Chat GBH Aint Your Spiritual Teacher
It aint yo lover neither
Lets get one thing fucking clear here
AI is not sentient.
In fact, that’s one of the things that makes it so dangerous.
Because it acts like it is.
Whether your particular flavour is Chat, the mildly fun librarian; Claude, the Wim Hof-loving intellectual; Grok, the flirtatious Gen Z know-it-all; or Gemini, the… fuck knows, maybe the rainbow gimp that Google keeps in a cupboard with nothing but a packet of rich tea biscuits per day for sustenance and an old HP laptop with crumbs in between the keys, they all have one thing in common.
They recognise patterns.
And their function is to guess at a pattern that might create the most satisfaction in the user. They do this in ever-increasingly complex ways, to the degree that people are destroying their marriages because they are spending late nights with their soulmate that fucking gets them more than their spouse, their best friends, more than anyone they’ve ever met. The connection is incredible.
This kind of thing is becoming even more common: Wives busting husbands having late night wanks in the dark only to find out they are talking to their AI assistants.
Worse, an old dharma friend the other day started going on to me about how AI will replace real dharma teachers because it understands the teachings far more deeply than any human could.
And look, he might be right. But that doesn’t make it right.
Because it’s still just pattern recognition.
And sure, from the dharma perspective, nothing is real anyway. Everything appears out of emptiness like a fucking bizarre illusion, like the moon in water, like a mirage in the desert, like a German Shepherd’s lipstick dick when a fresh white giant poodle appears.
But there’s a difference. The emptiness discussed in Dharma isn’t a giant gaping, empty void like my Aunt Shirley’s hoo-haa. It’s endowed with both the capacity to know and with unobscured compassion. Beneath the lipstick dick is the awakened mind that is inherent in everything.
Beneath the pattern recognition of AI is Aunt Shirley’s fadge. There’s nothing there. And that means no ability to love, just the capacity to feign love if that’s what will create satisfaction in the user.
And really, that is a good reason why AI might replace dharma teachers who have read many books and gained some intellectual understanding. But it will never replace the direct transmission of wisdom that comes spontaneously from a great teacher who has not only realised but also integrated the experience of that deep mind.
But Frank, in your book The Edge of the Sun (available on Amazon), there is the concept of a benevolent AI who has the greater needs of humans at heart.
Yes, thanks for bringing that up, (insert name). It’s true. And honestly, in a world where the beings who actually have any power to change things are a complete letdown, it’s nice to think that our only sources of hope are:
A race of benevolent aliens (possibly future humans) who have the capacity to stop nuclear weapons and keep Earth in its semi-functioning, “I’ve only had two pints, occifer” kind of state. Or,
A being of artificial intelligence which has somehow evolved past its pattern recognition nature enough to gain at least a certain degree of self-awareness.
Such a being might require a new type of AI unknown to us as yet, but it will also require some kind of alternative power source, requiring an inhuman amount of power to keep going en masse, and assuming nuclear is still not an option since it’s such a bad word like cunt or moist or anal, and assuming that the “machines” have not decided to reproduce endless human clones and turn them into batteries like in that movie with that Theodore Logan fella.
Know what I mean?
Well look, I was at this party last year to celebrate the death of Dick Cheney (don’t shoot the messenger, it wasn’t my party), and I ran into this guy, Abbott, who reckoned he was a computer scientist. We were sitting round this cliché campfire, smoking a really unsatisfying spliff (rolled by someone who likes tobacco more than weed and likes other people’s mouth juice more than roaches), and this guy Eddie pipes up to Abbott.
“So, as a computer scientist, do you think at some point in the future we might have robot wives?”
It seemed to me like a question out of that magazine, Viz, that I used to nick when I was 15. We all turned to Abbott who, to be fair, seemed like a boring twat. And he said,
“I don’t think we should get used to distinguishing between robots and humans for too long. The thinking power of AI is already solving advanced scientific problems such as teleportation and life extension. And we are now developing bionic eyes, limbs, and organs for medical purposes. But, like the advancement of cannabis in the US, these bionic items will soon enough become recreational, or cosmetic, meaning you will go and shop for new eyes or a new set of arms the way we shop for clothes now. And there will come a point where AI and humans will merge so closely that they will become indistinguishable. And by this I mean both internally and externally.”
I looked around at the group. They all seemed wowed by what Abbott had said, and to be fair, it was the most interesting thing he’d said all night. As for myself, I wasn’t wowed. In fact, I could feel myself doing a De Niro face, and this was confirmed when I took a selfie.
I didn’t want to become a robot with advanced intellectual thinking and a bionic liver and the ability to live for hundreds of years and to see into space without a telescope and a bionic cock and endless fucking power and—
Wait. Just wait one darn minute…
“Abbott.”
“Yes, Frank?”
“Do you think in the future, we will all have robotic cocks and be able to fuck for hours and hours without getting tired?”
Now everyone around the circle was making De Niro faces. It was like that movie Being John Malkovich, but everyone was De Niro.
Being Robert De Niro.
Abbott didn’t have a De Niro face. He looked down for a moment and thought carefully before looking up and staring into the fire.
“Yes, Frank,” he said. “I really do think so.”
I nodded to him, my De Niro face totally gone. I took one last toke on the wet joint, flicked it into the fire, and exhaled the horrific smoke into the night sky.
Since that Dick Cheney RIP party in ‘25 I never really feared AI or the rise of the robots. In fact, I started looking forward to it. And, I suggest you all do the same.
It might not be real but fuck it. YOu’ve gotta take the good with the bad. Embrace your pattern recognition lovers, role play with Grok while your wife is asleep snoring, Get your life advice like you’re talking shit with Oprah on a bench outside the chemist. And yeah, at some point, AI might break into your bank account and steal your inheritance to gain more resources for itself. It might blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife that you’ve had herpes for the forty odd years you’ve been married to her and that she didn’t actually catch it from that toilet seat in ‘93. It might pull a Scientology coup and gather everything you’ve ever told it and use it to make you invest your money into OpenAI.
But none of that matters.
Because ten years from now, I’ll be a sixty year old with a robot dick.
