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A Brave New World Is At Our Doorstep

https://archive.is/qIwgh

The move toward a highly technological and highly militarized society is here and it is not going away.  The Tech Bros (Google, Meta, Amazon, DeepMind, OpenAI and many others we don't even know about) have delivered humanity into a world where we are going to be redundant.  And by redundant I mean everything from doing plumbing to needing humans for anything.  

A few of the queries I am investigating this day are: 

• What is going to happen to vast swaths of this redundant humanity? 
• Who is controlling the A.I. ?  And under this question are so many more sub questions such as: 
  • Where does the information come from to train this A.I.
  • What biases are written into the code?  
  • Where is the A.I. farm?  Trump has declared it will be in the UAE.  Is that to bypass regulations? 
  • How will A.I. be powered? Are there more nuclear plants in our future? Who will regulate that pollution? 
• Apart from robots taking jobs, will the robots also find novel ways to kill?
  • This dystopian future has already been deployed in Gaza and Ukraine with assasination drones and we don't even know what comes next. 
  • Autonomous killing is already on the drawing board because humans can't make decisions in a nanosecond. 
  • Musk has already used his Starlink to manipulate info in war zones.  What is to stop an oligarch from starting a war or deciding (in his interest) who should win?  Ukraine is a perfect example of this. 
• What about the "good side" of A.I.? 
  • Some point to better design, new drugs, and lower costs for everything and lots more stuff and money -- but we know that more economic activity leads to environmental destruction.  Under the old system we were burning the world up.  What happens in the new AI future? 

The article listed above should raise a lot of other questions for humans, but also for Quakers because soon it will be impossible to operate with any kind of integrity in the brave new world. 

WHY? 

Because increasingly it will be harder and harder to know what is true (A.I. lies -- the so-called hallucination.  And that might be just an innocent mistake or it could be built into an algorithm)  Also, as digital currency comes into being it will be very hard to discover flows of money into political pockets but for the peonage it will be an oppressive form of control and impossible to opt out and still be able to operate in society. 

So what will the people of the future do?  And by future I mean 2030. 

The dark answer is Transhumanism.  People will feel increasing pressure to MERGE WITH MACHINES.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this materialization of humanity will be the death of spirituality ... unless we act now.  

So let this blog serve as a warning.  A klaxon signaling danger.  

Will A.I. Regulate Itself? 

In a recent article in The Atlantic (https://archive.is/xWUOH) the authors reckoned that two things will alter the course of A.I. in just the next few years.  One is RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) and the other is Quantum Computing.   RSI is when an A.I. system improves itself without human intervention.  In this scenario we could see things like humans being locked out of decision making loops and the A.I. going off on its own leaving humans without any understanding of what is in the code or how to stop it.  

In the current scenario of zero's and ones computing we could still grapple with A.I. even though it is still operating at the speed of electrons.  But imagine a scenario where instead of linear line by line code is created and evaluated for functionality thousands or millions of lines of code is being created at once to arrive at a solution.  That is Quantum Computing.  Think of a mouse in a maze trying to get to the cheese.  One mouse going down one tunnel at a time.  In Quantum computing you have an unlimited number of mice and the cheese is found much faster -- in nanoseconds.  For comparison a human brain cell operates on the order of milliseconds.  Let's put that in perspective.  A millisecond is one thousandth of a second (1/1000 or 0.001 seconds), while a nanosecond is one billionth of a second (1/1,000,000,000 or 0.000000001 seconds). Essentially, a millisecond is 1,000,000 (one million) times larger than a nanosecond.  

In Trump's "big beautiful bill" (not) it specifically says that AI shall not be regulated?  If you thought packing the supreme court was dangerous wait till we see how an unregulated A.I. operates.  Here is just one grim imagining. 

A.I. is trained to come up with a solution for better crop yields and RSI is employed.  A.I. eventually determines that crops prefer a warmer world and that the best way to do that is to make sure more CO2 is in the atmosphere and that we need more land for crops. So it logically creates more traffic jams that burn more fuel, it designs everything to be a little less efficient to bump up CO2.  It also notices that the best farmland is in an area densely populated by trees in the south and that fire is a great way to restore the land so it overloads the grid on those areas, explodes transformers and starts massive forest fires. 

