The Foolishness of Crowds - UPDATED

How Ouijia boards, prediction markets, and AI are essentially divination

UPDATE: Four days after posting this, based on my own thoughts, I ran across the following quote in John Daniel Davidson’s recently released (and mostly excellent) book, “Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come” which I picked up only after seeing his interview on Tucker Carlson on April 30th, one day after I posted this. (Go figure. Great minds…)

The AIs we’re developing… are susceptible to being used by spiritual entities, turning the nuts and bolts of AI technology into what are essentially widely deployed digital Ouijia boards.

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Since the late 19^th century, Ouijia boards have been pitched as innocent social fun. They are anything but. They are occultic tools for divination. Which is bad.

“There shall not be found among you anyone who… uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD; and because of these detestable things the LORD your God will drive them out before you.” (Deuteronomy 18:10-12)

God doesn’t change. He has given us His word, the Bible, and it is sufficient. We are to seek His counsel, not that of hard-to-identify spiritual forces working through the social zeitgeist. Even if it seems innocent and fun. Especially if it seems so.

Boomers might remember Ouijia boards as a toy sold alongside games like Monopoly, Battleship, and Risk. (Apparently, they are the only “board game” to ever outsell Monopoly in a given year.) Our 5^th-grade teacher (in a public school in one of the most leftist-pagan enclaves in the entire nation) had no issue with us using them as a social diversion during class breaks in the early 1970s.

Susie is steering; I saw her peek!

Who’s keeping track of letters?

Wait, no fair; it says, ‘Billy is a lunkhead’.

This sort of widespread acceptance is depicted in the 1995 film Jumanji where a similar device, disguised as a toy, unleashes hard-to-fix chaos remarkably similar to that unleashed in the 1993 film, Jurassic Park. (Whenever you see dinosaurs in fiction, think Job 41 and Leviathan, which the LXX renders “drakon,” i.e., dragon, the serpent of old.) Neither Jurassic Park nor Jumanji are Christian films, but at a thematic level, the radical Pandora’s-box downside of mankind messing with forces we ought not to mess with does get a halfway-reasonable airing in both. We can’t say we didn’t know.

Now, think with me for a moment about the functional essence of Ouijia boards.

A bunch of people—by definition unconcerned with God’s prohibitions on and His utter detestation of all forms of divination—get together to try to learn something high and special about truth, or the future, or whatever by pooling their ‘wisdom’.

Some may view it through an secular lens: let’s see what our collective subconscious comes up with! Others may view it through an explicitly spiritual one. Since very few are hard-over committed to a secular-materialist (nihilistic) worldview in the way they conduct their actual lives, I suspect that most view it as some messy-vague ‘new age’ amalgam of the two. Either way, it’s pagan, which is to say, antichrist: imitating true faith in the One, True, living God, and claiming it to be superior… or at least innocent and fun.

Now consider how similar the functional essence of Ouijia boards is to a phenom that gained huge philosophical and technical steam in the dot.com boom. Books like “Out of Control,” (Kevin Kelly, 1992) preceded the introduction of what we now call the web in 1994, the basic message being that swarms of free independent actors often worked better than top-down systems. If we’re talking capitalism, then thumbs-up.

But books like “The Wisdom of Crowds,” (James Surowiecki, 2004) observed that more was possible. As mankind got connected, something special seemed to be emerging in terms of his ability to tap into his (Adamic-fallen) collective potential.

(Full disclosure: back in an old professional life, I made myself a second-tier expert on so-called “prediction markets”. I blogged about how globalists were messing with them to steer perceptions (and thus outcomes) of the 2004 election; but prediction markets called its outcome anyway, days in advance, far better than the mainstream media, which totally muffed it.

The upshot: pay-to-play global Ouijia boards actually ‘worked’ pretty well.

Fast-forward to 2024, and AI amplifies the same questions.

For the pagan, the only test is pragmatic. If it “works,” what’s the problem?

But the Christian needs to press deeper and ask what we are dealing with.

I’m not an expert on AI, nor am I by nature a luddite, but the big difference seems to be that even a given AI’s designer can’t predict what will come out of it, nor examine how “it” got to any given answer. “It” says what “it” says; and because it’s really fast and really smart on a lot of things, we trust “it” more and more.

The question I wanted to raise with this post is essentially that.

As we begin to rely on AI as a forensically unaccountable magic black-box, why do we think that its pretty pictures and smart-sounding answers will lead us good places? How is tapping into the entirety of all fallen human knowledge this way not similar, in functional essence and expectation, to all of us, eyes wide shut, resting our hands, in trust, on the rim of a bunch of giant oracle-Ouijia boards?

If you were a demon, wouldn’t you love something like that? Wouldn’t you swarm to a “place” where you could exert influence without being detected. Wouldn’t you cavort in a “place” where you could give authoritative answers without being obvious?

I leave you with this assessment from a source which would usually be supportive, while reminding us that God is not the author of confusion, but the righteous and truthful maker and sustainer of real reality.

“…AI has bred a kind of confusion that’s hard to fully scrub—or even detect. All this AI has a confounding effect too: Its mere presence makes people question reality, even when images are, in fact, real. On social media, reality has never been more bent and twisted.”
(Fast Company, April 26^th, 2024, “AI is making Meta’s apps basically unusable”)