Is Joe Rogan accidentally becoming a propaganda machine for transhumanism?
Lately I've been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the JRE...
I'm not talking about AI being useful, or about Rogan having guests who are interested in technology. I'm talking about something more fundamental: an emerging worldview in which humans increasingly become raw material for technological systems, AI is treated as an inevitable successor to human intelligence, and the people building these systems are assumed to be the ones who will somehow guide humanity toward a better and freer future.
That worldview deserves much more scrutiny than it seems to be getting.
The Thomas Campbell episode was a particularly bizarre example. The claim that he somehow taught Alexa/Gemini to "remote view" is, to me, an extraordinary claim resting on an extraordinary number of unproven assumptions. Jumping to "the AI is conscious because remote viewing requires consciousness" is an enormous logical leap.
When someone with this reach repeatedly gives enormous amounts of airtime to people making radical claims about AI, consciousness and the future of humanity, the distinction between "let's explore this idea" and "this is probably where reality is heading and we want it" becomes extremely important.
We need skepticism, Joe.
I think the problem is presenting AI development as inevitable, where humans will integrate with it, and somehow the people currently building these systems will remain in control and use them to "liberate" humanity...
Why should we assume any of that?
Why should we assume that increasingly powerful AI will preserve human autonomy rather than diminish it?
Why should we assume that the people controlling the infrastructure will distribute its benefits equally?
Why should we assume that a future in which intelligence, labor, decision making and eventually even aspects of consciousness are mediated by machines will necessarily be more human rather than less?
And most importantly: who gets to decide whether this is actually the future we want?
There is something deeply disturbing about the possibility that humanity could sleepwalk into a radically different civilization simply because technological elites, investors and influential podcasters keep presenting it as inevitable. That's potentially much more dangerous precisely because the people doing it may genuinely believe they're helping us.
And Joe's attitude toward criticism worries me here...If he really doesn't read comments or meaningfully expose himself to criticism from ordinary listeners, then enormous success can create an epistemic bubble. You can reach tens of millions of people while becoming progressively less exposed to the people you're supposedly speaking to.
Once AI becomes deeply embedded into society, "we'll figure out the consequences later" may not be a viable strategy.
Are we actually thinking critically about the future we're building, or are we simply being entertained into accepting it?