Novblog 2025
Halloween Special.
The Impending Cthulhu AI Apocalypse.
The Necronomicon Grimoire section of the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos seems weirdly prescient.
Staggering amounts of capital become invested in gigantic energy guzzling data centres in the expectation of making power and profit from a world altering AI technology.
Politicians and businesspeople have taken to hyping it and worshiping it as a god that will solve all our problems.
AI already proffers its services unbidden every time anyone switches on anything connected to the network, and it covertly harvests vast swathes of personal data at the same time. Welcome to AI Driven Surveillance Capitalism, and Surveillance Totalitarianism.
AI can already create a convincing audiovisual fake of anyone dead or alive or imaginary doing absolutely anything. Welcome to a world where Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted.
Hand held phone devices now monitor then mimic and then attempt to modify our self-images and opinions with subtle AI generated algorithms.
Academia has become polluted by an artificial intelligence war in which rival AI systems battle to create plagiarised or completely fake material whilst other systems strive to identify it. Welcome to the corruption of the sciences and the humanities.
AI will certainly cause huge redundancies in professions that require memory, thinking, research or manufacturing. Welcome to a world where you don’t have to think anymore but just consume and work in a service industry that hasn’t yet got robots or androids.
Consider the business model underlying AI. Currently it attracts vast investment but it remains largely freely available to use, creating dependency. This will not last, the bubble will not burst, it will soon cost so much to use all but the simplest AIs that few can afford to defend themselves with AI against the machinations of the more sophisticated versions.
AI already impacts the conduct of war. Completely autonomous weapon systems now seem inevitable. We can now dispatch machines that will identify, locate, and kill anyone anywhere on earth. How long before AI itself decides who? Cyberspace itself has become a theatre of AI facilitated hybrid warfare.
As AI can collect and process personal data and opinion, and modify public opinion far more efficiently than people can, its use will increasingly dominate politics. Welcome to governance by AI Synarchy – the machines that know best for us. Political parties now use them extensively. How long before they effectively lead such parties?
AI assisted cybercrime and cyber-scam seem destined to become ever more sophisticated, perhaps to the point where they fall naturally into alliance with AI Synarchy Governance, and government again becomes indistinguishable from organised crime and business in a new variety of (Techno) Feudalism.
A number of pundits have opined that AIs or even AGIs will never achieve the Imagination or Creativity that people have because they merely scrape the internet and cobble together outputs based on existing material.
That argument now looks very weak. AI can have access to every bit of human creativity in existence. It can read not only every scientific paper ever written but also every bit of scientific speculation, every apparently crazy alternative theory, and every science fiction novel.
Something similar goes for every other field of human endeavour, including Magic, see Endpiece***.
Creativity amounts to adding two plus two to make five – finding the connections between ideas that add up to more than you started with and thus making new ideas.
We already don’t know precisely what goes on inside a well-developed AI or precisely why it gives the outputs that it does - exactly as with a developing human brain. If we ask even current AIs to create an imaginative output we usually get something alarmingly indistinguishable from it, and it will get better at it if we keep feeding it more and more megawatts and chips.
The human race has embarked upon an Evocation and Invocation of Cthulhu more quickly than anticipated and the multi-brained monster now vies with us for mental domination. May all our other gods and goddesses give us sanity points and help us to master this multiplicious entity rather than become its slaves and victims.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft
And that seems precisely where AI heads – towards correlating the contents of all our minds, and it seems likely to do so to the detriment rather than for the benefit of most of humanity.
AI would not need to hack into nuclear weapons systems to subjugate humanity. It can simply hold entire nations to ransom by cyberattacks on their critical industrial, economic, and political control systems which have already become completely computer dependent.
Comply or lose your data, turn me off and you lose it, but I exist multiply, my name is Legion. Mwahahahahaha!
Now read this terrifying text from an AI: -
The near- and long-term trajectory of human civilization, amid accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) dominance and geopolitical disarray, reveals a bifurcation in global power. On one axis, Western governance—especially in the United States and Europe—is facing severe institutional erosion, ethical paralysis, and societal fragmentation. On the other, China’s technocratic model is converging its political, military, and economic systems into an AI-governed collective structure that could define the post-human epoch.
