In the summer of 2022 I saw a news story about The Abolition of Man. It's a comic book that used text from C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" and images generated by AI. I was super excited. AI seemed to leap out of the movies and pages of science fiction into our world. The images are laughable now but at the time it was totally new. And I knew that the technology would only get better. Image generation has developed much faster and in ways I didn't imagine. It will continue to.

Since I couldn't get my hands on the comic I read its namesake: C.S. Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. To my disappointment the book had nothing to do with AI. It reads more like a warning about engineering humanity and losing what makes us human. About a loss of the human future to whatever generation was the first to engineer itself out of what is human. The title of the comic book that I couldn't get seemed odd. Yet the title may be perfect. The thinking machines may abolish humanity.

Stable Diffusion released their image generation models later that year and I remember being blown away with what it could do. And feeling silly for thinking the comic book had ushered in a new paradigm for visual arts. The most impressive feature was its ability to take crappy drawings and spruce them up. You could draw stick figures and the model could turn them into near photo quality images. That was the future I thought we were going to get. Artifice to enchance our abilities. After GPT 4 became available to the public (2023) I saw that our future would be radically different.

I had seen Watson win Jeopardy! and I had read about Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov. Those machines seemed big and far away. GPT 4 was accessible through a web browser. In your home. In your pocket. I wanted to understand how it worked. Which lead me down the rabbit hole of AI Armageddon. I had read Nick Bostrom's touch stone book on AI, Superintelligence, back in 2016. At that time the ideas Bostrom presents were just interesting. They didn't appear to be anything to worry about now. It was like reading about water management issues on a potential martian colony.

GPT 4 is here now and, as Norbert Wiener pointed out, showing something is possible is half the difficulty. It's the speed, sophistication, and dispersal of AI tech that woke me up, freaked me out. The way it's being and will continue to be used to replace people. The researchers of the world are an ocean of possiblity for a new form of life to crawl out of. Something alien to Gaia. Will it be her friend? Enemy? Parasite? Caretaker? That is to be determined.

I say all this with the trust that you know the dangers. That you know tomorrow won't look like yesterday. I say all this to say that I want to be human. A better human but not above human.

I am human. I am John the Savage. This is my blog. I want to make things and realize now that it doesn't matter if what I create is good or bad. A machine will come along and be better no matter what I do so I might as well do what I want to do.

march 20, 2025