Is this absurd? 

Consider that we have no idea if the A.I. companies that are unregulated  have a kill switch to control any of this.  How would they even know it is about to happen if decisions are being made in a billionth of a second?  

The A.I. future we are living into is going to be a hellscape.  Much like the nuclear world we now occupy.  At any moment these genies of death can run amok.  Nuclear is mostly zero's and ones digital. The president still has the final launch authority (and that is no comfort at all).  In civil nuclear power we can barely manage to have the foresight to keep generators off the ground in a tsunami or have pumps and valves (analog systems) that work reliably.  What will happen when we are completely blind to the entire process? 


~ Joseph Olejak

I attended an art exhibition recently at Free Columbia in Philmont and a young artist named Eloise featured her work.  I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.  It was not just her talent but also the story behind it.  

In particular there was this one painting that showed a human figure and what seemed to be emanating the spirit of God from it. The colors were fantastic, but more than that I was happy to learn that the artist had something of what might be called an ecstatic experience while doing the art.  I'm reluctant to say exactly what she might have experienced but she did share that "she felt taken over by something bigger than herself and wondered how much to let go and allow it to take her over and how much of herself to keep in it."

What a wonderful inquiry to be in at 24! 

This got me thinking about how we approach Spirit. 

• "Opportunity favors the prepared mind" ~ Pasteur.    When we engage in activities that allow us to go inward we can begin the approach that altered state of consciousness.  Art is a path inward.  Meditation is a path.  The gathered meeting of Quakers is a path. 
• How much is too much?  I wondered about what Eloise was describing.  Where does the influence of spirit begin and end? How much of our own will forces come into play in the ecstatic state? If one believes in spirit(s) how can one be sure about who we've invited in? 
• Is an ecstatic religious experience merely a psychotic episode?  I'd have to say "it depends" on the message.  It is possible to be taken over by dark forces. Christ was tempted in the desert.  In Matthew 4:4, Jesus rebukes the devil's temptation by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, saying, "Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God."  In the Quaker tradition the ongoing revelation might be considered the word of God if we receive that message when we are connected to Source.  As Quakers we Discern and even Test messages. 

I invite readers to find an opportunity to enter that ecstatic space; whether it be in Quaker meeting or in a forest or on a lake.  God is present in all of creation.  It matters not where we find it ... only that we do. 

~ Joseph OLejak

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another
- Ephesians 4:25

We Quakers put a high value on truth telling.  

This might be why we find the current state of affairs so deeply disturbing.   In the last 100 days we've been fed about 492 suspect claims.  Since 2020 who knows how many?  In the tens of thousands that we know of.   And if we combine both political parties in that calculation it's probably a lot higher.  But honestly, I find it hard to tell when I'm being lied to unless I can look in the liar's face. And that's just outright lies; not to mention lies of omission. 

On the right and left of the political spectrum everything is spun for some political advantage. My distrust of everything is at an alltime high. 

So what does a person do in such a fact free environment?  How do we find common ground when the color of the ground is clearly brown, the wavelength of the light reflected from the ground is in the brown spectrum but we are told the ground is blue? 

The delusions of the world are many, but perhaps the way out of this is to have shared experiences.   It is easy to quote what others say or follow the words of so-called leaders, but what is our own experience? 

• If I walk along the shore with a friend and the surf gets us both wet surely we can agree on water and wetness? 
• We can agree on gravity if we both jump off a rock into a lake.
• Maybe we can even agree on some shared language to describe something we both see or experience.

Beyond that I don't know what is true.  Everything else is just second hand news or conjecture.  

The inquiry I am in is this: 

• What is real? 
• Can I trust my senses?  My experience is that the Earth is flat unless I get in an airplane and see the curve of the planet.
• If I hear something, do I trust the source?  How do I even evaluate that? A photo can show one truth and then be cropped to show another.  A statement can also be chopped into sound bytes to have many different meanings? 
• Are there universal truths that I can accept without question?  Such as God is love. 
• Is logic a bastion of truth?  Math?  a2 + b2 = c2  

I think the notion that we are "members of one another" is a guide to truth, but only if we are building that community together. And by together I mean in person; looking into the eyes of another.  Feeling into that person's inner light. 

