AI Isn't The Future. It's Medieval Alchemy.

AI has been the hot topic for the past few years, but it seems like nobody's noticed that it's actually just medieval alchemy. Duh. We're all so busy scrambling and trying to figure out how AI is going to change everything when all we need to do is look a thousand years into the past to figure it all out.

You're of course already familiar with what artificial intelligence is. So, your first question here is probably, what's alchemy? Well, to the medieval mind, alchemy was this weird specialized branch of natural philosophy that thought it could uncover all the deepest secrets of nature. Alchemists basically wanted to create an agent of perfection, something that could turn lead into gold and cure human illnesses. Coincidentally, just like Sam Alman, they tried to constantly sell everyone on the future implications of their experiments instead of what was actually doable in the present moment.

You might use AI all the time. I know the corporate world and American universities pretty much run on chat GBT at this point, but could you actually explain to me in an indepth way how these large language models work? And before you copy paste some long Wikipedia answer into the comment section, the answer is no, because even the engineers who built them don't fully understand how they work. This is called the blackbox problem. You see, these engineers designed the architectures and training processes for something like chat GBT. But if you were to ask them, they don't actually fully understand the internal logic of how these models arrive at specific outputs. Wouldn't you believe it? Flying blind like this is actually an incredibly medieval concept.

Medieval Europe was a truly god-fearing place in a way that not even the most religious among us could imagine today. Everything was completely steeped in Christianity, including alchemy. And the alchemists saw themselves as co-creators with God who could change the very essence of matter from one thing to another. One of their main pursuits was to discover the philosopher stone. Shout out all my potter heads, which was a concept that dates all the way back to the Greek mystic Zimos of Paniplo in the 4th century. Basically, the alchemist figured they could create this legendary substance. Not only would it turn lead into gold, it would also heal all ailments and give human beings immortality.

Like I said, medieval Europe was extremely Christian. And if you've ever read the Bible, you'll notice that a lot of the patriarchs in the Old Testament apparently lived incredibly long lives. We're talking 8 or 900 years. So, if you're a medieval alchemist reading this, it's not crazy to think that maybe those biblical patriarchs had access to some secret that you need to discover. Elias Ashol was a 17th century alchemist, which is a little outside the boundaries of the Middle Ages, but he was drawing on medieval knowledge when he claimed that the history of the philosopher stone went all the way back to Adam, who learned about the stone directly from God. This information was then passed down through Moses and Jacob and all the other main characters in the Old Testament, but it had been lost somewhere in the distant past.

Also, alchemy wasn't just a Western European pursuit either, and it was actually the Byzantines in the east along with Arab scientists who initially picked up where the Greeks left off. I'm going to get a little technical here for a second, but just stay with me because I promise this all links back to AI. There was this 8th century Muslim alchemist named Jabir Iban Hayan, and he was big on the idea that every metal was a combination of fire, earth, water, and air. So if you can imagine that all metals have some combination of these four basic properties, you should theoretically be able to transmute one metal into another by rearranging these properties. That's how you would be able to turn lead into gold. The change could only happen from some outside substance which was called zerion in Greek and alixier in Arabic which was latinized into the word elixir. This elixir, Jabir figured, was some sort of powder and you could somehow make it from the philosopher stone. In the same way, a modern neural network is just a bunch of dead math until you apply the elixir of training data and optimized weights. That is what transmutes the code into something that feels alive. The responses you get from your AI agent.

Now, I want to give credit to our medieval ancestors here because there were plenty of thinkers throughout the Middle Ages who called bull on all of this. There was the legendary Persian philosopher Avisa who was also an incredibly influential physician and he basically tore this whole alchemy theory down saying those of the chemical craft know well that no change can be affected in the different species of substances though they can produce the appearance of such change. To put it simply, he's saying it's easy to drum up hype and sell people on the idea of this magic process, but those who had actually worked with this stuff knew that it was impossible.

That brings us to our current AI problem. Now, the title of this video says that AI isn't the future, but I'd like to clarify that I'm not some lite and I'm not actually against AI technology generally. It does seem to have some beneficial use cases, especially in the medical field. And I think it is something that's going to be part of our existence for the foreseeable future. What I am saying is that history teaches us that we should be wary of any miraculous thing that's going to fix all of our problems in one fell swoop. All you need to do is look at medieval alchemy, which proves that this pursuit of perfection is part of the human psyche, and it's never quite worked out the way it was supposed to.

