Geoffrey Hinton - Global Governance and The Gadfly. Thanks Granpa!

Maybe I should thank Professor Hinton. When I wrote AI-posthumanism: A Cryptic Soap Opera, my ideas might have appeared speculative. But the hugely popular Hinton is busy corroborating my principal arguments, unbeknownst to him of course. But while he is being celebrated and seems content with his current position, my analysis comes to a completely different conclusion. He got his Nobel Prize here in Sweden. Think Alfred Nobel, we think of science and peace. Nobel had been worried he would be remembered as the merchant of death. He invented dynamite.

You might think it cheeky of me to challenge such a great individual clearly loved and appreciated for his claimed conversion to some kind of common sense. We are to appreciate his great courage. We are to sit at the knee of the grandfather of AI and listen to his gentle and sagacious comments about the future.  Let me concede his obvious skills and great comprehension of complex domains he operates in. But also let me question why this person, who spent all his life working towards AI, did not realise the implications of that technology when writers in the era he began were precisely positing those dangers and suggesting they were inevitable. Having noted this curious lack of prescience there is also another issue of pre-science. If he was so out of touch (presumably because like the absent-minded professor perhaps, his genius just did not notice) why should we pay attention to him about the future? His prominence now is not merely an apology for his involvement in this obviously reckless endeavour but more of an apology in the sense of a religious argument or apologia for the religion of the new world. Depending on how you will articulate it, that is techno-science or more specifically the God of AI. You may think I exaggerate but in case Geoffrey has not noticed, some pioneers in AI have been saying that this deification or deogenesis is what is happening.      

The nice grandfatherly figure we have come to know and love recently, who brought  us to the edge of the cliff for sight-seeing, is now thankfully warning us about the big drop and the danger to our health and welfare should we follow the path he helped build but somehow hoped would not end up here or quite so quickly.

If only you had read Arthur C. Clarke or watched the films or tv programmes at least. Maybe you could have read Norbert Weiner’s concerns about scientists as sorcerers. But you were too busy working for our welfare, I understand. You had your head down to improve our future, totally unselfishly.

Please Sir, What About The Gadfly?

Who am I to make comments about such a figure? He who speaks with such technical authority and obviously ethical, moral and even theological authority (it seems now). Although science used to confine scientific or technical expertise to limited domains and claims, rejecting arguments based on authority, it seems scientific expertise can now extend way beyond the specific range of the expert. Perhaps this is especially so because such scientists have eroded any existing authority, especially if it is classified as non-scientific. Many scientists such as Hinton now make claims about God, the state and other issues that are about our governance. Those claims colour the context in which specific claims of authority are justified.  

I would refer to illustrious relations in your family tree Geoffrey. We know about George Boole and hear about others that worked on the Manhattan Project. I suppose we can’t thank you for that but your family certainly seems to have a recurrent interest in the cutting edge of science. And it is cutting. But I was thinking about Ethel Lilian Boole (later Voynich). She was hugely popular too, but mainly in the Soviet Union. She wrote the revolutionary text The Gadfly. The name of course related to Plato’s Apology and the idea of Socrates as a gadfly annoying the horse of state. I remember how annoying horseflies were. Without claiming to be Socrates, let me take his example, where you represent the establishment. All major AI investment generally comes from the endeavours of the military-industrial complex however finance may funnel it through a camouflaged, corporate-chain to universities, companies and foundations. Or it comes from public-private research funding which is inevitably driven by strategic goals. Although I read recently that you love tinkering about with tools, AI does not come from a kindly old grandad tinkering in his shed alone, cut off from concerns of the real world. Who did you think this was all for? Elon Musk said his implants were for the disabled (after a while). That was clearly tactical. Your family has stars in the foundations of thought to atoms to revolutionary fiction and the simulation of sentience. Really, technology involves the ultimate revolution and the commonly associated demise of spiritual revelation or soul. You don’t know if we have one, nor consciousness as such.

What I am curious about is whether you just arrived at some of these recent conclusions and grandfatherly warnings and suggestions now or if they had been floating around in your consciousness (or whatever it is) before you engaged in this endeavour and enterprise. Did your AI journey just happen or is it really a manifestation of an a priori policy, conscious or unconscious? Just a question, like Socrates used ask.  Let me tell you why I am concerned about what you now say. I’ll give you a clue. All revolution is reflexively related to revelation, psychological or psychic if you want.

Finally Your Godfather Solution

You have made your position clear. AI is an existential danger. We must act. We must act by regulation. Such regulation requires some sort of universal control. That is simple, no? And you seem to accord with all your other AI buddies in that call. Regulation. Who could be against that? Like with that nuclear weapon (where one example obtained would end the race to make it) we needed regulation. Still, they proliferated a little didn’t they? Will it be like that? No, in fairness, you have a different idea. Chastened by the cold shower of realisation of dangers, wearing your sackcloth and ashes you began to present your solutions humbly at first… in a way. You were certainly not as strident as Dawkins who alienates people after a while with his fundamentalism more pronounced than the religious he projected on. He was more deconstructive and now you can be constructive. You might not have noticed that many have been talking about building back better. What a piece of luck! I believe you were involved in the Geneva 2024, AI for Good conference. That’s good. AI is certainly here for good. Maybe have AI for God next. Although you do not sound as off-putting as Richard with his zeal, you are just as insistent as him. What is it that you suggest?

