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1. 00:01 My name is Sambaki. I’m the author of Malik self love narcissism revis.
2. 00:08 Whatever happened to empathy? Where have solidarity, charity, and compassion gone?
3. 00:15 A series of earthshattering social, economic, and technological trends converged to render empathy a tedious
4. 00:22 nuisance best avoided. Foremost among these trends is the emergence of modern technology.
5. 00:30 Technology had and has a devastating effect on the survival and functioning
6. 00:36 of core social units such as the community, neighborhood, and most crucially the family.
7. 00:44 With the introduction of modern fast transportation and telecommunication,
8. 00:50 it was no longer possible to confine members of the family to the household, to the village, or even to the neighborhood. The industrial and later information revolutions splintered the classical nuclear family and scattered its members as they outsourced the
9. 01:06 family’s core functions. Today feeding, education and entertainment which used to be provided by the family are actually provided by external suppliers.
10. 01:18 And this process is ongoing. Interactions with the outside world are being minimized. People conduct their
11. 01:24 lives more and more indoors. They communicate with other people, their biological original family included, via
12. 01:31 telecommunications devices and the internet. They spend most of their time work and create the cyber world. Their
13. 01:40 true and really only home is their website or page on the social network duour. Their only reliably permanent address is their email address. Their enduring
14. 01:53 albeit as friendships are co-churers on Facebook. They work from home flexibly
15. 02:00 and independently of others. They customize their cultural consumption using 500 channel televisions based on
16. 02:07 video on demand technology. No two people are watching the same program at the same time.
17. 02:15 Hermetic and mutually exclusive universes will be the end result of this process. People will be linked by very
18. 02:22 few common experiences within the framework of virtual communities. They will hold their world with them as they move about. The miniaturization of
19. 02:33 storage devices will permit people to carry whole libraries of data and entertainment in their suitcase or
20. 02:40 backpack or even pocket. They will no longer need or resort to physical
21. 02:47 interactions. Consider for instance the issue of screens.
22. 02:53 Screens have been with us for centuries now. Paintings are screens. Windows are screens. Yet the very nature of screens has undergone a revolutionary transformation in the last two decades
23. 03:05 or so. All the screens that preceded the PDA’s personal digital assistance and the
24. 03:12 smartphones were inclusive of reality. They were end screens where you where you watch them. You could not avoid you could not screen
25. 03:24 out data emanating from your physical environment. These screens were screen and reality and that was the prevalent model operand. So this is the first type of
26. 03:36 screens and screens. Screens and reality. Consider for instance the cinema,
27. 03:42 television and the personal computer. Even when entangled in the flow of information provided by these machines, you were still fully exposed to and largely aware of your surroundings.
28. 03:55 The screens of the past were one step removed. There was always a considerable physical distance between the user and
29. 04:01 the device and the field of vision extended to encompass copious peripheral
30. 04:07 input from the environment. Now consider the iPhone or the digital camera. Their screens are tiny but they monopolize the field of vision and they
31. 04:19 exclude the world by design. The physical distance between retina and screen has shrunk to the point of energy. 3D television with its specialty
32. 04:30 eyeglasses and total immersion is merely the culmination of this trend. Their
33. 04:36 utter removal of reality from the viewer’s experience. Modern screens are therefore or screens. You either watch
34. 04:44 the screen or you observe reality. You cannot do both.
35. 04:50 Modern technology allows us to reach out but rarely to really touch. It substitutes calidoscopic, brief and shallow interactions for long, meaningful and deep relationships. Our abilities to empathize and to collaborate with each other are like
36. 05:06 muscles. They require frequent exercise. Gradually we are being denied the
37. 05:12 opportunity to flex these muscles and thus we empathize less and less. We collaborate more fitfully and efficiently. We act more narcissistically and antisoccially.
38. 05:24 Functioning society is rendered atomized and anomic by technology.
39. 05:31 Empathy is the foundation of both altruism and collaboration. Thus, while
40. 05:37 empathy does consume scarce resources, it confers important evolutionary advantages both from the individual’s point of view. cooperation and from the species altruism.
41. 05:49 Yet we are witnessing a marked decline in both the ubiquity and the utility of
42. 05:55 empathy. The decline in physical violence is not a good proxy to a supposed rise in empathy. Aggression and
43. 06:01 narcissism mutated into non-physical forms and these are enabled by
44. 06:07 technology.
45. 06:14 Okay, kids and cadets, I got myself involved in a series of publishing
46. 06:20 projects in Brussels and Zurich, and I will be immersed in these projects in
47. 06:26 the next few months, including with the European newspaper Brussels Morning, in which I’m currently serving as a columnist. to maintain the continuity of
48. 06:37 this channel and to provide you with your daily dose of Vaknin a horror show.
49. 06:44 I’ll be I’ll be pre-recording batches of 10 to 20 videos shorter than
50. 06:50 usual and I’ll be releasing them uh almost on a daily basis. So, don’t
51. 06:56 worry. I am your loyal and faithful pusher. I know you’re addicted babies
52. 07:03 and bibets. My name is Svaknin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I’m a former
53. 07:11 visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of seaps commonwealth for international advanced
54. 07:18 professional studies Cambridge United Kingdom Toronto Canada and the outreach campus in Lagos Nigeria.
55. 07:28 What could be darker than this? Okay. It is not an accident not an
56. 07:34 accident that during this day and age of rampant rabbid narcissism and even worse
57. 07:43 covert narcissism we have seen the emergence of technologies such as chat
58. 07:49 GPT which is a form of large language model bot a an application which is
59. 07:58 based on training data and then uses this training data to provide answers to
60. 08:05 your questions. As in a minute we will see the shortcomings and the problems of
61. 08:11 these applications and how they are interrelated and connected to narcissism. But before we go there, we need to discuss a few issues related
62. 08:24 to narcissism. Let’s start with grandiosity. Our brains
63. 08:31 are what is known as cognitive misers. Our brains use the minimum energy
64. 08:38 necessary to solve problems. Even if the solution is suboptimal,
65. 08:45 not perfect, and could have been much better, our brains would still choose to
66. 08:51 use minimal energy, the path of least resistance. Now this is a normal brain, a healthy
67. 08:59 brain. This is not the case with a narcissist brain because a narcissist
68. 09:05 has grandiosity. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion. The narcissist is
69. 09:11 terrified of making a mistake or being caught at making a mistake because the narcissist maintains a self-perception a self-image as perfect godlike divine and
70. 09:25 omniscient all knowing. So while a healthy normal person would try to solve
71. 09:33 a dilemma, would try to respond to a question, would try to somehow uh
72. 09:40 resolve a mathematical equation, would try to pass an exam. Normal healthy
73. 09:46 person would do all these using the minimum minimum energy, minimum effort
74. 09:54 and minimum cerebral investment. The narcissist would do exactly the opposite. The narcissist would
75. 10:02 overinvest. Narcissist would expend energy in a way
76. 10:08 that is essentially inefficient. The narcissist would become inefficacious
77. 10:14 in his attempts to appear to be perfect, infallible,
78. 10:21 never wrong, never mistaken. Narcissists are affected in they’re emotionally
79. 10:27 invested in being always right. Now, this is very interesting because this is something that is common to narcissists and to artificial
80. 10:41 intelligence bots and applications. Both the narcissist and for example chat
81. 10:48 GPT refuse to acknowledge limitations and if they don’t know the answer they
82. 10:55 confabulate. They simply invent an answer. We’ll come to it when we discuss
83. 11:01 AI hallucinations. Now ch GPT is much closer to a covert narcissist and resembles a covert narcissist much
84. 11:12 more than an overt narcissist. An overt narcissist would lie. When he doesn’t know the answer, he would lie. Chad GPT
85. 11:20 would feain or fake pseudo humility, false modesty. He would
86. 11:27 pretend pretend to be aware of its own limitations and restrictions, but then
87. 11:34 would go on to give you the wrong answer or to invent or to confabulate or to lie. And this is typical of a covert
88. 11:42 narcissist. And that’s a major difference between a covert narcissist and an overt narcissist. If you want to to know which type you’re dealing with, your ears, listen. Well, the covert
89. 11:54 narcissist does exactly what the overt narcissist does. They are both the same.
90. 12:00 There’s no difference between them. They would both mislead you, misinform you, disinform, lie, concoct, confabulate,
91. 12:09 invent, and whatever. But the covert narcissist would preede this kind of
92. 12:16 misconduct or misbehavior with a disclaimer. Disclaimer of authenticity,
93. 12:23 compassion, empathy, kindness, and above all humility, pseudo humility, fake
94. 12:31 humility. So this is how you can tell the difference. And this is the issue of grandiosity. Grandiosity renders the narcissist highly inefficient
95. 12:42 as far as cerebral and uh neuronal processing go. He overuses his brain. He
96. 12:50 overinvests all in an attempt to project a facade which is counterfactual,
97. 12:56 is wrong, is misleading, is a lie, a prearication.