There's this insane book that came out recently called On the Future of Species, and it's all about how AI is literally primed to create synthetic life. Is it ethical? Who cares? We can finally perfect the human genome and create a race of super soldiers. But before we get to that, I mentioned earlier the black box, the place where complexity hides the truth. To be totally honest, I've been dealing with a version of that in my own personal finances. I'm the type of person who signs up for free trials to test out new editing tools or research archives and then completely forgets to cancel them. And that's why I'm so excited to tell you about today's sponsor, Rocket Money. As someone who gets easily overwhelmed by multiple accounts, their singular view feature has been a lifesaver. I securely linked my checking, savings, and even my business accounts. And now I have a single dashboard to monitor my overall financial health without logging into four different portals. But the best part for me is the subscription management. Rocket Money automatically tracks every recurring charge I have and puts them in one consolidated list. It's helped me stay on top of those forgotten trials I mentioned earlier, and it even helps me cancel them with just a few taps. Go to rocketmoney.com/mindset to get started for free. You can also scan the QR code here on the screen or click the link in my description. Unlock even more features when you sign up for premium. Start transmuting your spending into savings at rocketmoney.com/mindset.

So, you know how I said before that alchemists saw themselves as co-creators with God? Well, they believe that everything is made of a base prima materia that can be broken down and reorganized. In his new book on the future of species, the genomic entrepreneur Adrien Wolfson says that with AI, we're making this alchemist dream an actual reality. For my money, the term genomic entrepreneur sounds incredibly dystopian, but I guess that's beside the point. Wolson writes, and I quote, "The impulse to blend the anatomical traits of other species with those of humans appears to be hardwired into our imagination." And he's totally right. In the Bible, the prophet Ezekiel sees four beasts emerge from a burning cloud. Each has wings and four faces. That of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. There was also the creature Barack, a fusion between a mule and a donkey with wings and a human face that was said to have carried Muhammad on his journeys. Wolson claims that with the new neural network technology of Alphafold 2, we can take the structures of complex proteins and actually predict them. That means we would be able to create new ones. And if we can create new proteins, that would suggest that we can create new forms of life. One more quote from Wolson here. He says, "Biology now stands at the threshold of transitioning from a largely descriptive science into a generative one." Dude, this is literally just medieval alchemy. We've tried all of this before.

There was this alchemist named Paraselus who was working at the tail end of the Middle Ages into what we would now call the Renaissance. He had this crazy idea that life didn't actually require a womb and with the right ingredients and a controlled environment you could theoretically create a human or maybe even something better than a human. In his seinal work deurram paracela says that human semen is the primary seed which makes sense. According to his theory if you sealed it up in a cucurbit which was a glass vessel and buried it in horse dung for 40 days something miraculous would happen. Of course, the warm dung would provide a steady, gentle heat that mimicked the warmth of a womb. It makes total sense. After 40 days, a transparent human-like form would start to emerge. It would then have to be fed on human blood for 40 weeks to reach maturity. The goal for the alchemists wasn't just curiosity or trying different things in some early form of the modern scientific method. They wanted sovereignty over nature. For our AI overlords, sovereignty over information apparently isn't enough. They want the power to create and edit human life.

Quickly back to Paracelis for a second. Don't you wonder what kind of personality would come up with an idea like this? Well, he was known for outbursts of swearing. He loved to throw temper tantrums and insult everyone around him. One of his close companions wrote of him, "The two years I passed in his company, he spent in drinking and gluttony day and night. He could not be found sober an hour or two together." I mean, that is kind of relatable, but still. This was the man who was trying to unlock the secrets of the universe and attain ultimate power. Obviously, Paraselus never achieved his goal of creating human life, but he was a major pioneer in the field of what we now know as toxicology. And he was clearly a tortured genius. I guess in some ways you could say he shot for the moon. He missed, but he landed in the stars.

