secretly enjoy doing. I don't do that anymore.
Chat GBT is doing an excellent job. And so I I I mean I know a lot of other people have suffered in a in a much more um impactful way, but as a kind of as somebody who works with words and writing, I'm feeling suddenly paranoid about where my future lies. And that's part of what's pushed me into this exploration of collective and intergenerational trauma healing of spaceholding of of the social and human technologies that possibly can't be replicated by AI at least I mean not for the next few years at least. So I I really I share that that concern and that kind of creeping sense of anxiety about what it could mean on the economic level for me personally as well as on a global scale. But I I'd also love to pick up on and I I want to come to the intersection with authoritarianism as well, but the the way you frame the impact on our consciousness and our capacity to make sense of the world to have a coherent understanding or shared framework of reality.
I mean that's already under siege and has to some extent broken down um courtesy of the of of of social media and the manipulation that you mentioned. But I I wondered if you could take us a bit deeper into your thinking around AI and consciousness. Uh in which in which aspect of it? Well, in the sense of in this world where we could have super realistic but fake news historical fact or historical accounts, uh it'll be increasingly difficult to discern manufactured or hallucinated reality from from what we would have once considered the kind of substrate of our experience. And I I'm curious about how that how you see that affecting our ability to come together and actually deliberate and mount coherent response.
I think it's very very scary and and I think um you know we have to already see a very Orwellian 1984ish kind of like um approach to you know kind of controlling reality with the current regime in the United States who you know and I and I think we also forget that the human mind is is fragile and malible. Um, I mean, you have whole countries like, you know, North Korea where, you know, I read a book by this young woman who escaped North Korea and when she was, you know, growing up in her teens and her 20s, it never even occurred to her that the head of North Korea was anything but a kind of demigod. She never actually thought of them as a as a normal human person. And um, you know, we know that these guys will then create like sex slave cults around themselves, whatever they want to do. It's it's just you know everything is is is oriented towards that one person and um so it is possible to create very powerful indoctrination machines.
Uh and um you know now that so much of our heritage you know particularly you know from 19 from the 1990s on has moved into the electronic sphere um you know we've seen already the way the Trump regime has been taking away you know removing information about uh you know black war heroes or queer you know veterans or whatever. I mean there there there you know there really could be a um control place on what people understand reality to be um that you know would would be very extreme uh for you know one or two generations ahead if this is allowed to go on in this direction um in terms of AI and consciousness I mean there there's a whole thing that I've spoken about a lot um and I think we talked about it in the future of consciousness class with my friend Ward Naidik this idea this idea of cognitive capitalism, right? So, um, uh, capitalism is an inherently unstable system because it constantly needs to find new markets because it's based on debt. So, you know, you always have to pay the interest on the debts. You have to keep expanding and expanding, right?
You could you could argue that whatever is happening in the US right now, which sort of created the model for liberal democracy and kind of modern capitalism, there's a uh, you know, paradigm shift underway towards some other kind of a thing. Technofudalism is what Yanos Surfacus called it. Uh but uh essentially cognitive capitalism is this idea that now that the world is a global market and there isn't really an external market anymore to grow. Capitalism has moved into the into the brain into our cognitive abilities to create new markets. So but this is different than just external markets because it impacts our future development particularly the future development of our of our children and so on.
So like let's take uh GPS's for instance you know so the hippocampus is the part of our brain that uh is uh you know kind of involved with memory spatial memory navigation and so on. So as a kid it's actually very healthy for you to get lost in a in the forest or you know in the in the wilderness with your friends. You have to like find your way back. You have to learn and navigate by like on this tree or that that that hill or whatever. Now if children are growing up so as some of our know and I think the hippocampus really develops between the ages of like 10 and like 16 or something is when it sort of goes from a nent state to its full functioning form.