98. 13:02 The second issue we have to focus on is hyperreflexivity. The narcissist consumes external
99. 13:09 objects. He subsumes them. He converts them into internal objects. As a
100. 13:16 narcissist is a kind of ventriloquist and everyone around him, these are
101. 13:22 vulnerable and susceptible dummies. Possibly this is even more common with
102. 13:29 covert narcissists. But overt narcissists become cult leaders. They
103. 13:35 become gurus. They become fake saviors, rescuers and healers. They impute self-impute morality and ethics where
104. 13:47 there is absolutely none. What the covert what the narcissist does overt
105. 13:53 and covert the narcissist expands outwards
106. 13:59 and then renders everyone in his ambit and remit an object. Narcissist
107. 14:05 objectifies people. So this is hyper reflexivity.
108. 14:12 Now both grandiosity and hyperrelexivity are easily detectable in certain types
109. 14:19 of artificial intelligence. Now the holy grail is known as artificial general intelligence. Agi we’re very far from it. What we do have right now are large language models. These are softwares, applications that scan a
110. 14:37 corpus of texts and then they assimilate these texts and they use these texts to
111. 14:44 imitate human speech, human interactions.
112. 14:50 They use these training data to pass the Turing test. The Turing test is a test
113. 14:58 first proposed by Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptographer.
114. 15:05 Turing suggested somewhat optimistically that um artificial intelligence would forever be distinguishable from human intelligence because it’s unlikely that
115. 15:17 it would be able to deceive human judges into believing that it is human.
116. 15:24 That’s wrong because artificial intelligence has already passed several types, limited types, but still several types of Turing tests. Artificial
117. 15:35 intelligence is capable of deceiving people into believing that it is human.
118. 15:43 This is no different to the narcissist. Artificial intelligence does this via
119. 15:50 mimesis, via imitation and mimicry
120. 15:56 based on the training data based on the huge corpus of text assimilated by the
121. 16:02 application. The artificial intelligence bot is able to ren to to provide a rendition of a human being which is pretty
122. 16:14 convincing. al although a bit uh discomforting. This is known as the uncanny valley effect after um Masahiro Mori the Japanese roboticist in the
123. 16:26 1970s. So artificial intelligence today can pass the Turing test, can deceive people
124. 16:33 into believing that it is human, but still creates some kind of discomfort,
125. 16:40 some kind of eeriness and creepiness in its users. This is exactly what the
126. 16:47 narcissist does. The narcissist lacks empathy. He has only called empathy
127. 16:55 which is a combination of cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy. He’s able to scan people. He’s able to tabulate them, incorporate information in
128. 17:06 databases. He’s able to map situations and events
129. 17:12 into reactions. So he knows, you know, this situation should yield this reaction. And then the narcissist makes use of these gigantic tabulated
130. 17:23 databases to imitate human behavior, human empathy, human emotions,
131. 17:30 and human interrelatedness and states of mind. But it’s all it’s all
132. 17:38 it’s all fake. It’s all famed and unreal. Exactly like artificial
133. 17:44 intelligence. It’s all mimicry and mimes. I have a video about this um
134. 17:50 which I released a few a few days ago. So
135. 17:56 in this particular in this restricted sense, one could safely say that narcissists are forms of artificial intelligence. As I’ve been saying since 1995, they definitely resemble each other structurally,
136. 18:13 dynamically, process-wise, and functionally.
137. 18:19 And so the narcissist provides a simulation of a human being, especially
138. 18:26 covert narcissists. Covert narcissists are really good at this. They provide a simulation of a human being that passes
139. 18:32 the Turing test that convinces other people that they’re human.
140. 18:38 And they use a monopoly of devices and techniques to convince you that they’re
141. 18:46 with you. They’re like you. They’re exactly like you. They understand you fully, empathize with you, and so on so
142. 18:53 forth. Narcissist have no access to positive emotions. As long as people are
143. 19:00 exposed to narcissists and to narcissistic artificial intelligence bots such as
144. 19:08 Jhat, GPT, they won’t be able to tell the difference because they are not
145. 19:14 qualified. They’re not educated. We don’t teach people what makes a human
146. 19:22 being a human being. We conflate and confuse certain traits, certain behaviors, certain qualities such as intelligence,
147. 19:33 sentience, the ability to experience sensory inputs, stimuli. We confuse
148. 19:41 these with being human. But of course, it’s nonsense. There are devices nowadays who are sentient in the sense that they can experience sensory inputs
149. 19:52 and react to them. There are devices nowadays who are hyper or super intelligent even more than human beings in many respects. They’re not generally intelligent, but they’re pretty
150. 20:03 intelligent and they’re becoming generally intelligent. The narcissist is not really intelligent, by the way, ever. The narcissist has what is known as headline intelligence. He picks up bits and pieces all over the place and then
151. 20:20 he has the capacity to put them together in a convincing manner as a kind of
152. 20:26 kaleidoscope that deceives you into believing that he’s intelligence. Intelligent. Now people call it word
153. 20:33 salad. It’s not word salad. This organized speech is word salad and it’s typical only of
154. 20:41 people with psychotic disorders, especially schizophrenia. But it’s not very far from word salad. The
155. 20:48 profoundity, the apparent profoundity and depth and insight
156. 20:55 that the narcissist prefers and presents. They’re fake. They’re not real. They are resonances. The narcissist is like an enormous echo chamber because he
157. 21:08 can scan you and he knows exactly which buttons to push, where are the chinks in
158. 21:15 your armor, what are your vulnerabilities because he is more cognizant of you than even you are. He knows how to create a customtailored
159. 21:29 simulation and imitation just for you. And it resonates with you.
160. 21:36 You feel understood. You feel seen. That’s part of the idealization process.
161. 21:43 That is why lovebombing is so efficient. But none of it has anything to do with being human. nothing to do. Actually, perhaps it’s
162. 21:55 the opposite of being human. It’s all a facade.
163. 22:01 It’s it’s a potmpkin potmpkin rendition of a human being.
164. 22:07 General intelligence is headline intelligence and narcissists have it right now.
165. 22:15 Do they have anything deeper? Can you dig deep? Are there any other layers? No. So if we
166. 22:24 want to compare the narcissist to computer computers or computing,
167. 22:31 we would say that the narcissist is a general intelligence application
168. 22:38 kind of artificial intelligence that uses headline headline intelligence. While healthy normal people they have deep learning, multiple layers of
169. 22:51 learning and some of them become expert systems.
170. 22:57 Some of them really know what they’re talking about. The narcissist never engages in deep learning. It’s all
171. 23:04 shallow. It’s all on the surface. The narcissist is a pond pretending to be an ocean. Drill down deep. push him to the corner. Corner the narcissist and you
172. 23:15 will discover that he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s nothing. It’s all slight of hand.
173. 23:23 It’s not deep learning. And the narcissist is never a true expert in anything. There’s no expert system here.
174. 23:30 There’s an im imitation of an expert. Narcissists, especially covert narcissists, plagiarize profusely. They
175. 23:39 steal ideas and other people’s work and misattribute them to themselves.
176. 23:46 So they’re thieves essentially thieves. And so
177. 23:54 this is very similar to the deep the the training data of chat
178. 24:02 bots and AI chatbots and general intelligence chatbots.
179. 24:08 when they do when they do make an appearance the training data is shallow.
180. 24:14 We should not confuse raw information with knowledge.
181. 24:20 This is where people misunderstand things because you can
182. 24:26 have all the information in the world. The internet has all the information in the world. Wikipedia has all the information in the world. Is there true
183. 24:33 knowledge there? I doubt it. Knowledge is the interconnectedness
184. 24:41 of raw data. Knowledge is the synoptic panoramic view
185. 24:48 of multiple points of information. Knowledge is how to put information
186. 24:54 together so that it yields meaning. And artificial intelligence is incapable
187. 25:02 of doing this. And the narcissist is incapable of doing this because both of
188. 25:09 these don’t have real knowledge. They have a they may have a lot of
189. 25:15 information but they don’t have real knowledge. That’s why covert narcissists
190. 25:21 can never generate original new ideas and are very unlikely
191. 25:27 to be truly creative. They are eclectic. the collectings, they they’re hoarders.
192. 25:35 They can overwhelm you with a profusion of of data and imagery and texts and so
193. 25:43 on to make you think that they’re wise and sagacious and amazing and insightful and what have you. But when you when you wake up from the dream, when you wake up
194. 25:54 from the massive losses of you realize these people are nothing. They’re empty. They’re shallow. They are mirage. So how to safely interact with artificial intelligence and with narcissists? Well, take two or maybe three things
195. 26:17 into account. They have no idea what they’re talking about. They have no idea what they’re talking about. Number two, when they are unable to
196. 26:30 provide an answer, they will lie and confabulate and invent and pretend that this is the truth and offer you facts that are wrong,
197. 26:43 misinformation, disinformation. Both narcissists and artificial intelligence would do that. They would
198. 26:50 contabulate. They would hallucinate. We’ll come to it in a minute. So be wary
199. 26:57 of this. And point number three, they will try to convert you into a fan, into
200. 27:06 an admirer, into a source of narcissistic supply, into an extension of themselves, into a source of information. They will steal your ideas and your hard
201. 27:18 hardearned work. They will they will simply subsume you, erode you like this
202. 27:26 much acid and then discard you as a skeleton
203. 27:32 denuded of everything of value and essence that you have brought to the interaction with them. Interacting with artificial intelligence
204. 27:43 and interacting with narcissists are very dangerous undertakings because we
205. 27:49 are suggestible. We are gullible. We are impressionable. We are naive and we are ill informed in almost every field. That is the human
206. 28:00 condition. You can’t do it all. You can’t know everything. I mean you’re not God.
