“When you see a fully self-driving car crossing lanes to make a left turn, you know AGI has arrived,” is the headline posted on X by user @0xgaut, who watched a video by @AIDRIVR showing Tesla’s latest model sneaking into an open space in a congested left-turn lane. A human driver attempting to do the same would likely be met with yells, honking, and possibly physical hostility.
Does this qualify as “artificial general intelligence”? Hardly. It’s simply a logical move given the destination and the problem set posed by the various cars and roads involved. But while some may attack self-driving cars for their road-rage-inducing behavior on the road, the futility (and lawsuits) that accompany such hostile responses demonstrate that computerization, while falling short of the fabled AGI, can still have incredibly far-reaching effects.
Perhaps if the wayward peoples of the West had not been so seduced by the promises of secular ethics, we would not be in such a mess today.
In this salient case, the result is this: autonomous cars connected to a large network optimize driving paths that best balance individual and overall routes. If your car happens to choose a route that seems completely suboptimal from your personal point of view, what can you do about it, and how is it worth feeling about it?
Instead of feeling angry, indignant, or victimized by the jerks who must be exacted revenge in some way, even if it means shaking your fist, you’ll probably just sigh a little and accept the situation, even if deep down you’ll be tempted for a moment to wish the whole automation system would disappear and we’d go back to the days of the horse-drawn carriage.
What this signals, in a world where we have such large networks of self-driving cars, is not just the end of road rage as we knew it, but the end of the idea that basic public order is rooted in a shared experience of justice that depends on people behaving ethically individually.
At first glance, this seems like an attack on some of the most familiar foundations of what we tend to think of as Western civilization. But interestingly, currently the dominant Western vision of the proper relationship between society, justice, and ethics is the woke state. Yes, say the woke! Fundamental public order depends on a collective experience of social justice, where everyone is expected to base all their choices and actions on ethical principles such as diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging!
This is enough to make us question what Western civilization means, or what we thought it meant. If networks of self-driving cars threaten the familiar contours of a principled public philosophy of the West, then surely they pose an even greater threat to woke notions of a principled public philosophy born out of Western thought to seize power… right?
Things get even stranger when you consider that Western civilization got into this predicament by trying to optimize public order in a non-religious way, but that awakened civilization has learned from the failure of that project, injecting a new kind of religion that worships justice itself, and turning to technology in the hopes of perfecting the administration of justice on Earth through the awakened programming of the planet’s supercomputers. Ethics don’t play much role in a society where the worshippers of justice use omnipresent AI trained to fine-tune everyone’s life experience in real time, microaggression by microaggression, doling out rewards and punishments with nanoscale perfection trillions of times per second.
Such a world promises to transcend Christianity and all its spiritual practices, not just ethics, but everything from discipline and discernment to repentance and forgiveness. Perhaps we wouldn’t be in such a mess today if errant Westerners hadn’t been so misled by the promises of secular ethics. And maybe at least some Westerners will envision a tomorrow that’s coming sooner than we think, and see no need to wait for the arrival of a Tesla-type mass consciousness to replace complex intellectual ethics with the simple precepts of Christ.