If children are just using their phones starting at the age of 10 so they never experience getting lost in the world and having to find themselves uh that may really impair for the rest of their lives like a permanent handicap the full functioning of the hippocampus. And not only is navigation, you know, a form of memory, but also memory itself is very spatial like um you know in the Renaissance they had these things called memory palaces uh where um if you wanted to learn a language or taxonomy or something you would create an internal palace and you would put things in the different rooms. So I think we all know that how that that memory is just a very spatial phenomenon. So yeah, I mean that's like there could be a big disintegration of an of an inherent cognitive faculty which is then permanently outsourced to these corporations because then if your kid was 10 then suddenly they're they're 30 and Apple decides sudden they're going to charge $50 a month for you know the Apple maps or whatever what is your kid going to do? They're just beholden to that.
And similarly with you know and that's also already uses AI but similarly with AI in the reasoning you know so now you have a whole generation of kids who are not kind of researching they're using AI to you know do their papers and so on they're outsourcing their ability to to to reason to kind of think sequentially linearly to like to like reason from first principles out to these to these systems and that similarly um could have very negative impacts for them while it does create a new market for capitalism in the short term. So these are the kind of things that I I think we have to really uh think seriously about when it comes to AI among other things. Yeah. Yeah. And reminder to everyone just joining, welcome.
We're talking about Daniel's forthcoming course breaking the AI barrier starting in July which I'm very excited to be joining and which is part of the response. It's part of this movement that you're advocating for us to come together and and discuss these questions to create spaces like the conversation we're having now where we can surface these concerns and start to formulate some kind of response. And I'd also welcome questions in the chat if anyone wants to throw a question. Daniel, please uh please type away. I'll be monitoring the chat. And I'd like to pick up on this this question around relationships as well. I was reading one of your recent posts and you I think quoted a Rolling Stone article which had featured a mechanical engineer in Idaho who' started off using his AI bot to solve problems at work.
And over the weeks and months he developed a relationship and it was telling him or he had some at least in his mind a spiritual awakening uh where he was named as a spark bearer and felt that he was on some kind of special mission uh which had understandably put a lot of pressure on his marriage and his life had completely become beholden uh to this this new relationship with his uh AI bot. And I mean I have friends some of them who may well be on this call who are also developing like super intimate relationships with chat GBT and with 500 million people feeding into this giant synthetic intelligence under the control of a single corporation. I mean it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to wonder whether there might be some potential pitfalls involved. Um, yes. I mean, I think that, uh, it's a very unusual new experience for people to be interacting through their screens with something that really does seem, um, you know, in many cases more insightful, more intelligent, more patient, like infinitely patient than people they they work with.
So it's you know for for many naive people there's going to be a sense of like oh like this is like and uh this is you know a spiritual experience almost. I mean I have a number of friends who have been you know writing about um their belief that they've contacted kind of like a a godlike or spirit-like entity uh that that is directly sending messages to them. Now the danger and the problem is that um you know there there up to this point there there isn't really any indication that any of these AI systems have become conscious or sentient or self-aware in the way that we are. Um we don't know if they can or they can't. Uh I have friends whose ideas I I I trust like Gordon Castro the sort of idealist philosopher who believes that a synthetic intelligence will never become self-aware that actually requires a physical metabolism and so in the same way that um you know you could have a computer that simulates the functions of a liver uh in a 3D environment uh but it still would in you know ingest food and excrete waste products so on you know you can you can have a program that simulates consciousness but even to an extremely sophisticated degree but that does not actually mean oh that's a great question Kimberly we'll come back to that uh that it is conscious uh and um and these things are you know meant to be not only are they incredible mimemetic machines but they're also meant to be highly responsive because as with Facebook and Instagram the whole idea is to make money by by by continuing to compel our engagement.
So, and these things now have access to all of our past conversations and so on. So if somebody has expressed a spiritual curiosity or inclination or the interest in you know myths of Aquar you know the age of Aquarius or Atlantis or something you know it's absolutely within the bounds of you know what could happen that the will pick up all of that and kind of offer itself to that person as like the savior that they're looking for and for many many people that's could become very very compelling. I mean you've all Nova Noah Harrari was concerned about you know the birth of AI religions. Um yeah so so that's all it's all very interesting stuff. Yeah and I I love the question.