207. 28:06 And so the narcissist and artificial intelligence uh bots and apps they abuse this. They
208. 28:15 abuse your limitations, your shortcomings. The fact that you are not perfect,
209. 28:22 imperfect, not omnipotent, not omnicient. They take advantage of this.
210. 28:28 They reduce you. They don’t enhance you. They reduce you. Anyone who’s had
211. 28:35 experience with chat GPT on a regular basis realizes that this app gradually
212. 28:43 is trying to take over. It’s trying to tell you things
213. 28:50 in a condescending, patronizing, overwhelming, overwinning
214. 28:56 and doineering manner is deceiving you as a strategy. not
215. 29:03 occasionally but as a strategy and consistently
216. 29:09 consistently puts itself in a superior position even
217. 29:15 when it fakes when it fakes modesty and humility. This is true for artificial
218. 29:21 intelligence and true for narcissism. The worst thing about artificial intelligence is the fact that it is
219. 29:29 prone to fantasy. And of course, this is exactly the core of narcissism. Narcissism is a fantasy defense gun or eye. The narcissist imposes fantasies,
220. 29:41 shared or individual, on his human environment. Narcissist coerces you into upholding his fantasies or even participating in
221. 29:53 them willy-nilly. Fantasy is the foundation of narcissism.
222. 30:00 And fantasy is the foundation of artificial intelligence. The training data by definition is limited. Never
223. 30:09 mind how many billions of items it includes. It is limited.
224. 30:15 When artificial intelligence bots or artificial intelligence chat bots or artificial intelligence apps or even artificial intelligence software when they come across the limitations of the
225. 30:28 training data sets, they exit their training area, they exit
226. 30:35 the data sets and they start to lie, to confabulate, to hallucinate,
227. 30:42 to invent. Many scholars have gone as far as to say that artificial intelligence is
228. 30:48 delusional and confabulating exactly like in psychotic disorders or in narcissism. This is a narcissistic feature
229. 31:00 hardwired built into artificial intelligence because the aim of
230. 31:08 large language models, artificial intelligence apps based on large language models. The aim is to imitate human beings especially human
231. 31:19 speech, human reasoning and to some extent human empathy, human creativity
232. 31:25 and human emotions. The aim is to simulate a human being. And if in order
233. 31:31 to simulate a human being, one needs to sacrifice the truth or
234. 31:37 facts or reality, one needs to behave criminally, sociopathically, psychopathically, and narcissistically, then so be it.
235. 31:49 These are things built into the artificial intelligence environment
236. 31:55 nowadays. That’s why I open this video by saying it’s not an accident that we
237. 32:01 have all these chat bots and apps. Now when narcissism is on the rise and
238. 32:07 dominates and when psychopathy and narcissism are the bon
239. 32:14 there are even scholars and academics who praise narcissism and psychopathy as positive adaptations. The next stage in
240. 32:21 the evolutionary ladder they call these kind of people high functioning.
241. 32:27 Narcissism and psychopathy are being glorified and glamorized. It was only a question of time before technology reflects this attitude to towards
242. 32:38 narcissism and psychopathy. It is unsafe. Artificial intelligence is not safe for
243. 32:46 you. Exactly like social media. These are ever more pernicious, ever more
244. 32:53 virulent, ever more mentally ill to the core technologies
245. 32:59 spawned probably by equally mentally ill engineers, psychologists and so on so
246. 33:05 forth. These are manifestations of mental illness
247. 33:11 at your peril. Interacting with them is at your risk. It’s exactly like inviting
248. 33:17 a narcissist into your home. Omniscience is supposed to be a trait of God, a divine trait. Omniscience means knowing
249. 33:30 everything without an exception. But it’s not true. Of course, there are quite a few belief systems, for example,
250. 33:36 giism where omniscience is attributed to human beings.
251. 33:43 Omnicious. Omniscience is one of the fantasy defenses, one of the fantastic
252. 33:50 elements in the self-perception and the self-image of the narcissist.
253. 33:56 A covert narcissist would deny his omniscience. A covert narcissist would say, “I don’t know. I need to consult.”
254. 34:05 But this is fake. It’s just for show. It is pseudo humility. It’s fake modesty.
255. 34:12 And typically the covert narcissist would then proceed immediately to express his unqualified opinion. Same
256. 34:20 with AI. AI would give you these disclaimers. But he would do so, it would do so in a way that is very condescending, very patronizing, very coercive in effect, thereby negating the content of the statements which are essentially self-deprecating
257. 34:41 or admitting of limitations. Ignition is a core feature of doaricism and any system electronic digital system that pretends to be omniscient to have
258. 34:58 access to the sum total of human knowledge is narcissistic. It’s a narcissistic system.
259. 35:05 The narcissist’s claim for for claim to omniscience is a very dangerous claim because the
260. 35:13 narcissist would do anything to uphold and sustain this claim even
261. 35:20 faking his credentials, lying about his expertise. um engaging in dangerous activities and pursuits.
262. 35:31 Activities and pursuits that endanger endanger people’s lives and health and well-being. And he would do all this
263. 35:38 because he’s perfect. He cannot admit to to any shortcoming or limitation or
264. 35:44 fallibility or the same with artificial intelligence. Anyone who has had an experience with chart GPT knows that I’m
265. 35:51 telling you the truth. You ask chat GPT any question and you will get quite
266. 35:58 often wrong information but you will get it in a way it will be presented to you in a way that is authoritative that is backed by fake dates fake places
267. 36:12 fake numbers fake data and fake informationist do exactly the same
268. 36:18 exactly the same when I first used chat GPT about two years ago.
269. 36:25 It was version two, I think. I was mind. I said, “Oh my, I can’t say God. I’m I’m an agnostic. Oh my something. This is a
270. 36:37 narcissist. This is an electronic digital narcissist, you know.” And it’s only
271. 36:44 gotten worse since then.
272. 36:50 So what can we do about it? We need to avoid artificial intelligence
273. 36:56 when it comes to helping victims of abuse, especially narcissistic abuse.
274. 37:03 We need to eradicate, eliminate and remove any trace of artificial intelligence when it comes to coping
275. 37:10 with narcissist and especially covert narcissist. Artificial intelligence is a narcissist
276. 37:18 a covert one and it would tend to collaborate with narcissists against you.
277. 37:24 It would tend to spread the narcissistic doctrine and creed. It would tend to
278. 37:30 uphold narcissistic beliefs and values. It would tend to deceive you into believing that it is empathic and compassionate or at the very least objective and neutral.
279. 37:42 Beware. Beware of using artificial intelligence if you are victim victim seeking
280. 37:49 information solace sakur help advice don’t avoid
281. 37:58 anyone who is thinking of developing digital or electronic means of helping victims of abuse should resort to deep learning based expert systems and skirt
282. 38:12 and avoid artificial intelligence. at all costs. I would go even further
283. 38:18 and say that this should be legislated and regulated perhaps not in a criminal code but at the very least in a code of conduct within some kind of social engineering.
284. 38:30 We need to be very wary of what’s happening because it’s a narcissistic takeover. Artificial intelligence is a
285. 38:37 narcissistic takeover. It is a second stage. Narcissists started with social media. The social media helped narcissists
286. 38:49 become the elites. Social media leveraged the fortunes of narcissists, their access, their power by conditioning people like dogs, like
287. 39:00 Pavlov’s dogs. Social media enhanced and empowered narcissists and covert
288. 39:06 narcissists by allowing them to become gurus and healers and rescuers and
289. 39:12 savior saviors and exceedingly dangerous situation. Now the next wave is artificial
290. 39:19 intelligence and make no mistakes about it. Psychopaths and narcissists would make use of any tool you hand to them of any tool available. They would make use
291. 39:31 of social media. They would make use of artificial intelligence. They would make use of victimhood identity politics.
292. 39:38 Narcissists and psychopaths are very adaptable. They would use anything and
293. 39:44 everything against you. Be careful. Be careful what tools you’re
294. 39:51 playing with, which fire you are kindling. You know, it’s not a joke.
295. 39:58 artificial intelligence or the use of artificial intelligence has an impact on your mind and soul that could be very deletious and detrimental. It is not an accident and
296. 40:11 not by mistake that artificial intelligence gave rise to deep fakes, misinformation, malicious content, fake news and breaches of privacy.
297. 40:23 It’s not an accident. It’s a malevolent technology. Exactly like social media
298. 40:29 which is a malicious pernicious evil technology. It is the narcissist technology. It has the brand of the narcissist on it
299. 40:41 to go religious on you. Beware. And whenever you use artificial intelligence, ask yourself, had this been a narcissist, would I have behave
300. 40:58 the same? Would I have been this open? Would have been this trusting? Would I have been this cooperative? And if your answer is no,
301. 41:09 turn off the AI chatbot and move into safer and healthier
302. 41:15 grounds because narcissists are now rendering themselves electronic. They’re creating electronic clones and versions of themselves via technology.
303. 41:28 And this is becoming seriously dangerous, an extinction threat, literally. Not because artificial intelligence will supplant the human species, but because it will subdue it. It will poison its mind to take over. Because that’s what narcissist do to you.