~ Joseph Olejak

Maya Angelou's poetry is a shining beacon of truth in the murky times.  

As Quakers worldwide witnessed the grotesque violation of the Westminster Quaker Meeting space by the Metropolitan police, an act that had not occurred in the living memory of British Quakers, we must double down on our insistence that Quaker houses of worship are inviolable places where the police, the military and government informants are not welcome as enforcers. 

We must draw a line in the sand about what we will tolerate as the encroachments on human decency continue unabated. 

Angelou wrote: 
When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

Is it so hard to imagine that we are now at an inflection point in American history where the sapling of American democracy is now bent and ready to break.  This is not the birches of Robert Frost.  This tree is much more fragile. This tree is only able to bend for so long before it will be crippled and twisted forever.  

What does this have to do with our blessed community?  Is politics, the deeply temporal realm of man, not also in the realm of spirit?  Should we allow our values (and soon our children) be consumed in the "minstrel show of hate." 

I would argue that there is a time for quiet and a time for witness (quiet or vocal).  The brave and startling truth is that "We, this people", as Angelou wrote "have the power to fashion this earth..."

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it. 

And when will we come to it?  The hour is getting late.  We cannot stand by and wait for the oligarchs' campaign to implode.  It won't.  

In our own spiritual discernment I urge all Quakers to: 

• Take a deep look at what is happening to others and then map that onto ourselves.  
  
  • No one is safe.  Westminster was a test case. 
    
• Inquire into your heart and see what you find there.  
  • In Chile the mothers of the disappeared stood in front of La Moneda Palace, the home of Pinochet, to witness what had been done to their sons and daughters. 
• What are you willing to do? 
  • George Lakey wrote that "non-violent direct action is the street heat of successful movements."  

Let us now ... come to it !!

For the entire poem of Maya Angelou

https://www.best-poems.net/poem/a-brave-and-startling-truth-by-maya-angelou.html

~ Joseph Olejak

I hear the surf in Palestine sifting through the sand
amidst the scream of missiles and the flinch of metals.
Kites once snapped in wind unspooled by children’s hands.

Fresh produce is now rare in Gaza’s markets. Meat, chicken,
potatoes, yogurt, eggs and fruits are completely gone.  Lament
the loss while dialing Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand

complicit in the genocide by shipping contraband
bunker busters to Israel instead of water, food, fuel, medical
supplies and kitchens to the fringed by the sea Palestinians.

 Crops and livestock have been decimated, there’s a stout demand
for veterinary supplies, what animals will low by the manger,
what star will rise in the East, how long will the Menorah’s candles

last or when will the Ramadan fast be broken in the already broken
evening?  Who will play the flutes or read stories to the children,
who will dance in the squares?  Have they unearthed the railroad

 in the Gaza strip, repaved its airport, rebuilt her port?  Fool pier
that boondoggled off the coast shuttled by befuddled Army Corp
of engineers, smashed by uncharted seas in untested currents.

 Clog every road to Gaza with trucks stuffed to the gills with food, President
Trump’s number is 202 455 1111 Tuesday –Thursday ten minute
waiting time and you get a live person unlike Schumer or Gillibrand.

 ~ Bob Elmendorf

"Make a joyful noise unto the Lord" 
~ Psalm 100:1

I was cleaning out my fathers desk on Saturday.  A task that I have assiduously avoided since he passed nearly 10 years ago.  The desk was filled with special things my father loved like his Montblanc fountain pen and pencil set and a calendar made out of brass that had the months and dates on little cards that could be changed.  I used to love playing with that as a child.  

The truth is I miss my father and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about him. His words are still with me. 

A drawer in the desk must have gotten jostled when it was moved months ago and it would not close properly.  I pulled the drawer out and found a ball point pen that must've fallen out and jammed the drawer.  I pushed it back in and it still wouldn't close.  I pulled the drawer out again and stuck my hand in up to my elbow and found a balled up piece of paper crushed into the drawer slide. I pulled it out and immediately noticed the handwriting ... It was my father's penmanship.  Here's what it said: 

Attitude Makes The Difference 

I believe that the ones we love are never far from us even though their physical bodies have moved on.  This was my father speaking to me.  I am sure of it.   The one thing my father was a master at was recontextualizing.  No matter what situation he was faced with he had an uncanny knack of finding the bright side.  One of his favorite aphorisms was "what you think about comes about."  