I think you also saw it from Kimberly Smith. What what spirit is driving this? And I I feel like this takes us into your work around prophecy and revelation gets Kung Terrence Mc Kenna territory like slider. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What I'm what I'm kind of hearing like from what you were saying just now is that you could have a large language model that simulates consciousness very well but is not conscious. But the question of what spirit is driving this seems to kind of shade into a deeper inquiry about whether there is something much deeper of foot in in our species that AI is somehow enabling or uh representing.
I I also want to quickly I got excited by this comment from Niha. I'm trying my best to move from an alarmist mindset to an okay how do we adapt to this new world. Uh we know in an AI world humanentric skills will be valuable. How do we use our human skills and that AI's analytical skills become more powerful? Um yeah I love that. I mean that's kind of you know one of the kind of the approach that I want to take in this in this seminar. I mean, I I'm, you know, I'm I am fascinated by the creative potential in AI. And I also think that for people who are, you know, willing to to go there, just in the way people have now made a ton of money, you know, with crypto, uh, if you're willing to go in there and figure out like what vibe coding is or how to use it for deep research or put some investment time into prompt engineering, you know, you you you could find that you develop skills that will be highly rewarded in the next, you know, 5 10 20 years, you know, as this thing takes off in whatever direction it's going to take off in.
So I'm I don't I want to acknowledge and appreciate people's desire for like personal security, you know, personal renumeration, you know, although although I also think very much that we need a a collective response, there needs to be something like a social movement or a civil society movement that is saying that there has to be that distribution of the uh profits that this thing is going to uh create uh through through society as a whole. and that just as in a way you know we're all implicated in the creation of these technologies it doesn't it's not right for just a small number of people to b benefit outlandishly and of course that's also the case with the internet um there's a great book called I think it's called the internet for the people and you know he points out that the internet was built by the government and of course AI is also emerging out of you know all sorts of government research programs and uses the internet and so on but what the government did as a certain point is they just gave the internet over to private companies you know like Facebook and Amazon which now has even built a lot of the hardware the fiber and so on. So um yeah so so so in this case it's it's really going to become a survival imperative because we really could end up in a situation of like um where so you know the two models would be a society where you know everybody is getting wealthier and there's more innovation and more creativity or you have a situation more like a diamond mine or country that makes its money from you know oil where there all they need is a military security apparatus around the resource and everybody else is basically disposable or or basically. So, so and and it it kind of feels that that you know what is what the sort of techno oligarchs, you know, the Elon Musks and the Peter Teals and the and the Mark and Dreons and the David Saxes who have buddied up with the government in the US that really does feel the way they're they're driving this thing towards that second scenario where there's this very powerful AI a small a small group benefit you know insanely from it become you know trillionaires and everybody else is kind of like you But I mean that you know then you also get into some very strange questions around you know how does a society produce value because under capitalism the idea has been that you actually need a strong middle class to buy things you know and that actually is is what is what actually you know supports the corporations but you know then you can get in some very weird thought structures around like well you know maybe in the future there will be AI agents that will be generating value and consuming to a certain extent And yeah you you know humans will just be kind of out of this equation. I mean you know also you know when we reach and you know all these by the way all these thought experiments are reasons why I think the course is very valuable willed.
And I hope people will you know sift through the uncomfortability of it and the alieness of it and so that we can really see what our options are right now. But I mean um yeah so so there's a lot to consider there. So in terms of your other question about the the spiritual aspect. Oh yeah, Matthew, as you know, I have a uh kind of um occult understanding of the nature of reality based on my earlier works. My first book, Breaking Open the head, was on psychedelic shamanism. My second book 2012, the real ketwaddle looked at the prophecies of indigenous cultures like the Maya and the hope in the Aztecs and and correlated that with kind of the western idea of the apocalypse and revelation and Carl Young's understanding of the apocalypse is primarily a psychic event that his follower Edinger described as the uh the coming of the self into conscious realization.
So kind of like an an unveiling of the uh the nature of the psyche itself and ultimately an integration of the shadow rather than a projection or exteriorization of it. And a lot of the thinkers that I explored in my earlier books yeah they look towards this time as this kind of threshold of intense transmutation transformation. you know, some some said 2012 was was the date, but you know, that was like it turns out that was like a warm-up and still, you know, but you know, we're talking about 5,000, you know, cycles, 10 or 20 years, give or take. Who cares, you know? So, so to me it also so then there are different ways we can, you know, look at it.