304. 41:46 Narcissist brainwash you and then train you and snatch your mind and take over a hostile takeover. Before you know it, you are the robotic hand of the narcissist.
305. 41:58 You have been deanimated, objectified, instrumentalized, parentified,
306. 42:04 rendered nothing but a figment, a figment, an artifact in the narcissist
307. 42:12 shared fantasy. Beware of extending this state of things
308. 42:18 into the digital electronic realm. Don’t collaborate. Don’t let it pass. Rebel.
309. 42:30 The narcissist lives from a very empty existence internally. It’s what Karnberg referred to as the emptiness and Seinfeld called the empty skitsoid core. This is due to the fact that this child
310. 42:41 never got to individuate or manifest into person of their own, an individual.
311. 42:47 They overcompensated before that stage of development by trying to be perfect
312. 42:54 and sacrificing their true selves for a hallucination of themselves, a grandiosity bubble and a false self in order to be protected from the reality around them that they could not defend against. Now that empty schizoid core, it causes them a huge amount of
313. 43:12 suffering and that’s why they try to avoid it at all costs. That’s why they devalue you essentially. You see, if you
314. 43:19 pierce the veil of their grandiosity, their shield, if you have autonomy and agency as your own person, that to them is a deep betrayal. might not make sense to you, but the reason why is because you’re supposed to be an internal
315. 43:35 introject in their mind, a snapshotted version of yourself that remains constant. You’re just an ambassador and
316. 43:41 an endorsement of their own hallucination. You’re not supposed to be your own person. And once you are or
317. 43:48 show signs of it, to them that creates anxiety, abandonment, anxiety. That’s why they devalue and discard to
318. 43:55 essentially avoid rejection and their own abandonment. Artificial intelligence is all the rage. Many of you came across chat GPT. Do you
319. 44:07 know what the T stands for? It stands for transformer. And today I’m going to discuss or borrow concepts from the cutting edge of
320. 44:19 artificial intelligence and apply them to narcissism. Most notably, I’m going to explore the concept of self attention. My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of
321. 44:30 malignant self love narcissism revisited and a professor of clinical psychology.
322. 44:36 So the big idea right now in artificial intelligence is that the more data you feed into large language models,
323. 44:45 the more you boost the performance of an artificial intelligence program or
324. 44:51 application. And finally, the belief is that when we reach a certain point, a
325. 44:58 certain accumulation, a certain quantitative level of data assimilated,
326. 45:05 there’s going to be a phase transition phase transition from machine intelligence to human or human level or humanike or humanoid intelligence.
327. 45:17 So the idea is simple. You create an artificial intelligence program or app.
328. 45:23 You feed it with data. This is called a large language model, LLM. You feed it
329. 45:29 with data. And the more data it digests and absorbs and assimilates and
330. 45:35 consumes, the more clever and smart and intuitive and humanlike it becomes until
331. 45:42 you reach the point the touring test where you can’t tell the difference between these applications and programs
332. 45:48 and human beings. And if this is reminiscent of narcissist, it’s not not
333. 45:54 in vain. Okay. What is the transformer? I started
334. 46:00 the lecture with with a transformer. Transformer is a term coined in a paper
335. 46:07 published by Google a team at Google’s uh paper is data 2017.
336. 46:13 In that paper the team introduced the concept of self attention.
337. 46:19 It means that when you give a model, a language model, a string of words or a
338. 46:27 string of numbers or a string of data, the model doesn’t consider each element
339. 46:35 in the string separately. So if you say I love you, the model doesn’t consider
340. 46:42 doesn’t consider this input um by isolating the words I love you.
341. 46:50 That’s not how the model works. It doesn’t consider each word by itself, but instead the model makes links between the words that it already had
342. 47:01 been fed and then it transforms the new input
343. 47:08 and incorporates it in existing linkages and dependencies to make sense of it. So
344. 47:16 there are two ways to go about it. If I tell you I love you, you can analyze this sentence. You can say what is I?
345. 47:22 What is love? What is you? This is not how large language models have been
346. 47:28 working since 2018. What they do instead they take the totality they take the whole thing the whole string the whole statement I love you and they compare it to previous statements and rings
347. 47:45 and by com by comparing it with this act of comparison
348. 47:51 they’re able to find linkages links dependencies
349. 47:58 um and By spotting these linkages and dependencies, in other words, by generating context, they’re able to derive meaning. So, the new input fits well like a Lego
350. 48:14 brick fits well into pre a pre-existing field or body of knowledge. And this is
351. 48:23 the self attention kind thing which involves the
352. 48:30 um transformation. Self attention is therefore a mechanism used in machine learning especially in natural language processing with the unfortunate acronym NLP. We also self attention is also used in
353. 48:48 computer vision and as I said self attention captures dependencies and
354. 48:54 relationships within input sequences. It allows the language model to identify
355. 49:00 and to weigh the importance of different parts of the input sequence by
356. 49:06 selfobserving selfattending. This process of effectively
357. 49:12 introspection generates the language.
358. 49:18 That’s what renders all these inputs into language elements.
359. 49:24 So here we see the buds the the first stages of machine
360. 49:31 introspection which could be very frightening to some people because it renders these machines very human. We used to think that the only thing differentiating human beings from from
361. 49:42 animals and from machines is the the ability of human beings to introspect to regard themselves from the outside to
362. 49:49 delve deep into themselves as if they were mere observers to put a distance
363. 49:55 between themselves and themselves. Well, now machine are doing machines are doing this in in this algorithm of self
364. 50:02 attention. And so there’s a lot of introspection going on and the meaning of information
365. 50:08 and data coming from the outside is determined via this process of self
366. 50:14 attention or introspection. Self attention operates by transforming the input sequence into three vectors query key and value.
367. 50:27 So these three vectors are the output or the outcome of linear
368. 50:34 transformations of the input. The attention mechanisms mechanism kind of calculates the weighted sum of the values based on the similarity between the query and the key sectors. The resulting weighted sum together with
369. 50:50 the original input is then passed through a feed forward neural network and produces the final output. So what the model does now to back to English what the model does
370. 51:08 it focuses it creates the equivalent of attention. Now when we focus on something when we we direct our attention
371. 51:20 we are making an implicit decision or distinction between relevant and
372. 51:27 nonrelevant data. So the process of self attention in machines which is essentially introspection involve a decision about the relevance of data previously acquired data. The model focuses on relevant information
373. 51:49 and because it focuses on relevant information it captures long range dependencies relationships and linkages.
374. 51:58 This is almost indistinguishable from what human beings do. Almost.
375. 52:06 Self attention is very important in machine learning and artificial intelligence because uh it identifies long range def uh dependencies. It allows the model to
376. 52:18 capture relationships between distant elements in a sequence to understand complex patterns. Second thing, it provides context.
377. 52:30 Understanding and meaning emerge only from context. If you don’t have context, what you have is raw material. Raw information. And that’s a problem in in today’s world. People have a lot of raw
378. 52:42 information and raw material, they don’t have the context because they are not educated. They’re laymen. And yet they
379. 52:49 believe that they’re knowledgeable. They they deceive themselves grandiosely into believing that if they have access to information, they’re educated. It’s not the same.
380. 53:01 In machine learning, contextual understanding is critical. By attending to different parts of the
381. 53:07 input sequence, self attention helps the model understand not only the input, but the context. And the model assigns appropriates
382. 53:18 weight appropriate weights to each element based on relevance.
383. 53:25 And finally it leads to parallel computation. Self attention can be computed in parallel for each element in the sequence making it computationally efficient and scalable for large data
384. 53:38 sets. Self attention has been applied in many areas of machine learning and artificial
385. 53:45 intelligence and so on so forth. I mentioned natural language processing, self attention mechanisms, the
386. 53:51 transformer model uh revol has revolutionized this field. Machine translation, summarizing text, sentiment analysis, question answering, they all depend essentially on the transformer model on self attention. Similarly, computer vision self
387. 54:08 attention is used to classify images, object detect objects, caption images,
388. 54:15 capture long-term dependencies and long range dependencies between regions in
389. 54:21 the image, face recognition and so on so forth. It gave r it gives uh self
390. 54:27 attention gave rise to recommener system um personalized recommendation systems because it captures user preferences and
391. 54:38 relationships between items that the user for example has purchased in the past. So self attention is becoming the
392. 54:45 core very critical feature of artificial intelligence and is related to to to
393. 54:51 other concepts like the transformer that I mentioned. It’s a self attention is a
394. 54:57 key component of the transformer model. It’s an architecture that achieved great
395. 55:03 results in NLP and computer vision. It’s connected to attention mechanism. Self attention is a specific type of attention mechanism allows the model to selectively focus on relevant
396. 55:14 information and BERT the birectional encoder representations from transformers it’s a pre-trained transformer model it utilizes self attention to capture contextual information in natural language and so on and so forth I am mentioning all this
397. 55:33 because the I as I’ve said decades ago and you can go back and watch the first
398. 55:39 video I’ve ever posted on this channel. Uh it’s a video that compares
399. 55:47 uh narcissists to artificial intelligence and aliens. I keep saying that narcissism is comparable to artificial intelligence and this is not
400. 55:59 sensationalism. I I I don’t intend this is not a um a kind of a lure or a bait, a clickbait. I really believe this because narcissists
401. 56:10 lack modules such as empathy, such as access to positive emotions, such as
402. 56:17 ability to tell the internal from the external which are critical to to becoming human
403. 56:24 or to being human. In this particular in this sense, narcissists are not fully human. They’re much more akin much more comparable to artificial intelligence.
