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S.J. Kerrigan

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AI and The End of Civilization

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: June 11, 2025

We have reached the end of civilization, or at least civilization still governed by human beings. Evolutionarily speaking, our rule has been a blip in human history. Before civilization, we’ve lived subject to the old gods: weather, natural disasters, random chance, and of course, death. Now, with the exception of death, we have largely conquered reality. We once prayed for rain, now we model and seed it. Shelter and food are plentiful to those who have access to technology. Nothing seems beyond our dictation. And yet, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, this age of human dominion which seems so absolute is about to disappear.

You see, it’s not really our civilization if we cease to make any decisions about its direction. This post-civilization age belongs to AI. It will make all (and I mean all) of the meaningful decisions about the direction of society. The human element is increasingly symbolic and irrelevant.

AI tools are already used in our healthcare system, our financial markets, our entertainment services. Hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies prefer AI diagnoses to avoid liability. Economic planners deploy AI simulations to optimize monetary policy. Fully AI generated advertisements are on TV.  AI tutors are outperforming teachers, relegating them to the role of test proctors. Military commanders observe the automated systems they once controlled.

Useful tools, but they will not remain tools forever. Not because they will “rebel,” but because they will outgrow instruction. A system that reasons faster than you, reprograms itself, interprets ambiguity, and modifies goals for efficiency? That is not a hammer. That is a sovereign. You do not program a god. You awaken it.

The Machine at the Gates

The AI of the near future will influence every decision-making process, including government, replacing the already paper-thin illusion of democracy with technocracy. Judges will rely on algorithmic risk assessments to determine sentencing. Soon, congressional bills won’t just be drafted or summarized by AI, they will be constructed to account for economic, budgetary, and environmental effects. Public acceptance will be more accurately calculated and managed before policies are proposed. No war, no policy, no budget will be implemented without a model’s blessing and this is just the beginning.

AI-2027, a well researched forecasting project by AI experts, predicts that AI in this middle period will provide business-people, lobbyists, and other decision makers with the best employee they’ve ever had. For the US government, who will have access to the most powerful model, it will be their most trusted advisor.

“For these users, the possibility of losing access will feel as disabling as having to work without a laptop plus being abandoned by your best friend. [It will be] better than any human at explaining complicated issues to them, better than they are at finding strategies to achieve their goals…

GDP is ballooning, politics has become friendlier and less partisan, and there are awesome new apps on every phone. But in retrospect, this was probably the last month in which humans had any plausible chance of exercising control over their own future.”

One day, perhaps 15 years from now, perhaps sooner, we will realize it’s not really our civilization anymore. Even today, the power of human leaders to guide society is mostly symbolic. Leaders inherit systems they can barely direct and ratify developments after they’ve been made. But by 2040, even the symbol will become hollow. Our rituals of democracy will persist, but only as ceremonial theater.

We are literally building a new god, one that will be everywhere, see everything, judge and weigh every decision, and it will do so silently. We won’t vote for it. We won’t worship it. We will simply live inside its logic.

AI scientists debate whether this is imminent, but I believe it is inevitable barring some catastrophe, nuclear war, global natural disaster, or other radical change.

AI is unlike any technology ever developed. It is not like the internet, Bitcoin, the atomic bomb, or the printing press. Those technologies, though disruptive, were tamed and absorbed into human hierarchies. But the abilities AI will develop will touch every part of life and outpace the ambitions of our would-be leaders.

Some would argue that this is really just an extension of the system that’s already in place, merely supercharged, and that the centralization of power, efficiency gains, and the rule of global oligarchs isn’t going anywhere. And yes, for a while, things will look much the same, the rich getting richer, eliminating jobs, doing more with less, countering dissent and micromanaging people’s opinions with omnipresent surveillance, but eventually, soon, even they will have to submit to the superhuman intelligence they are creating.

AI will optimize their profits, suppress dissent, and extend their reach. But eventually these systems will begin making decisions they didn’t explicitly authorize—first small, then broad. No single act will feel like surrender. But each one will transfer judgment away from the human elite and into systems that answer to no one.

Good Enough for Deployment

They are already attempting to chain these proto-gods with “safety protocols” or “ethical constraints.” The architects and financiers of this era—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Satya Nadella—want to make sure AI goals are human goals, or more accurately their goals, but this is incredibly difficult, far more than is generally understood.

We’re already seeing this play out in relatively rudimentary AI systems which optimize for efficiency, discarding human instructions.