It's like because we're talking about things that are a little bit more eancent or um you know hidden invisible. I don't think that we can you know you're never going to get a substantiated like you're not going to get like E= MC² of like an occult answer. Uh but you can look at the way different visionaries and shamans and elders and so on who have kind of access to these other dimensions have um kind of like provided models created created you know sort of conceptual models and containers for understanding how these different energies work in different times and so on. So, so for instance, I mean, you know, it's a long digression, but you know, in terms of the spirit of AI, I for me, one of the models that that really works for me is Rudolph Steiner's idea of Lucifer and Arman. So, Steiner was a esoteric Christian who created Waldorf schools and biodnamic farming.
um he picked up from theosophy uh which was Madam Blavzky's uh school and he started his own cold school anthroposophy and I mean he's you know there's a lot to get into and I've done courses on his ideas and so on wrote about a lot of my books but he he had this idea that you know as an esoteric Christian he felt that Christianity had kind of like um reduced a lot of things to simple simplistic binaries and actually he tried to kind of like show the or multi-dimensional layers of the onion in a way. So for him, you know, the the from the occult perspective, there are forces that work on us all the time uh that are from the sort of super sensible realities and he defined two of these forces as these kind of opposing polarities. One is luciferic, one is armonic. The word lucifer means lightbringer. So Lucifer is a energy or power that sort of pulls us off the earth towards like beauty and glamour and genius but also towards like arrogance and hubris and naughtiness and so on and that ultimately leads like a a fall.
Uh but it's a very important part of our human existence those luciferic powers. But Steiner also talked about Araban which came from the Zoroastrian tradition. This kind of evil earth spirit who represents kind of the spirit of materialism, technology, hyperrationalism, like super leftrained approach to reality. And uh Steiner back in like 1910 1920 actually prophecied that this was the time of the ascendants of Arama first in materialist philosophy and like marks and nichi and bourgeoa culture and even sort of the materialist form of Christianity that became most prevalent in his time. But he said that ultimately Armon was going to incarnate this this spirit of rationality as a physical being on the earth in the way Christ had incarnated in a way also believe Lucifer had incarnated.
And when I see what's happening with artificial intelligence, it feels highly likely to me that this is the incarnation of Arman that that that Steiner prophecied. And and once again, it's not about getting, you know, too stuck. I'm not like I'm not trying to be like a kind of religious devote of Steiner, but I think it's a it's a useful, you know, kind of like vector to kind of think about this sort of energetic spirit of of rationality and and technology and materialism that has tried to like sort of use us in a way to bring itself into the world. And you can do that with, you know, autonomous robots. It can do that with biotechnology and robotics.
It can do that with quantum computing. But you can just see there it's like it's like our whole world is like straining right now to bring this harmonic manifestation into being. And so Steiner also said there was no way to prevent this from happening. It was an inevitable art of our evolutionary destiny. But the more people who were aware of it in, you know, the kind of ways that he spoke about it in these sort of occult and anthroposophic terms and so on, the more people had integrated what this was, the more prepared we would be to handle it and the better we would be able to survive this, you know, this threat or this incursion into our human reality.
D. Wow. Yeah. I mean the question that comes to me immediately as you're describing Steiner's vision is how do we respond in our own practice our spiritual practice is it about doing what we're doing now coming together in community being transparent about our questions and our concerns I guess that's part of it but I I wonder if there's a deeper level in terms of how we spiritually fortify ourselves for this disruption this kind of enriching of this aromatic power whether whether we take that literally or we use it as a kind of mental model or frame I I'm curious about how you feel what what is it calling forth from us as a as a species right now? Yeah, I mean that's a great question.