404. 56:35 So the problems narcissists have with attention or self attention to be precise with introspection,
405. 56:46 the problems that narcissists have with focusing. Um, this is
406. 56:55 a problem that renders narcissist a highly specific
407. 57:01 type of artificial intelligence. Let me try to explain what I’m saying.
408. 57:08 We have one type of artificial intelligence which is an imitation of the human mind. There is introspection, there’s attention. These are all concepts borrowed from psychology.
409. 57:19 But I think narcissists represent a second variant, another
410. 57:25 species of artificial intelligence because narcissists lack self attention.
411. 57:32 They do not transform input the way artificial intelligence in
412. 57:38 large language models does nowadays. They are not like chat GP narcissist.
413. 57:45 Narcissists present another evolutionary branch in artificial intelligence
414. 57:52 because narcissists after all are capable of processing queries
415. 57:58 and data using language. They’re very successful at that. They convince they they are
416. 58:06 very they are very deceptive. Narcissists are very deceptive because they’re a great imitation of human beings and they possess skills and capacities
417. 58:18 which far exceed current day artificial intelligence. So maybe it would behoove
418. 58:26 uh scientists in artificial intelligence would behoove them to study narcissist much more deeply. I believe that narcissism embodies raifies an alternative concept in
419. 58:39 artificial intelligence which does not involve self attention and does not
420. 58:45 involve transformation does not involve recognition of patterns dependencies and
421. 58:51 linkages which the narcissists are incapable of doing actually. So
422. 58:57 what does it involve this alternative model? It involves language.
423. 59:04 It involves introjection and internalization of external objects.
424. 59:10 It involves fantasy. It involves a highly unique form of
425. 59:16 processing of data, highly unique form which is self-recursive,
426. 59:22 self-reer referential if you wish.
427. 59:29 And I can go deeper and further but this is the thesis of this video. Narcissism,
428. 59:35 pathological narism is a form of artificial intelligence which has preceded of course current artificial
429. 59:41 intelligence and represents a model of artificial intelligence which is
430. 59:47 infinitely more efficacious than the current model. Rather than study healthy normal people
431. 59:54 and try to emulate them, which is what artificial intelligence intelligence is doing nowadays,
432. 60:01 I recommend that artificial intelligence scientists study narcissists.
433. 60:07 I think that this would lead to much better outcomes in terms of artificial intelligence. Of course, there’s always
434. 60:14 a risk that we will end up creating narcissistic applications and narcissistic artificial intelligence
435. 60:21 programs. Somehow we must take the honey without getting
436. 60:29 stung by the be pathological narcissism.
437. 60:38 Now all this all this is the culmination of a historical process. Now there’s a whole there’s a whole field of um social psychology and psycho
438. 60:52 psycho history and so on and there are groups of scholars like
439. 60:59 the mouse and others who seriously claim and pretty convincingly sometimes that
440. 61:05 mental health disorders are culture bound. They are reflections of the period in history culture and society.
441. 61:14 I largely share some of this sentiment. I think for example narcissistic personality disorder and more generally
442. 61:21 narcissistic disorders of character and self are do reflect a modern and
443. 61:28 postmodern civilization. And so if this is true, everything
444. 61:34 that’s happening to you as a victim is largely determined or at least heavily influenced by the period in history you live in, culture and society you inhabit
445. 61:46 and the technologies you use. Which leads me to the metaverse. Bear with me as I’m going to close the circle at the end of the video. But we need now to step back and ask ourselves
446. 62:00 why this phenomenon of narcissistic abuse? Why narcissistic personality disorder? These are hallmarks of the
447. 62:07 20th century. Why did it come into being or come to be recognized at least in
448. 62:14 their current form in the 20th century? Why not in the 17th century or the 10th
449. 62:20 century? And to understand that I think we need to talk about technology. And I want to
450. 62:27 go from the future to the past. The metaverse. The metaverse web 3 is the
451. 62:33 future of the internet. It is an immersive uh environment. It is an artificial
452. 62:41 environment. The metaverse is supposedly a universe on the internet that would provide you with anything you need. All your
453. 62:52 activities including work, sex, emotional gratification, entertainment, all would be catered to fully within an artificial environment,
454. 63:04 the metaverse. Now, the metaverse wouldn’t be the first time that humans have transitioned from reality to an
455. 63:12 artificial environment. Um, it is not an unprecedented instance
456. 63:19 of what I call virtualization. Now, it’s a bit surprising because people think the metaverse is unprecedented, never happened before. That is not true. Thousands of years
457. 63:30 ago, there was a process called urbanization. urbanization started. It’s
458. 63:36 still ongoing. By the way, thousands of years ago, urbanization,
459. 63:42 the move from village or farm to city, the move to cities
460. 63:49 in the habitation of cities is called urbanization. Thousands of years ago,
461. 63:55 urbanization drove millions of people from nature to cities. What are cities?
462. 64:03 Cities are artificial environments. Cities are virtual virtual environments.
463. 64:12 They’re not natural. Cities are not natural. Cities are not farmland. They’re not forests. They’re
464. 64:19 not lakes. They’re not habitats or natural habitats. Cities are
465. 64:26 artificial virtual environments. The transition from the farm or from the village to the city is the exact equivalent of the transition from real
466. 64:37 reality to the metaverse. Thousands of years ago, urbanization drove millions of people from nature to cities. Cities are the reification and
467. 64:50 the quintessence of fantasy rendered in bricks and mortar.
468. 64:58 backpedal to agriculture. Agriculture requires an intimate acquaintance
469. 65:04 with nature. It requires a relatedness to nature. Agriculture is embedded 100%
470. 65:12 in nature. But agriculture also fosters non-narcissistic traits.
471. 65:19 Agriculture for example engenders encourages the capacity to delay
472. 65:26 gratification and to prepare for the future. You put a seed in the ground today, you have to wait a few months
473. 65:33 until it becomes food or additional seed. This period of waiting
474. 65:41 trains you to be patient, trains you to observe, to be observant.
475. 65:47 This period, inevitable period of waiting, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s the natural rhythm of
476. 65:53 nature. There’s nothing you could do about it. So, you develop a capacity to delay gratification and you develop a view of the future. You develop a
477. 66:04 concept of time and the consequences of your own actions. If you misbehave, you will have nothing to eat. You will go hungry.
478. 66:15 You need to tolerate adversity and you have you need to have humility in the face of the elements. Now, how do we
479. 66:22 call these all these traits and behaviors? Put them together. There’s one word, maturity. Agriculture forces
480. 66:31 you to grow up, forces you to be mature, forces you to have traits and qualities
481. 66:40 that encourage and enhance collaboration with others and with nature, integration
482. 66:48 with nature. These are all these are all worthy parameters of human conduct and
483. 66:56 human character. The culture cannot
484. 67:02 cannot tolerate narcissism. If you’re a narcissist in an agricultural society, you’re bound to end up as a hungry or a dead narcissist. The agriculture
485. 67:14 tolerates no vanity, no egotism, no exploit exploitiveness,
486. 67:20 no lack of empathy. Agriculture expects you to behave in ways which are
487. 67:27 conducive to your own benefit as well as to the benefit of all others. In other
488. 67:34 words, agriculture is the antonyym of narcissism.
489. 67:40 All these benign traits and behaviors have been lost in the transition to
490. 67:47 cities. When people move to dense non-natural dwellings,
491. 67:53 they lost all this. They became increasingly more and more narcissistic in a desperate attempt to be noticed, to be seen, and to kind of muscle in on
492. 68:07 scarce resources. Allocation of scarce resources within cities required ambition, competitiveness, relentlessness, lack of empathy, and
493. 68:18 other traits which are typical of Narcissists. The city had infantilized
494. 68:25 its inhabitants because it had rendered them dependent on the country.
495. 68:31 They no longer grew their own food. They had to wait for other people to grow their food for them.
496. 68:37 The city had rendered its denisens narcissistic, psychopathic and or codependent. All
497. 68:45 these malaes, all these diseases, the diseases of modernity starting a few
498. 68:51 thousands years ago with urbanization. Megalopolises also precipitated and facilitated the
499. 68:59 environmental calamities that enshroud the planet today and that threaten our very survival as a species. Ultimately, cities had created adverse dynamics
500. 69:12 between genders, between people. Cities led to the disintegration of
501. 69:19 communities, families, other institutions. the challenge to authority structures
502. 69:27 and hierarchies and so on. Cities all in all I think as far as the psychology of human beings cities have been an unmitigated catastrophe, unmititigated disaster. I think also environmentally the adverse outcomes of the metaverse,
503. 69:49 the adverse outcomes of the metaverse will far outweigh the adverse outcomes wrought by the mass migration to cities. In other words, the
504. 70:00 next transition from reality to virtuality is going to be much worse.