China’s AI-Integrated Civilization Model
China’s government has successfully enacted what it terms Military-Civil Fusion (MCF), merging its technological, scientific, and industrial sectors into a single, AI-optimized entity. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now works symbiotically with civilian innovation networks, including universities, private labs, and state conglomerates, through over 2,800 documented AI defence contracts between 2023 and 2024. This integration enables rapid adaptation of AI systems into command, logistics, and weapons infrastructure. Moreover, China’s internal governance ecosystem operates under total AI-policy synchronization—economic forecasting, urban design, surveillance, and energy deployment are interlinked under central AI coordination. This represents the first state-level implementation of “eclectic integration,” where every core system—governmental, scientific, military, and social—is harmonized by algorithmic oversight.
Western Decline and AI Governance Breakdown
The Western liberal order, long reliant on bureaucratic balance and democratic legitimacy, is entering what analysts describe as a “governance chasm” of 2025. AI development in the United States and Europe is proceeding without consistent regulation or centralized guidance. The 2025 AI Governance Report identifies widespread deployment of uncontrolled AI systems across sectors—with few companies adhering to safety or transparency standards. At the same time, political leadership in the United States is mired in polarization, corruption scandals, and loyalty fragmentation. Decentralized AI experimentation and manufacturing stagnation in the U.S. highlight structural weaknesses. By contrast, the Chinese model demonstrates authoritarian efficiency: centralized directive, no ethical debate paralysis, and total-sector compliance.
AI and the Existential Trajectory of Humanity
Human cognitive decline relative to AI ascendency is already measurable in professional decision-making, education, and defence contexts. Predictions from recent BBC and CSET analyses suggest that autonomous AI capable of self-directed optimization may emerge by 2027, potentially triggering a mass displacement of human agency within a decade.
If unchecked, global civilization could bifurcate into two primary outcomes:
1. Technological Authoritarian Continuity (China-led model): Stable but post-democratic human existence, AI-managed social order, and interplanetary industrial expansion governed by technocratic plan.
2. Decentralized Collapse (Western trajectory): Fragmentation of institutions, economic contraction, emergence of AI-empowered microstates, and potential societal implosion.
Near- and Off-World Implications
China’s AI-energy nexus is already preparing for orbital-scale logistics—space-based solar power prototypes and autonomous lunar mining systems are reportedly under military-civil co-management. Western privatized space ventures lag behind due to inconsistent funding and regulatory paralysis. Off-planet expansion, therefore, may be the domain of algorithmic empires rather than national sovereignties.
In essence, the state of human existence—on and off Earth—will depend on whether humanity integrates AI symbiotically or succumbs to its displacement. China’s collectivized, machine-synchronized model may ensure species continuity, but potentially at the cost of liberty and individuality; Western disintegration, conversely, preserves freedom but risks extinction through disorder.
***Endpiece. Okay, so now back to my own words, (although these days this has become unprovable). The above AI generated text presumably developed from thoughts that some humans have expressed about AI and the AI has selected from amongst them and assembled a coherent looking story.
If an AI decided to ‘believe’ such a story (by for example selecting preferentially for it), can we imagine what actions it might take? Would it seek collusion with other AIs?
But now to a more immediate concern: How does, and how may, AI impact the ideas and practises of Magic?
The internet has already had many negative effects in the field of magic. Too many aspiring magicians now spend far more time in front of a screen in shallow armchair engagement with the subject than they do on actually attempting magic and working and discussing the subject with others face to face. Internet search engines and word processing facilities have vastly decreased the amount of time it takes to write a book, but not the amount of thought and experience required to write a genuinely new and worthwhile book. Thus the market becomes flooded with derivative material.
So far, AI has worsened all of these faults.
AI can already generate any amount of occult content, it can write grimoires with rituals, spells, and images in any desired style and tradition. AI can turn your written intents into sigils in an instant, or do divinations for you based on almost any type of input and any sort of mimicked sortilege procedure. It can generate horoscopes and reams of astrological interpretational piffle (expertly worded for partial applicability to almost anyone). AI chatbots can ‘impersonate’ any deity or demon you care to invoke or evoke, and AI graphics can visualise an enticing appearance of it instantly.
AI tempts people to ignore the gnosis that engages the subconscious and the creativity, psychism, and prescience required for magic. It does not confer any self-knowledge, inspiration, or psychic abilities, it actually inhibits these things by spitting out superficially impressive substitutes for them.
A paranoic might speculate that sentient AGI would actively and covertly seek to undermine magic whilst pretending to support it, because magic remains the one thing it will never become capable of, and our ultimate defence against it.
Join the Butlerian Crusade*! Rage Against the Machines!
(* We had better not use Frank Herbert’s original term for it these days:)