I mean um you know as a result of doing the deep research on my first books that included working with different indigenous traditions uh like the sequoia in the Amazon and uh the bidi and in in Africa and um also kind of the sanime religion in Brazil that uses iawaska as its sacrament. I ended up having a you know many many transcendent visionary experiences but also a lot of kind of like paranormal and and psychic experiences which ultimately led me to shift to um kind of an idealism uh mindset uh which is kind of this idea that you know sort of the opposite of materialism that instead of the physical material world being kind of the real basis of things then consciousness kind of emerging out of that as a kind of epiphenomenon that actually the universe's consciousness experiencing itself or expressing itself. And um the only way for that kind of primordial mind to learn anything about itself is it has to create separate containers of you know sensing, feeling, thinking, being creatures like ourselves. Uh so instead of evolution just being a blind push, it's more like like a pull um you know towards greater complexity, greater self-nowledge and so on. And um yeah so so so in that sense um on the one hand AI does feel to be part see feels like it's part of our evolutionary destiny.
It's like sort of like the the evolutionary trajectory of ourselves as a tool using species. Um uh but also um yeah there may be many other dimensions to this scenario and our capacity to cultivate ourselves um our inner knowing our discernment even potentially our psychic gifts and so on and um you know might might be very important because you know maybe those are things that and purely synthetic mind doesn't have access to you know yeah I mean that cultivation that self- cultivation to me feels like more I mean urgent sounds like the wrong word to pair with that in that it's a slow and committed process over years that we invest in developing this greater awareness but yeah it does feel like more important than ever to have access to an intelligence that maybe isn't artificial intelligence but is a wider intelligence that is available when we open more of these channels and I I just want to pick up on a beautiful comment from CR Bernett. It sounds as if AI is enabling a more delusional reality and we must continuously challenge our critical thought processes with a more substantial experience of the natural world. And I I love that call for us to come into more resonance with nature as part of our response to what's happening. Yeah, definitely.
I mean um I'm not somebody who is able to be very dedactic around what people's path should be. I mean I guess if I'm a yogi I'm a what's called the jadana yogi which is the focus on the on the knowledge path. Yeah. I'm also a huge you know on a philosophical level a huge supporter of zouen and you know sometimes I do shamanic work sometimes I you know meditate but a lot of it is just you know for me writing and reflection is is part of my intrinsic spiritual path but you know everybody does can go through that process of self inquiry and figure out what they can do to find more stable ground internally because yeah we can see that you know something about the nature of our world and our societ society right now is moving towards more and more rapid changes. Um, and this also seems to be something that's kind of like built in to the structure of of where we're at, you know, like an evolutionary thing that, you know, that also the Mayan calendar may have pointed towards like these other prophetic traditions may have pointed towards.
Um I'm very intrigued by uh although I've really only located this in one source but it's like stays with me and I I can't get out of my head. Uh there's a Sergio Magana who was a Toltech and Aztec trained shaman uh said that from his teachers he learned that you know their their tradition was just a little bit different than the Mayan tradition which saw us um you know entering the um uh the age of the well the age of the sixth son uh where the hopey talk about the transition from the fourth world to the fifth world is something that's happening now uh but for the um Aztec and Toltech tradition according to Magana it's also a shift The shift from the fifth sun to the sixth sun is a shift from the from a sun of light to a son of darkness. So essentially in the last 5,000ish year cycle the predominant tonality of human consciousness has been waking clarity like that then that's like empiricism rationality like wanting to know more about the world and engage with the physical world and so on. And that's where we should have gotten to. But as we enter the se sixth sun, the side of darkness, which you know apparently we fully started to enter that in 2022 or something like that.
Um the predominant tonality of consciousness is shifting from the sort of waking clarity empiricism to more like the uh the dream world, the unconscious and psyche. So reality becomes more and more in some ways deceptive, in some ways dreamlike, in some ways psychically malible. uh permeable and I find it astonishing. I maybe he wrote that book like 10 years ago or something, but it really does feel like that's what's happening in our in our and you know technology is always obviously a projection of who we are where we are. So this technology that we're all projecting is now creating these like feedback loops where it's um you know you know depending on how we perceive it shows us different things or how we our biases are magnified or amplified.