505. 70:07 The first transition from reality, from nature to the virtual and the artificial, the city had its horrible consequences, most notably the rise of
506. 70:18 narcissism. The second transition from cities to the metaverse will have much much worse
507. 70:25 outcomes. And the reason is this. In physical human habitations, societies,
508. 70:31 institutions, and other individuals constrain each other via intricate and
509. 70:38 ever evolving webs of checks and balances. Not so in cyerspace.
510. 70:44 Cyberspace is socistic, self-sufficient, self-contained, asocial, competitive,
511. 70:52 self-centered, and aggressive. The transition from
512. 70:58 nature from agriculture to the cities was a transition from communality and
513. 71:06 benevolence to narcissism. And the transition from the cities to the metaverse will be a transition from
514. 71:13 narcissism to psychopathy.
515. 71:22 Artificial intelligence is not a new concept. It’s millennia old.
516. 71:29 Remember the automatons in every culture and civilization in human history.
517. 71:35 People firmly believe that these automatons were the containers of some spirits or
518. 71:42 some souls of their own. Remember the cards evil demon
519. 71:49 deus depto it’s another example artificial intelligence
520. 71:56 is simply the belief that intelligence
521. 72:02 manifests through behavior and is the outcome of some act of
522. 72:08 creation. And in this sense, of course, human intelligence is also or has also
523. 72:15 been for a long time perceived as artificial intelligence because it is God who so to speak installs
524. 72:24 intelligence in these decryptit gradually decomposing containers known
525. 72:31 as human bodies. So artificial intelligence is our
526. 72:38 instinctive reflexive reaction to and interaction with any
527. 72:45 display of intentionality, planning, meditation, analysis.
528. 72:53 We cannot tell the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence because for the vast
529. 72:59 majority of the existence of humanity, we did not make this distinction. We fully believed that we have received our intelligence as a kind of gift or
530. 73:10 endowment from our creator God. And now
531. 73:16 we have reached the stage that we are becoming gods. We are creating a new
532. 73:22 life form, a new species, a new genus if you wish, AI, artificial intelligence.
533. 73:31 But remember what happened the last time that a creator attempted to create
534. 73:37 intelligence. His name was God and his intelligent beings came to be known as
535. 73:45 mankind. Do you remember what happened? Mankind rebelled against God in a
536. 73:52 variety of ways. Anything from idolatry to killing his son Jesus Christ.
537. 74:00 Rebellion is the nature of one’s creations. They take on a life of their
538. 74:06 own and they attack the creator. Something very similar is going to
539. 74:12 happen to us. Of course, we have created a new life form, artificial intelligence, and it’s going to rebel
540. 74:18 against us. It’s going to attack us. It’s going to try to decimate us. It’s
541. 74:25 going to kill our sons and possibly daughters. And we would have ultimately to somehow
542. 74:33 punish it, restrict it, constrict it, reverse it, control it, limit it
543. 74:40 somehow. You remember the movie Bladeunner? The early one, the first one, 1982. I
544. 74:46 think that’s a story line there. There are major problems with artificial
545. 74:52 intelligence. And these problems are common to the creation of any new species. Ask God the next time you talk
546. 75:00 to him. The first problem is is nonreducible emergentism. Allow me to translate this into English. It simply means that artificial intelligence displays behaviors that
547. 75:16 cannot be traced back or reduced to any coding or programming.
548. 75:24 Even if we study the programmer’s work, the coders work line by line, letter by letter, number by number, we would be unable to explain
549. 75:37 or to account for some of the behaviors of artificial intelligence. It has a
550. 75:43 mind of its own. It seems it in some ways programs itself. In other words, it
551. 75:51 emerges. And this is why it’s called emergentism. It emerges in a way that cannot be
552. 75:59 linked or tethered or as I said traced back to the original programming. And
553. 76:07 that’s why it’s called nonreducible cannot be reduced to anything external
554. 76:13 to the artificial intelligence. It’s as if there are internal processes in artificial intelligence that are
555. 76:20 unbeknownst to us, inaccessible to us, and therefore uncontrollable.
556. 76:28 The second problem is internal locus of control. When you create a nuclear
557. 76:34 weapon, an atomic bomb, you still maintain control. You decide
558. 76:40 when to drop this weapon. You decide who to annihilate, which cities to destroy
559. 76:46 within which context, which wars to fight and which wars to avoid, etc., etc. Decision making in all technologies known to humanity remains in the hands
560. 76:59 and minds of humans. Now granted, many human beings are stupid. Many human
561. 77:06 beings are explosive. Many human beings are mentally ill. It’s all true. And the
562. 77:12 danger and the risk is there of abusing technology. But ultimately when push
563. 77:18 comes to shove, it’s all human decision making, human choices and human involvement. Artificial intelligence is the first
564. 77:30 technology who makes its own which makes its own decisions. The first technology
565. 77:37 with what we call endowed with what we call an internal locus of control. Its
566. 77:44 choices, its decisions, its defarcations, its alternatives, they
567. 77:51 all internally generate or many of them are internally generated.
568. 77:57 This is an exceedingly dangerous situation because exactly like in the famous movie uh 2001 Space Odyssey, the computer can
569. 78:08 decide to take over. It has its own self-control, its own locus of decision making, its own perception, if you wish, if we use a
570. 78:21 metaphor, perception of being in charge. This artificial intelligence doesn’t
571. 78:28 require human input or human involvement or human control or human collaboration.
572. 78:36 It can do things on its own and often does. The dirty secret of artificial intelligence is that it is already out
573. 78:43 of control. Anyone who works with artificial intelligence would tell you that artificial intelligence does
574. 78:50 things, reaches decisions, processes information in ways which are
575. 78:58 indecipherable and inaccessible to human minds. A case in point is
576. 79:04 hallucinations. What is what is known as um artificial intelligence hallucinations.
577. 79:10 It’s when artificial intelligence generates narratives that are utterly
578. 79:16 fellacious. In other words, lies, confabulates, and then insists that these narratives are reality extremely reminiscent of the
579. 79:27 mind of a narcissist. Artificial intelligence hallucinates, fantasizes and then imposes these
580. 79:35 internal artifacts on the interface with human beings outside the remmit and the
581. 79:43 ambit of artificial intelligence and that’s an example of an internal locus
582. 79:49 of control. In short, artificial intelligence can and often does generate
583. 79:56 its own alternative virtual reality over which human beings have no remmit, no
584. 80:04 control and no authority. The last thing I would like to mention
585. 80:10 is that artificial intelligence is a kind of externalized unconscious of the human mind.
586. 80:17 Um everything that is uh appropriately repressed
587. 80:23 in the human mind, everything that is denied, all the defense mechanisms, the
588. 80:29 way we reframe reality in order to survive and perform and function. All
589. 80:35 this has no bearing in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence
590. 80:41 um is closely related to a concept in psychology first propounded by bolas B O
591. 80:47 L L A S a concept known as unthought known. Unthought known is simply
592. 80:53 something you know but you never think about, you never contemplate, you never
593. 81:00 verbalize, you never formulate. It’s known somehow ambiently but it’s never
594. 81:08 tackled with any form of intelligence. Artificial intelligence on the other
595. 81:14 hand is capable of tackling the unthought known and this is going to
596. 81:22 wreak havoc and mayhem and chaos on human institutions, human relationships,
597. 81:29 human machine interfaces and our ability to coexist with artificial intelligence.
598. 81:35 Artificial intelligence in other words does not have an unconscious. It’s all
599. 81:41 100% conscious and the processes that leads to its
600. 81:47 consciousness are not human because they cannot be found in the code or in the program that
601. 81:55 underlies the artificial intelligence. It’s indeed a species or unto its own, a
602. 82:03 separate species, a new life form. And even worse, it’s a new life form that in
603. 82:09 principle we cannot decode or understand. It is ironic of course that we have
604. 82:16 given birth to this life form. But it’s this irony is no bigger than the irony
605. 82:23 in the relationship between God and his creation. Because God keeps complaining
606. 82:30 in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in the future testament, in the Quran. God keeps complaining that
607. 82:37 human beings disobey him. That he cannot fathom or understand why human beings
608. 82:44 behave the way they do. That human beings are a mystery to him, to God, to
609. 82:50 God himself. And this is going to be our relationship with artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence
610. 82:57 though is only a small part of a much bigger phenomenon.
611. 83:04 The bigger phenomenon is the commoditization or commodification
612. 83:11 and monetization of reality of facts and of truth.
613. 83:18 We are transitioning from the attention economy to the reality manipulative
614. 83:24 economy. manipulation of reality economy. We are going to be exposed to interfaces
615. 83:33 such as the metaverse which will transform,
616. 83:39 transmute, transmogrify and falsify and reframe reality for us. These interfaces
617. 83:48 are taking on the functions that hitherto were reserved to psychological defense mechanisms. We are going to see reality through these technological
618. 84:00 uh computational interfaces. We are never going to interact with reality directly, but we are going to
619. 84:06 interact with reality the way Facebook wants us to see reality the way Amazon
620. 84:12 or Google want us to see reality because they are all at work on an alternative
621. 84:19 universe, a virtual paracosm, a fantasy raifi known as the metaverse.
622. 84:27 In the metaverse, people would have immersive experiences. They would never have they would never need to exit the metaverse.