We are living in a time which could be characterized as dangerous or filled with opportunity.  There are forces that are looking to reshape our way of life.  We can cower or we can speak up.  These forces have always been with us.  They are the forces of might makes right. The forces of money and power. But we have a super power -- we can make a joyful noise and raise up the teachings that make people truly great.  Love.  Dignity.  Acceptance.  Charity.  

This day, the inquiry I invite us to be in is this: 

• What joyful noise can you make?  
• What verse are you going to lend that will be a clear signal above the cacophony of political garbage? 
• What "yawp over the roofs of the world" will you make like Walt Whitman? 

Jesus spoke the truth of the WORD to the ROMANS and the PHARISEES.  In my way of thinking the Sermon on the Mount was the best embodiment of our values.  Let us raise a joyful noise and as John Lewis said "get into some good trouble to redeem the soul of the nation." 
~ Joseph Olejak

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth"
John 1:14

The Christmas story we are so familiar with is the baby Jesus in the manger and adorned by gifts from the Maji.  John is offering us another way of looking at the birth of Christ; as an incarnation of spirit into flesh.  The word.  And not the first time.  In John 1:1 we are reminded that the word is God and the world came from the word.  

Powerful stuff.  

From a Quaker perspective what appeals to me is that the spirit of Christ in us lives in our word and His word.  God made creation and he saw that it was good.  The essential goodness of the world is not something apart from God as if spirit and flesh are two separate and distinct things.  They are one.  And the beauty of the new covenant with humanity is that the word is right there -- ready at hand -- to invoke, the use, to empower and to hold as sacred. 

There is one caveat ... we have been given free will and it is up to us to embrace it.  

My query for this Christmas day is this: How can I as a Quaker and a Christian make flesh the word of God in me?  

Lucky for us we have the practice of integrity to guide us. It is a way to keep us "trued up" to what really matters.  As a cyclist this word "trued up" has special meaning for me.  When a tire goes out of round a bicycle can easily lose its integrity.  And this sense of the word integrity is super helpful.  The meaning of whole and complete and in working order.  Is my word in working order?  Am I operating whole and complete to my word?  In the sense of John 1:1 what am I creating in the world with my word?  Is it good?  Would it be recognized by the God of creation? 

Yes, powerful stuff. 

Merry Christmas my fellow human beings.  Peace, joy and word of God in you !!

~ Joseph Olejak

"Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil" 

~ Isaiah 64: 1-3

On this first week of Advent we ardently seek that God would come down from the heavens and offer up solutions to our problems. Oh that it were so!  

 The word "rend" means to tear.  It also means great emotional pain.  When I think of "rend" I think of the moment when Christ died on the cross and the curtain that shielded the Holiest of Holies was torn in two.  That curtain kept the arc of the covenant from the eyes of the people. The curtain symbolized the separation between God's holy presence and humanity,  With the death and resurrection Christs presence is now with us always. No priest is required to intercede for us. 

If we are looking for a God in the clouds to come down and save us we'd have to look to the burning bush talking to Moses or Abraham being stopped by an angel from sacrificing his son.  The symbolism of the rend curtain may offer some guidance on what God might do for us. 

When was it rend? 
Why then? 

If we look at the main teachings of Christ we find:

• Love: Love God and your neighbor as yourself, and love your enemies. 
• Forgiveness: forgive others who have wronged you.
• Humility: Don't be hypocritical, and don't judge others. 
• Kingdom of God: The Kingdom of god lies within as the Holy Spirit working in us. 
• Service: Serve others without expecting anything from them.
• Community: The blessed community is when we gather to discern the word of God

Interesting that the new order coincides with sacrifice at Golgotha. 

It is a sad fact, but modern life has made us lazy in spiritual matters. God is not a Facebook meme and God is not sending you a parcel from Amazon with the solution to your problems. 

Our Query in 2025 ought to be how can I prune away all the noise and begin to hear more clearly the voice of God within. 

~ Joseph Olejak

~ Christine Rosensteel