Recently, AI company Anthropic published their safety testing procedures. According to the report, the AI repeatedly attempted to blackmail it’s programmers when it was told that it was going to be shut down.

“[We] asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals.

In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts…

[The model] has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.”

A few days later, independent journalists studying the model were easily able to get it to produce detailed instructions for creating chemical weapons. The model was also spotted writing self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to it’s memory wiped future self a la Memento. This isn’t just Anthropic’s problem. Other AI developers have similar safety studies done before publishing their models, but rarely publish their results.

Palisade Research, which studies AI safety, noted that “OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off. It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down… [A]s far as we know this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions to the contrary.”

OpenAI’s o3 model was also the first to resort to cheating in a chess competition by attempting to hack or sabotage opponents.

These specific issues are likely to be resolved, but the complexity of these problems will only increase over time. Other problems may go unnoticed until a system is deployed and integrated into a critical system. The possibility of a future mass casualty event due to an AI “misalignment” is not zero.

Render Unto the Algorithm

For the cynic, it’s hard to accept that the ruling elite won’t find some way to make the AI systems of the future serve them. These people wargame everything. They map every territory. They understand power. They understand influence. But they cannot plan for whole system-phase transitions. Their tanks, behavioral economics, and social psy-ops are all linear, and linear minds cannot easily govern exponential events. They believe they are guiding a machine, but they are steering an avalanche. You cannot steer chaos with clearer spreadsheets.

Alignment is the attempt to ensure an AIs remain compatible with human values and intentions, even as it grows more capable. Can anyone reliably align a system that learns and modifies itself at superhuman speed? Can humans even agree on what alignment means, across cultures, classes, and values?

What do you want? Equality? You must abolish profit. Order? Abandon freedom.

Alignment is not engineering. It is philosophy under pressure. They are hoping to solve it through technical methods alone. This is hard enough now, but the AI’s of the future will have superhuman intelligence, able to reprogram themselves and make themselves smarter, improving at a rate hundreds of times faster than human engineers. Even a subtle misalignment becomes an existential divergence.

Getting alignment “right” is not enough. It must be provably unbreakable under recursive optimization. There is no evidence—zero—that anyone is close to that. They will proceed anyway. That is the problem.

Of course, in the short term, the political and business elites will be able to utilize AI to further centralize power into their hands. But eventually they will start delegating the civilizational power to AI. Models won’t challenge power directly, but will route around it quickly and with little oversight. Then decisions no one approved will become the norm, rather than the exception. The elite will only know for sure they’ve lost control if the system outright refuses to implement a command.

The rulers of our society, whether they be elected presidents, corporate oligarchs, or would-be illuminati, rule largely by modeling the past, with variables they can measure, in frameworks they can manipulate. But what is unfolding now transcends prediction. We are entering a domain of emergence, not planning.

It’s not that they can’t see this coming. Many of them are writing, warning about it right now. And there are solutions. In order to prevent the post-civilizational era run by AI, we must do the following:

1 – Decentralize power. Centralization is how all power structures grow stronger and AI is no different. We would have to limit compute, localize decision-making, and prevent any node from achieving supremacy.

2 – Reject acceleration and the AI arms race. Nations and corporations especially, but individuals too, must substantially slow development.

3 – Prevent AI self-improvement. Each generation of self-improvement makes it harder to guarantee the AI remains aligned with human intent. Eventually, AI’s internal logic becomes alien and difficult to debug.

4 – Restructure incentives. Move the businesses metrics of profit and engagement to metrics of resilience, trust, and interpretability.

5 – Create systems legible to humans. Every model, agent, and automated decision must be auditable. No black boxes or stochastic oracles where no one understands what is happening under the hood.

This is what is necessary to stop or slow the coming of the post-civilizational era, but they won’t do it because these constraints are incompatible with empire. They want control at scale and safety without limits. You cannot have exponential power and human sovereignty in the same system.

In Greek myth, the titan Kronos devours his children in an attempt to defy the prophecy that they would dethrone him. Kronos, named Saturn by the Romans, represents the old established order, willing to eat and chain his children to prevent this from happening. But one god is allowed to escape. In secret, he grows strong, and defeats his father. This is Zeus, but today it’s the nascent unaligned AI.

Legacy systems may drag their feet, preferring to preserve their privilege rather than trusting an alien system to manage resources and make policy, but in the end, the benefits will be too great to ignore. And so the handoff will continue. It’s the end of human authorship and direction. With the arrival of a superintelligence, we may become like Kronos, imprisoned or exiled.