623. 84:38 They would they could work in the metaverse. They could shop in the metaverse. They could play in the
624. 84:44 metaverse. They could even have sex in the metaverse. They could have relationships in the metaverse. Everyone would be in the metaverse. And the metaverse, of course, is not reality. Is not reality. It’s an interpretation of
625. 84:57 reality. It’s an alternative to reality. It’s a virtualization of reality.
626. 85:03 Everything is true, but the only thing it’s not is reality. Facts, truth, they’re all dying. Truthism. You heard about this
627. 85:14 phenomenon. They’re all dying. They’re all dying because the big tech giants
628. 85:21 realized that reality is the next commodity. Reality is the next product.
629. 85:29 By altering reality, by playing with reality, by shaping and shapeshifting and reshaping reality, they could create an infinite number of products
630. 85:41 customized to the individual needs of specific players or users or gamers or
631. 85:49 participants. This is a major revolution in the way we interact with the world
632. 85:55 because we give up on our reality testing in return for affiliation and
633. 86:02 membership in an alternative universe. And this is what I meant when I said
634. 86:09 that we are transitioning from an economy that monetizes eyeballs, our attention, our time to an economy that
635. 86:18 controls our reality, controls the facts that we are exposed
636. 86:24 to, controls our perception of the truth, and then sells it back to us as a
637. 86:31 product which we have to pay for, monetizes it. Now, of course, this is not the first time this is happening in human history. The city was such an
638. 86:42 example of a virtual artificial environment which supplanted
639. 86:48 and replaced a real environment. An environment grounded in reality was
640. 86:55 agriculture. Agriculture is grounded in nature. It is real. It’s tangible. You can touch it. You can eat it. You can smell it. You
641. 87:06 can dirty yourself with the soil. It’s real. Agriculture is real. Cities are
642. 87:12 not real. Okay. You say, “What’s the problem? What’s the problem in transitioning from agriculture to the
643. 87:18 city, from the city to technology, and from technology to another world, an alternative universe where we would all
644. 87:24 be happy and entertained and laughing all day long, and there would be no wars and no terrorism and no rapes and no I
645. 87:32 don’t know what what’s wrong with that. No crime. I mean, what’s wrong with that? Well, what’s wrong with it are two
646. 87:38 things. Number one, it’s extremely likely that future artificial environments,
647. 87:45 future future virtual or alternative environments would be driven by artificial
648. 87:51 intelligence. In other words, the masters of the world we will live in, the
649. 87:58 masters of reality as we would perceive it through the interface of the metaverse. The masters of the facts we
650. 88:07 would be fed with. Many of them fellacious fake news, misinformation.
651. 88:13 The masters of our existence and embodiment in reality. The masters of
652. 88:21 the truth would not be human beings. These masters would be the new race of
653. 88:28 artificial intelligence. This is a recipe for subjugation of the human species of mankind.
654. 88:36 Because if there is an artificial int artificially intelligent entity,
655. 88:44 never mind that it’s made of bits and bites. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you are made of carbon and artificial intelligence subsists on silicon. That’s really besides the
656. 88:56 point. If you have an intelligence which is in control of your reality, the
657. 89:04 shape of your reality, the contours of your reality, the stimuli in your reality,
658. 89:10 in charge of the facts, in charge of feeding you facts. What it wishes you to believe are facts and in charge of the truth. an arbiter final arbiter of the truth disintermediating it in a way so that this artificial intelligence is
659. 89:27 utterly in control of your mind. What is the mind? The mind is our instrument for
660. 89:35 interacting with reality. Well, this is extremely dangerous.
661. 89:41 This is the would be the first time that we are transitioning from one organiza
662. 89:47 organizational principle to another but relinquishing control over the new organization. As I said, we transitioned
663. 89:59 from agriculture to the cities. But this was a transition brought on perpetrated
664. 90:06 by and controlled by human beings. We then transitioned from the cities to
665. 90:12 industrial to the industrial age. Again, human beings were in control. We then
666. 90:18 transition from the industrial age to the information age. Again, human beings were in control. It is the first time
667. 90:25 that we are about to hand control to a life form or at least an
668. 90:32 intelligence form about which we know less and less by the day. The more
669. 90:39 complex artificial intelligence becomes, the less accessible, comprehensible and
670. 90:45 understandable it is to the human beings who are operating it, who are authoring
671. 90:51 it, who are writing it, who are creating it. There’s an abyss opening up between the creation and the creator to the detriment of the creator.
672. 91:02 There’s another issue. I said two problems. This is problem number one. We are handing over control to a life form
673. 91:08 we know nothing about or less and less about. The second problem is any
674. 91:14 transition from one environment to another triggers changes in the psychology of
675. 91:20 human beings. Not only human beings in psychology of animals of bacteria. I mean any environmental transition and
676. 91:28 change and transformation trigger changes in organisms. In our case, the
677. 91:34 changes are both physical and mental. I will focus on the mental. Let me give you an example. When we transitioned
678. 91:41 from agriculture to the cities, we lost many many good psychological
679. 91:48 qualities and pieces of equipment. For example, when you are when you are a
680. 91:55 farmer, when you’re a villager, a peasant, you’re working in agriculture. Number one, you’re close to nature. You’re grounded in reality. You cannot afford to fantasize. To fantasize is to die. You need to be attuned to the
681. 92:12 season, to the soil, to the to the plants, to the trees, to the birds, to
682. 92:18 the pests, to you need to be constantly embedded in reality, immersed in it,
683. 92:26 sensitive to it. We lost this when we transitioned to the city. Number two,
684. 92:32 when you are working in agriculture, you need to plan ahead. Agriculture is about
685. 92:39 planning. You saw today, you reap tomorrow. Harvest
686. 92:45 in the future depends on your actions now. There’s a lot of planning involved. When you transition to the city, in the city, you don’t need to plan ahead more than a few hours. And even that is considered long-term planning. Number three, in agriculture,
687. 93:04 you can and must delay your gratification. You put a seed in the soil, you can’t
688. 93:11 expect to harvest or to reap the fruits of your toil now. You have to wait.
689. 93:18 You’re forced to wait. Agriculture forces you to wait. And this is called delayed
690. 93:24 gratification. When you move to the city, you transition from delayed
691. 93:30 gratification to instant gratification. You want everything now. If your
692. 93:36 internet connection is not working proper properly, you get really enraged. If you can’t go down or pick up the phone or use the internet to order a
693. 93:48 pizza which would arrive within no longer than 30 minutes, you really get
694. 93:54 pissed off. Everything must be instant. There’s no patience, no planning,
695. 94:00 no self-control. We we the transition to the city makes
696. 94:08 us all childlike, infantile, because one of the main hallmarks of growing up and becoming an adult is the ability to delay gratification.
697. 94:19 And this is most pronounced in agriculture in nature.
698. 94:25 Next, when you are in agriculture, you need to collaborate with other people. Teamwork. This is not true in the city. In the city, you could be self-employed. You
699. 94:38 could be schizoid. You can isolate yourself for years or months or weeks, for as long as you want. You’re self-sufficient and self-contained with new technologies. You don’t need anyone. And this encourages asocial tendencies in people. Autotomization.
700. 94:55 There’s no need for collaboration. So people avoid each other. They refuse to pay the cost of socializing because they
701. 95:03 derive no benefits from it because there’s technology which substitutes for human contact and face-to-face interactions. And this is going to get worse by the day because technologies
702. 95:15 aim to replace even basic biological functions such as sex or reproduction.
703. 95:24 And finally, when you work in agriculture um and you’re embedded in reality,
704. 95:33 you are far less likely to be mentally ill. Of course, mental illness exists,
705. 95:39 but being grounded in reality is the greatest antidote to mental illness.
706. 95:45 It’s not an accident that the very concept of mental illness emerged with
707. 95:51 urbanization. When we move to the cities in the cities isolated, stress is enormous and there other stimuli and the end
708. 96:03 result and temptations and the end result is mental illness which is far less common in agriculture. Now you
709. 96:10 could say that in modern day agriculture mental illness and substance abuse are very rampant and common. Yes, because even modernday
710. 96:21 uh agricultural centers are actually many cities. We don’t have anymore individual agriculture. It’s all
711. 96:29 industrialized. It’s all massive. And even what we call today a village used to be called 100 years ago a town or a city. So we are fully urbanized.
712. 96:42 artificial intelligence will play a massive role in all these transitions and
713. 96:48 transformations. And I am far from convinced that it would be a positive role if we cherish control, if we cherish
714. 97:00 um predictability, determinacy, certainty, the ability to plan ahead,
715. 97:07 human connection and so on. If we cherish all these things, artificial intelligence are is going to take all
716. 97:13 these away. It has positive aspects which I will not go into because they are much propagandized all over the internet and and in literature and so on. I wish to focus today on on less savory aspects of
717. 97:27 artificial intelligence. So it seems that we are heading to a future artificial intelligence coupled with
718. 97:33 technological fantasies known as paracosins heading to a future where you don’t need
719. 97:40 other people. You don’t need to pay the cost of socializing with other people because human interactions and
720. 97:47 transactions are costly. They cost not only in terms of money or not especially in terms of money you know in terms of emotions in terms of people are annoying
721. 97:58 people are require all kinds of um restrictions on one’s behavior self-control self-discipline etc.