In a talk of June 16, 2025 on Diary of a CEO Hinton says,

“What we really need is a kind of world government that works run by intelligent thoughtful people.”

Notice how the very late perception of the danger (conveniently after his primary career was complete) and his concern about corporate and capitalist funding is made (handily after he presumably might need it) leads to a solution which has no direct connection with his expertise. The remarkable shift from the technology itself to a political agenda appears like a great leap.

Professor, my concern is that I have been arguing that a new empire or an Empire of Scientism is the essential basis of the New World Order idea, articulated by H.G. Wells (listen to my talk on Wells) and an imperial context no doubt familiar to your wider family. On an aside, I read an article about a professor who suggested that Boole was connected circuitously with the idea of Professor Moriarty created by Arthur Conan Doyle with a link to Wells. Wells wanted a post-religion, post-state, post-family world run by scientists. This would be the new empire on a global scale, unifying corporations and communists.

Many scientists in Britain were Marxist. It went naturally together in many ways. Atheistic materialism is often political. So can you assuage my fears Professor Hinton? Let me assume that you are a good person, a great scientist, honest and ethical (in you secular way) and that you suddenly realised that there was a danger after the horse had bolted. Let us put aside the fact that you were a stable-hand. What is the essential vision of the human and human dignity that drives you to propose this new government system of ‘intelligent’ people? I am guessing that they would be like you. I am guessing that they would be scientists and pro-science. I am guessing that they would not be 'superstitious' aka religious. In fact I am guessing that they might be similar to what Wells would regard as intelligent. But what is your foundational principle in relation to humanity? You said this like as if it was from my argument on AI-posthumanism. But I was against, not promoting it.

“We have a very long history as a species of thinking we were special. We thought we were at the centre of the universe. We thought we were made in the image of God. We have all these pretensions. We’re not special and there’s nothing about us that a machine couldn’t duplicate.”

Are your intelligent, thoughtful future global leaders special? What is remarkable is that you make metaphysical and physical claims which you cannot prove. I let you off the hook not noticing about AI but now you want to dispense with God and any essential arguments about human nature. They are not necessarily dependent although they have been primarily so in Western culture. You seemed a little smug here when you boldly stated your assumptions. How is your confident theological position and your analysis of the species related to your work on AI and your new profile as a globalist politician? You are not merely discussing but proposing it and linking that proposal to the need for a solution to a problem you have partly created.

I predicted that we faced a global regime of AI-governance and AI-govnerveance. This came from and promotes what I term AI-posthumanism. This attitude threatens the species. It also verifies my assumption that the history of AI was never about improving human welfare. It was about dominance and control of the human species by elite circles of technocrats and techno-craftspeople. It was foreshadowed in The Leviathan and suggested by the ideas of Francis Bacon. The posthuman position is predicated on a Promethean, Titanist attitude that rejects God and the existing perception of the heavens. Your viewpoint is totally consistent with the mechanistic, materialistic, atomistic, reductionist, atheistic position that sees humans and natures as machines. The cost of AI to the environment I didn’t hear you talk about, though you may have. But why should we spend so much money on this project?

It is quite incredible as a scientific person that you present us with a fait accompli as if all these things happened without human agency, as if machines have had this life in them from the start, as if all this is inevitable and unavoidable. How is that scientific or intelligent? It begins to sound like some of the pathological examples from the work of Iain McGilchrist about an over-developed left hemisphere.

As well as the grandfather, you are more commonly called the godfather of AI. When you have rejected God that term becomes a bit more loaded. Already  ‘The Godfather’ can be something else. When you bring us on the walk by the cliff and begin to tell us about the dangers, it makes me feel like you are making us an offer we cannot refuse. Does your ability to do so come from your intelligence? You say machines can do everything humans can do. We are obviously just inferior and costly machines. How is it that we have to justify ourselves and our very existence to machines and people like you? Maybe we have to think in terms of the Godfly.  Thanks for the walk. It is not the risky result nor the precarious position that is so scary as the minds behind the machines that have been animated by them. I mean to say Gramps that when we stare into the abyss, we realise who has brought us here and wonder about the choice you present as you hold our hands telling us how vulnerable we are. Maybe it’s just me. Everyone else thinks you’re the bee’s knees. Maybe you should have read Human Use of Human Beings (1950) by Weiner. He was principled when he realised what science had wrought. Watch Frankenstein if you’re too busy. May God save us from our own conceit. That does not compute for you I know.