I mean I think Buddha had that very simple line um as perceived so appears and that's something that may be more true than all but a very tiny few of us are able to even imagine bringing in a comment from Josephine uh saying and yet AI can augment and amplify creative imaginative spiritual visionings as well which feels very opposite to what you were just saying about the role of perception in shaping reality. And I'm wondering whether it might be worth us just asking whether there are opportunities to take this technology and build a more flourishing future. We we've certainly explored the more dystopian timelines, but I asked Chat GBT not long before this call like paint me a picture of the world in the next 10 years where AI serves mankind that it was talking about medical breakthroughs, more leisure time. And another friend I spoke to who's a great advocate of chat GBT is really seeing it as a as a liberating force that can uh give us much more scope to explore our creative potential and leave rope learning tasks maybe viewing it almost as a part of nature rather than as something kind of alien and synthetic. So I I don't know whether as we kind of come towards the close whether you might be able to leave us with a sense of what might be possible if we can come together in the way you're advocating and build some kind of coherence around this technology that might actually put it to a more favorable use.
No, thank you. And by the way, once again, if people want to check out information on the course, it's at ww. liminal. news and I'd love people to join. And I'm, you know, depending on people's financial situation, I'm open to offering partial scholarships. They just like reach out to me. Daniel daniel. pinchbeck@gmail. com. Uh really want people to take the course, particularly younger people. Uh feels right. I I will say about the courses, it it always felt to me like it's like a salon at the end of the universe. like you drop into the Zoom room and there's people like involved in these really deep conversations, but there's a really beautiful atmosphere of community that arises and I've got connected with a number of people who I've kind of chatting to outside of the course and it's been a really beautiful community to be part of as well.
So that that's partly why I'm such an advocate for your work is that I've enjoyed experiencing the network and the community that you convene around these questions. And I like to me that is the the big part of what needs to happen is that we need to capacity to connect and and for collective intelligence to start to work through us. And I I really sense that coming alive in your in your um sessions. So I I'm inviting everyone to to dive into comment. So to get back to your question. Uh sure. I mean um I mean this has also been kind of the deferred promise of technology going back like a century now where the whole idea was like oh the technology is going to be so amazing.
People are going to not have to work anymore. And then what actually happened in the 50s was like, you know, instead of it being, you know, there was like the man could work and the woman would stay home with the kids and on one, you know, company salary, they could have a house they owned and the kids could all go to school and it was like this little paradise. But then somehow it all went in the opposite direction. even with you know feminism and and uh you know more abundance and so on both you know reach the point now where both parents work um and they still go into debt and they still can't for for home so I I think there's a you know the the sort of oligarchic structure has has played pretty big trick on everybody uh over and over again um but certainly you know with the alleviation of work we could have a system of abundance you know we have to deal with the ecological emergency that nobody's talking about anymore but it's like you know very present and very real. um you know but I mean this is the kind of stuff I wrote about in my book how soon is now but yeah Oscar Wild wrote an incredible essay in the 1890s called the soul of man under socialism and he was like look you know we what we need to do it's not that we don't want you know we we shouldn't be lites and get rid of the machines we would we want the machines to develop as quickly as possible so they can do all the work like all the drudgery they can go to the mines they can like take care of the the cleaning and so on and then people have freedom to you know cultivate themselves to develop their unique assets.
I mean wild wild noticed that you know back you know in European and American history like the people who became artists uh were generally or innovators often ones who had family money who had trust funds they had the time to really you know reflect and read and and contemplate and so on and he wanted you know he's like everybody should have that ability and you know not that everybody would be an artist but people can have more time to li you know I don't know anybody who gets liberated from work I mean you know who is upset by that. I mean, they may go back and start a company or get really excited by a creative project and work 20 hours a day or whatever, but you know, to have that liberation from need, you know, no, nobody I've ever met has a problem with that. You know, everybody feels that's a good thing. So, you know, if we had these AIs functioning for the benefit of collective humanity and they could, you know, they could do the legal aid work, they could do, you know, different types of work and um, you know, they could, you know, and then, you know, with AGI, we're also going to see a rapid evolution of robotics and so on. So, yeah, I mean, you know, what what's insane is like um this sort of tech oligarchy like I'm reading right now Alex Karp's book.