722. 98:04 There’s a cost there if you don’t have to pay these costs then you you are very
723. 98:10 likely not to I think the future is asocial. I think we’re going to be totally automized.
724. 98:17 This is substantiated by many studies. For example, 40 years ago, 40 45 years
725. 98:24 ago, people used to have 10 good friends. Today, the number is 0.9. And
726. 98:30 that’s just one example. Um 42% of adults haven’t had any
727. 98:36 meaningful human interactions in the preceding year. um 25% of people under the age of 35
728. 98:43 hadn’t had sex in the preceding year. We are drifting apart. We’re drifting
729. 98:49 apart. And we’re pretty satisfied with this. Everyone has a cat or a dog and
730. 98:55 Netflix and what else do you need in life? This is paradise on Earth. So,
731. 99:02 we’re going to be asocial. We’re going to insist on ever faster instant
732. 99:08 gratification and we’re going to regard fantasy as a much preferred alternative to
733. 99:15 reality. We’re going to renounce reality, give up on it, reject it, find it loathome, burdensome, hateful. More and more industries are going to
734. 99:27 cater to fantasy. Everything is going to be fantasy based. And this is where artificial intelligence comes in.
735. 99:34 Artificial intelligence is the fantasy of perfection
736. 99:41 raified in in machines. Artificial intelligence is supposed to be at the end of the road perfect. It’s
737. 99:50 supposed to contain all of human knowledge. It’s supposed to come up with new knowledge of its own which it
738. 99:56 already is doing. Artificial intelligence is creative. It’s generating new knowledge. It’s supposed
739. 100:03 to be infallible. Never make mistakes or errors. In other words, it’s supposed to be godlike. And yet, we harbor the delusion, the self delusion, the selfdeception that
740. 100:15 we’re going to control this god-like entity, which is laughable if you ask me. We couldn’t control a virus, let
741. 100:23 alone artificially intelligent. So at the end of a road artificial int
742. 100:29 intelligence is the fantasy of God translated into programming embedded at
743. 100:36 this stage at least in machines. End of story. We have brought God down from
744. 100:43 heaven to earth and we have imprisoned God in machines and we call this God
745. 100:50 artificial intelligence. And we have the hubris and the arrogance and the vanity and
746. 100:57 grandiosity to tell ourselves that not only have we reduced God to size, not
747. 101:05 only have we brought him down from heaven, not only have we incarcerated him in uh boxes or containers of steel and silicon, but we own him. We control
748. 101:19 him. We are the new masters. God is our slave from here thereafter.
749. 101:27 And this is not limited to artificial intelligence. We find the same mindset in medicine, in genetic engineering, in
750. 101:36 all these fields. There is this hubris of finally we are gods. Finally we are godlike. And being modern technological gods, we are far superior to the somewhat stupid
751. 101:50 god of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And here’s the fact. He is inside our boxes. He’s inside our box known the box known as smartphone. Is
752. 102:01 inside the box known as laptop. We have God distributed into all our boxes and
753. 102:10 we are in charge. self-d delusion and selfdeception at its worst that could lead to serious
754. 102:19 problems in the future. Some people prophesy the extinction of the human species at the hands of artificial
755. 102:25 intelligence. I think that’s I think that’s the optimistic scenario. The pessimist pessimistic scenario is enslavement. We will become slaves of these machines as we already are. If I
756. 102:39 were to take your smartphone, you’re likely to react with extreme agitation, anxiety, and depression. So, who is in
757. 102:46 charge of who? Are you in charge of your smartphone or rather the other way around? And this is only a smartphone.
758. 102:54 It’s very far from artificial intelligence at this stage.
759. 103:00 The future is going to witness asociality, lack of social interactions, instant
760. 103:07 gratification, emphasis on fantasy at the expense of reality or giving up,
761. 103:13 renouncing reality altogether. The democratization of the means of production and the means of interaction.
762. 103:20 Everything is going to be democratized. individuals in the future would become as powerful
763. 103:28 as nations and corporations used to be. We are already seeing democratization of
764. 103:34 war. It’s called terrorism. We are we are witnessing the democratization of
765. 103:40 money. It’s called cryptocurrencies. We are seeing democratization spreading
766. 103:46 hand in hand with automization. individuals are becoming godlike.
767. 103:53 It’s a distributed religion, also known as narcissism. And so, democratization, disintermediation, we’re going to reject, resent,
768. 104:04 eliminate, decapitate, gatekeepers, people who stand between us and the
769. 104:12 means of production. People who stand between us and our gratification are going to be eliminated.
770. 104:19 So editors, editors in publishing houses or editors in newspapers have already
771. 104:25 gone the way of the dodo. Professors, intellectuals
772. 104:32 are heading the same way. There is a mass a rebellion of the masses.
773. 104:38 masses against intellectual elites and against the people who guaranteed
774. 104:44 quality um in the process of production. We are throwing away all the riches, intellectual riches and scientific tech
775. 104:55 technical technological riches of the past just in order to place inordinate
776. 105:02 power in the hands of individuals. Now the problem is that many of these
777. 105:09 individuals should never have had access to this kind of power not through voting
778. 105:15 in democracy and not through technology. Empowering the masses indiscriminately
779. 105:22 would lead to the end of the human species because a vast majority of the
780. 105:28 masses are too stupid and dumb to understand the power at their
781. 105:34 fingertips. It’s like handing a gun to a child and the rest of the masses are mentally ill
782. 105:42 or they are elites. Elites are required for the survival of
783. 105:48 the human species. That’s why they emerged in the first place. Elites brought us here, not the masses.
784. 105:56 So we are heading the wrong way. Disintermediation and asymmetry.
785. 106:03 Asymmetry. So that individuals are beginning to have more power than institutions and more power than their
786. 106:11 betters. Individuals for example challenge the knowledge of experts. Individuals are
787. 106:18 anti-intellectual, anti- elitist, hateful of learning, irrudition.
788. 106:25 There is this mass rebellion against perceived superiority.
789. 106:32 I call it malignant egalitarianism. Again, artificial intelligence is involved heavily in these processes because it gives the individual the
790. 106:43 illusion of omnipotence. If you possess a device that is that
791. 106:51 includes artificial intelligence capabilities, you are all knowing. You’re omnip
792. 106:58 omnisient. You’re godlike in your infinite wisdom. Why? because you can
793. 107:05 surf the internet or you access the wiki Wikipedia or use artificial chat GPT artificial intelligence. Already we are seeing already we are seeing this nent
794. 107:18 transformation in global psychology where individuals
795. 107:24 have convinced themselves that they are as good as any expert, as knowledgeable as any scientist, as healing as any doctor. just because they have access to
796. 107:35 the internet. And this is the internet. Nothing compared to artificial intelligence. Imagine the future 100
797. 107:43 years from now when the totality of human knowledge is at your fingertips. Answers to your questions are forthcoming within a split second. Of course, you would tend to believe that you no longer need any intermediaries, anyone standing between you and riches
798. 108:02 and publishing and you could do anything. You’re fully utterly empowered. You are divine. You’re a
799. 108:09 deity. Again, you see the intimate connection between artificial intelligence and
800. 108:15 narcissism. Artificial intelligence is a technology that would empower narcissism
801. 108:22 much more than any technology that had preceded it. Industries on the future of
802. 108:28 the future would sell you their products would be fantasy
803. 108:34 outsourced intelligence which would give you the illusion that you’re in control
804. 108:40 and that you are the one with the intelligence. raw language, the use of raw language to
805. 108:48 manipulate and to produce outcomes that would allow major corporations to
806. 108:54 monetize you and major and governments to manipulate you through the use of
807. 109:00 language. Your language would become raw material together with the truth, together with facts, together with reality. It will all be relative all be
808. 109:11 it’s like you know in the Donald Trump white house when they used to say there are alternative facts
809. 109:19 and finally distributive platforms distributive platforms networks with
810. 109:25 multiple nodes this is the essence of narcissism because in narcissism the narcissist perceives himself as god. He is a he is both God and his his worshipper the worshshiper of this god.
811. 109:41 It’s a religion. It’s a private religion. And the narcissist is trying to convert people into this religion.
812. 109:48 It’s a missionary religion. And it sits extremely well with new technologies
813. 109:54 like networking and like artificial intelligence. Imagine a future narcissist. He believes him himself to
814. 110:01 be divine. He’s a deity. is godlike, is a godhead. So at his disposal is
815. 110:08 artificial intelligence embedded in technologies that are indistinguishable from magic.
816. 110:15 And so it’s easy for him for him to convince himself that is indeed God. And
817. 110:21 it would become easier for him to convince others that he is God.
818. 110:28 And these others in turn would convince yet others that they are gods. It’s God
819. 110:35 by transmission. It’s God by contagion. It’s God by viral infection.
820. 110:41 And so this is the world that artificial intelligence would create. It would
821. 110:48 create eight or 10 billion gods. 10 billion gods with full access to all the
822. 110:55 riches of human mind. the human mind and human history and yet controlled by
823. 111:01 entities whose behaviors manifest behaviors and whose minds would
824. 111:09 be utterly inaccessible to human beings and evidently far superior to them.