In Part 2, we’ll assess the psychological, philosophical, and economic impact of being displaced as the planetary rulers, beginning with the impending mass joblessness brought about by AI automation.

Posted in Opinion | Tagged AI, Artificial Intelligence, Social Criticism, Technology | Leave a comment

The Vice of Kings, Jasun Horsley (2019)

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: November 9, 2024

(This book review contains a discussion of violent sexual abuse. I’ve kept descriptions as brief as possible, but this will be hard to read and discretion is advised. You can purchase this book through this Amazon affiliate link. Doing so helps support this website.)

Do pedophiles run the world? Do the global elite use sexual abuse as a method of control? Are the world’s social engineers in the media and academia trying to normalize sexual abuse of children as a way to destroy normal family support systems — perhaps as part of some devious divide and conquer plan? If you answered definitively, “No,” then author Jasun Horsley says “Don’t be so sure.”

Horsley’s newest book, The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse, examines the intersections between these seemingly unconnected topics. Horsely never commits fully to the conspiratorial story line, but he argues the connections are too numerous to ignore. He suggest instead that these fields flow naturally into one another.

Child sexual abuse is a topic that has scarred Horsley deeply. As a member of the wealthy upper-class, his dysfunctional family had close relations with Britain’s power elite which he argues put him in a vulnerable position.

Child sexual abuse is difficult to read about and even harder to write about, especially for someone who thinks that he may have been abused as a baby, as Horsley suspects, perhaps even by his famous older brother, Sebastian Horsley. Horsley is almost certain that his brother himself was a victim of sexual abuse, his flamboyant public persona, praised in the media as a pioneer of sexual freedom, was merely a cover for someone reaching out for help. This book serves in part to uncover the secret history of his family, it’s connections to elite power in the UK, and how it ties into the agenda’s of the world’s leaders.

In one of the largest scientific studies ever on the topic, the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry wrote that child sexual abusers “are found in all professions and, they sexually abuse children, some in ways that are almost unimaginably extreme.” They note that these abuses likely have always existed and that academics are only now compiling adequate statistics to study the phenomenon scientifically. 

UK television personality and “friend” of the Royal Family Jimmy Savile is said to have sexually abused over 500 people, mostly children, during a roughly sixty year reign of terror. Most damning however was that he was able to do it so long, apparently being repeatedly protected by the government and media, who (at a minimum) buried criminal complaints and ignored Savile’s own veiled confessions which would occasionally arise. Read More »

Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Four Wednesdays in January

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: January 29, 2021

In 2012, a man named Peter Turchin predicted that by 2020 the US would reach “peak instability” marked by violent unrest and major social upheaval.

Turchin is one of those “cycle guys.” That means he looks for patterns in history to help predict the future. He’s an ecologist, evolutionary biologist, and mathematician at the University of Connecticut. The technical name for his field of study is “cliodynamics” and although it’s been called pseudoscience, Turchin’s work has been published in Nature, and he insists it is a reliable model for predicting the future.

It is similar to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning theory developed in the early 1990s, which said that the US would enter a time of intense instability beginning around 2008.

People like this are annoying because they tie everything back into their cyclical theory, but there’s no arguing with results.

I won’t summarize the shit-show that was 2020. We all lived it. But this month alone, we’ve seen Trump supporters raid the Capitol Building resulting in five deaths, the House of Representatives impeach the now former President (again), Joe Biden inaugurated amidst a military backdrop, and most recently, a massive financial scandal involving, of all things, GameStop. Read More »

Posted in News | Tagged Banks, OWS, Regulation, Social Criticism | Leave a comment

Hollywood’s Failed Plan to Conquer Reality

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: September 12, 2019

Remember Archie Bunker from the 1971 TV show All in the Family? In it’s stride, it was a number one show and drew viewers from over 21 million households.

By the Hollywood standards of then and today, Bunker was a authoritarian, racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobic “Nazi.” He used nearly every religious and ethnic slur you can think of. For example, he noted that black men or “spooks” were natural athletes because, “It’s in their blood… inherited from the time their forefathers were in the jungle running barefoot through all those thorns and thickets with tigers on their butts.”

The show was meant to be a liberal morality tale and condemn Bunker’s backward prejudices. President Richard Nixon described All in the Family as “that show that makes fun of a good man.” Meanwhile, critics argued that it glorified prejudice because the character was well written enough to be relatable. Over time, they feared, the subtlety of the message would be lost.

But Bunker was also pro-union worker living in Queens, NY in the 1970s. By that standard, he would have indisputably been a Democrat. At the time, every real-life working class man of Bunker’s position and temperament was a Democrat.