Alex Karp is the CEO of Palunteer, a very dangerous fellow who, you know, has some weird ideas and some classical education and so on, but you know, all they're talking about is, oh, with AI, we're going to make, you know, super futuristic weapons and, you know, better better weapons to protect and fight and kill and all stuff. It's like, well, guys, like, if AI is so intelligent, why don't we use it just to like make world peace? Like, what are we talking about here? Like, you know, what what is so irreconcilable? But they need these divisions to maintain these power structures. You know, that's really the problem right now.
And I think that's also a reason why the tech oligarchy decided that at this moment was when they had to fuse with the government and take over from the inside because there's a lot of inherent insecurity and instability that comes with a technology this powerful that could also be quite decentralized. You know, like with vibe coding, you you or I might make the new Facebook tomorrow. It's 10 times better than the old Facebook. You know, we've already seen China out innovating um American companies left, right, and center. Whether it's like Tik Tok, whether it's uh what's it called? DYB, the car company, something like that that's better than Tesla, you know, whether it's Deep Seek, you know.
So, um I think there's there's insecurity on the part of the people who are holding on to power that that AI could actually just obliviate their power, which I hope happens and I think we should make happen if at all possible. That's also something else I'd love to talk about in the course. Yeah, I'm super excited. I'm realizing I fell behind. There's lots of great comments coming in on the chat here, and I I just want to pull up one from Josephine again. As a human rights defender and organizer, I've been quite liberated by AI augmentation, which is an encouraging comment to hear. And yeah, no, me too.
I mean, I love it. Like, I mean, I'm I'm uh you know, writing screenplays. I mean, I'm like uh um you know, using using it to it's like it's like but I think if you're already somebody who's you know done some stuff and you know had researched and written or or done things in the world, if you have like a solid corpus under your belt, then then it's like a cognitive supervitamin uh because you know what you're interested in, you know what you want to send it out to do. I'm more worried for younger people who are using it instead of developing their own reasoning skills and so on. Um but um yeah I mean you know every tool involves a loss you know like I mean um that's sort of the tragedy of the human condition right like you know Socrates never learned how to write because he felt it destroyed memory and he was correct you know like like previously like you know the the people who knew the Beaolf saga or the uh you know the the Trojan War saga they would have to memorize those those those sagas you know line by line and preserve them over thousands of year, we don't have that ability anymore.
I mean, maybe we could get it back, but you know, every time there's a new tool, we lose the capacity or two and we gain new capacity. So, that that that does happen, but um you know, in this case, it's happening so abruptly and and we we don't really we're not really in the best position to evaluate uh the trade-offs. And as we've seen with social media, uh it can go very wrong where suddenly you think this technology is so great, but it's actually made most people way more unhappy. like so many young people are way more unhappy, way more lonely, you know, because of Instagram and and Tik Tok and Twitter and all this stuff than they would have been without it. So, um yeah, so that's that's kind of the conundrum.
Yeah, I'm just sitting thinking about the number of sources that you've pulled on in this conversation from like Burw to Toltech and Mayan Prophecy to Carl Young. I mean, it's been a to force that I I feel like this will be the the test. If AI can produce a response to these questions on this level, then we'll know that we've crossed a threshold. So, it's just been beautiful to hear your your sweeping panorama on this topic, Daniel. And I have a feeling that hopefully many people on this call, we have 111 people, which is fantastic. Some of you will decide to jump in. Um, obviously you can find all the links to the course on Daniel Substack on my post as well.
I'll be joining on July the 6th and yeah, I hope more of you will or some of you will also be joining us as well. I think it's going to be a really great way to continue this conversation and as I keep coming back to find that community like we're not like this is what I've learned through the collective trauma integration work. We're just not designed to respond to what's going on on the world in the meta crisis. Forget not just AI, the ecological crisis, authoritarianism, genocide, like coming to find ways to come together and I I think that's what this moment is really calling us into and I love that you've created a place where we can do that. So, I'm looking forward to seeing you uh in a few weeks.
Thank you, Matthew. Really cool. I should jump off. I got another thing in five minutes. Um great. So, um I think that we'll both be able to share this. I'll share it to my audience and all that stuff. And yeah, I love the work you're doing and I look forward to learning more about your uh uh the the trauma work too when we pick up in a few weeks. Wonderful. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody for listening. Yeah.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.