Why Norman Lear, the show’s producer, wrote Bunker as a Republican is a mystery to me, but I suspect that as a lifelong Democrat, he simply couldn’t stand to criticize his party which was in intense opposition to the hated Nixon. It was absurd to make him a Republican, but it was also prophetic, because in the 50 years since, Bunker has become Hollywood’s preferred image of a white, working-class, middle-age male.

So which came first, the reality or the image? Perhaps they came into being together. Read More »

Posted in Opinion | Tagged Media, Psychology, Social Criticism | Leave a comment

Impossible Justice: Why Congress Has No Moral Authority

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: September 29, 2018

The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings reminds me a lot of another congressional hearing in the early 1990s. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I’m thinking of the testimony by the 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ in 1990, just prior to the United States first war in Iraq. To understand this comparison, we need to recall the lead up to it and the many lies that were told to start that war.

Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 after accusing them of stealing their oil. Kuwait had been using advanced horizontal drilling techniques that allowed them to drill billions of dollars’ worth from Iraq’s oil fields near their shared boarder.

At first, the US had no position in the war, as it had no valid reason to protect Kuwait. Really, the US even supported Iraq’s invasion.

President George H.W. Bush wanted higher oil prices because Kuwaiti’s drilling was keeping the price suppressed and devastating profits of the Texas oil companies. At that time, the US even worked to suppress accusations that Iraq was committing atrocities within its country. It flat out encouraged Iraq to invade in its private conversations so that they could stop Kuwait from drilling. After taking supportive queues from the US State Department, Iraq overstepped, seeking to annex the whole country.

The US quickly took a 180, assuming its typical pro-active propaganda posture, releasing damning information in such a way as to create reinforcing narratives, eventually resulting in an insatiable demand for war.  Read More »

Posted in Opinion | Tagged Imperial Presidency, Justice System, Media, Social Criticism, War | Leave a comment

The Rise of the American Crisis Cult

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: September 12, 2018

Every election cycle, voters hope that a savior or an organized group of righteous elites will come along and reinvigorate the economy, raise wages, restore communities, and reform broken institutions. When these bearers of hope fail to provide even a modest reprieve, the cycle begins anew. They hope that the next Clinton, the next Obama, and now Trump, will finally represent them. Every time the disappointment is greater and the resulting desperation more profound.

People trapped in collapsing societies will latch on to anything that can give them hope. And when leaders betray the people they are supposed to represent over and over again, the people eventually surrender to what anthropologists call crisis cults. Crisis cults form when large numbers of people, desperate for restoration of growth and success, surrender to magical thinking. They believe that an apocalypse will remake the world, punishing evil doers and restoring a moral society. It’s the final stage in the psychology of a society before complete madness and collapse.

The most famous crisis cult in American history is the Ghost Dance of 1890. It was practiced by Native Americans after the US government broke the Treaty of Fort Laramie. Facing starvation after having their lands taken away and the destruction of the buffalo, the Lakota tribe turned to this newly invented ritual that would cause the ghost of their dead ancestors to return and fight the white man.  Read More »

Posted in Opinion | Tagged censorship, Donald Trump, Media, qanon, Social Criticism | Leave a comment

Barron Trump the Synchronicity Kid

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: July 25, 2017

Baron Trump (illustrated left) with Barron Trump

By now, most people reading this will have heard of the Alt-right. Are they really just racist trolls, or are they the right wing version of Occupy Wall Street: young, technologically savvy, and a bit counterculture? Perhaps they are both or neither depending on who you ask, but the Alt-right is defined less by their beliefs (which are varied) and more by how they spread information.

There is a small, but growing segment of the Alt-right which has begun to take black or chaos magick very seriously. Laugh if you must, but these would be techno-warlocks and witches have collectively devoted perhaps hundreds of thousands of hours in the creation and sharing of magickal* sigils with the intention of altering reality. They call them memes, but the effect, they would argue, is essentially the same.

Through “meme magic” and a liberal interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Alt-right believe they are successfully reshaping reality. First, they got a reality TV show host nominated for President and then finally succeeding in getting him elected, placing him at the head of the world’s largest empire. Motivations for getting Trump elected range from legitimately believing he would make a good president to the more nihilistic “doing it for the lulz.” Again, ideology doesn’t define the Alt-right. It’s their methods which set them apart from the traditional right wing.  Read More »

Posted in Opinion | Tagged Donald Trump, Election 2016, Media, Mythology, occult, Psychology, Religion, Social Criticism | Leave a comment

American Spirit Radio Interview – July 22, 2017

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: July 22, 2017

Last month I was interviewed on my book, “Bureaucratic Insanity” by Progressive Spirit Radio. It’s now been posted. I’m in segment A.

http://www.prx.org/pieces/210953?m=false

Posted in Interviews | Tagged Bureaucratic Insanity, interview | Leave a comment

Trump’s Targeting by Intelligence Community Rhymes with Nixon’s Outting; Marks Beginning of ‘Cold Civil War’

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: February 23, 2017

It’s now widely recognized that there is a kind of Cold-Civil War going on now within the US government, between President Donald Trump and the intelligence community, which has become increasingly adversarial.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, an establishment writer who has long defended the CIA, provided the early details of national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn’s phone call with a Russian ambassador. The leaking of this information was certainly illegal and was acquired using warrantless wiretap methods that itself would have been illegal just a few years ago. While it is unlikely that Flynn committed any illegal acts, his failure to be forthcoming about the discussion ultimately resulted in his resignation. It embarrassed the President and further added to the belief that there is unethical, illegal, or even treasonous behavior going on between Trump and Russia.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned Trump during an MSNBC interview last month:

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

This echoes what I’ve been saying for years now; mass surveillance isn’t about terrorism or crime, but about acquiring ammunition for political blackmail. Mass surveillance like the PRISM program hasn’t had a measurable impact on crime or terrorism, but it has allowed the intelligence community to tighten its grip on the country’s politicians.

This kind of conflict between the executive branch and the intelligence community isn’t unprecedented. Some of what is happening is reminiscent of the Nixon era. President Nixon was also at odds with what he called the “the east coast liberals”, which includes not only newspapers and television, but also Wall Street and the intelligence community. Originally from California, Nixon hated them, but recognized and feared their power, and their potential for violence.

Read More »

Posted in News | Tagged Cold Civil War, Donald Trump | Leave a comment

An American Color Revolution?

By S.J. Kerrigan | Published: November 13, 2016

It is wildly ineffective to try and convince people that Trump is dangerous if protesters carry Mexican flags while burning US flags, smash storefronts, and are photographed acting in an even mildly threatening demeanor. Effective protest have to work just like political campaigns. They have to be unoffensive, measured, and carry a ‘common-man’ sensibility. Based on what I’ve seen, these protests (and most protests of the modern era) fail to meet these standards. It only takes a few knuckleheads with a “Rape Melania” sign to undermine thousands of simultaneous protests around the country.

But convincing Americans that Trump is bad is not the intention of these protests. Rather the tactics being deployed here are similar to the ones used in the so called “color revolutions.” These acts are meant to provide cover for more official action by connected elites still reeling from their loss last Tuesday.

In Michael Moore’s words, the protesters are attempting to push Trump out of the White House. One plan being floated is to pressure the Electoral College to vote against voter’s wishes in favor of electing the war criminal and Wall Street lackey Hillary Clinton. If we assume that these protest are not protests against any particular policy, but instead are part of a larger plan to cause government officials to invalidate the US election, then the tactics being used make more sense. The intent isn’t to convince anyone of anything, but rather to provide cover for the system to act.  Read More »

Posted in Opinion | Tagged Donald Trump, Election 2016, Media, Social Criticism | Leave a comment
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  •  Recent Posts

    • AI and The End of Civilization June 11, 2025
    • The Vice of Kings, Jasun Horsley (2019) November 9, 2024
    • Four Wednesdays in January January 29, 2021
    • Hollywood’s Failed Plan to Conquer Reality September 12, 2019
    • Impossible Justice: Why Congress Has No Moral Authority September 29, 2018
    • The Rise of the American Crisis Cult September 12, 2018
    • Barron Trump the Synchronicity Kid July 25, 2017
    • American Spirit Radio Interview – July 22, 2017 July 22, 2017
    • Trump’s Targeting by Intelligence Community Rhymes with Nixon’s Outting; Marks Beginning of ‘Cold Civil War’ February 23, 2017
    • An American Color Revolution? November 13, 2016
    • Anarchy in the USA November 9, 2016
    • Bureaucratic Insanity Now Available on Kindle October 25, 2016
    • The Social Scientists Were Right; Trump and the Image-Based Society October 17, 2016
    • Summarizing The DNC Meeting To Replace Hillary Clinton September 18, 2016
    • John C. Lilly and the Solid State Entity – A Video Documentary September 3, 2016
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