Let's come back to the present day and take a look at what the AI guys are saying. Sam Alman claimed in an interview that AGI or artificial general intelligence will be the most significant technological development in human history. According to Altman, it has the potential to solve every problem we face. That sure does sound a lot like what the Islamic alchemist Jabir Iban Hayam said about the philosopher stone. He claimed it could bring perfect health and rejuvenation to a decayed world. So Altman is saying here that he views AGI as a singular universal fix for the human condition. But I think we all know that reality is always more complicated than that. Deis Hassabis, the co-founder of Deep Mind, has said similar things. And his stated two-step mission is to solve intelligence and then use that to solve everything else. Why does that sound so familiar, too? Oh, that's right. Because the 13th century English philosopher and alchemist Roger Bacon said the same thing 800 years ago. He was seeking something called cientia integralis, a universal science that linked the material world to the soul. Just like Roger, Demisabis is essentially looking for the single source code of reality, the key to open up every lock.

Let's go back to Altman for a second because I think for most of us, he's the face of this whole AI movement. He repeats this one phrase all the time, which is that AGI will be a breaking point in history. As I was researching this video, that kept standing out to me. Breaking point. Breaking point. breaking point. I then of course realized that Altman was just repeating a medieval concept. Have you ever heard of the three Hermes, also known as the Hermes Trisma? No. All right, let me fill you in. Medieval Latin culture, especially starting in the 12th century, adopted a specific legend to explain how highlevel knowledge survived the major disasters of history. So, if the entire world was flooded during the Noah's Arc story in the Bible, how did humans rebuild? To answer this burning question, medieval thinkers came up with a sacred genealogy of three main characters who were each appointed by God to basically protect and restore the secrets of nature. The first was Enoch who was there before the great flood. He was carried off to heaven and he was the first to get this divine wisdom. Then there was of course Noah who was saved by God during the flood. He was thought of in the medieval mind as a kind of bridge figure. So he's carrying the seeds of knowledge through all of the destruction. Then we come to Mercurious in post flood Egypt and he's the greatest of them all. He's a king and a philosopher and a prophet who formerly creates the liberal and mechanical arts which of course includes alchemy. So to sum it all up in the medieval view, the great flood of the Noah's arc story was this hugeformational reset that left humanity in a darkened state that they had to be recovered from. Just like Mercurius is the final figure who comes to restore knowledge after this global disaster, these guys like Sam Alman seem to think of themselves and AGI generally as this tool that's going to restore human potential after this flood of chaotic data that's been released on us and has been beating us over the head since the advent of the internet. This is the missing piece, the philosopher stone that we need to ascend to the next level of humanity.

We can really go down the rabbit hole here. And the modern medievalist Michela Pereira talks a lot about how alchemists really made sure to distinguish themselves from both just being theory guys or just being craftsmen who got their hands dirty. They considered themselves this unique class of philosophers who thought with their hands. The most radical idea that the alchemists had, of course, was that you could be God. You could break a substance and reduce it to its formless state before giving it its ultimate perfect form. This is literally exactly how large language models are built. They take the base matter of human culture and knowledge, so basically entire internet, break it down into this mathematical soup, and then reform it into a perfected AGI that can speak every language and solve every problem.

Even before the rise of AI in the 2020s, it's been obvious for a long time that tech bros like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Teal actually have a weirdly negative view of humanity, which is horrifying because they hold so much influence over us and we're humanity. If you listen to the new AI pioneers like Alexander Wang, who was on Theo Vaughn show about a year ago, their whole attitude is basically that humans are corruptible and imperfect. It's really hard to increase shareholder value when you need to eat and poop and sleep. But with AI, now there's an opportunity. AI is infinitely scalable and it doesn't need to sleep or poop. So now, of course, this is turning into a crazy power grab and a massive AI bubble where these companies are trying to replace flawed human labor and decision-making with the perfection of artificial intelligence. I mentioned tech bros, and they really do have a lot in common with medieval alchemists. Plus, I think it's important that we understand the personalities of the puppet masters who pull the strings of our digital world.

Before we do that, super quick. I've got a Patreon link in the description below if you want to be part of the Medieval Mindset book club, get access to the podcast and video scripts and the Medieval Mindset reading list and special content that doesn't get posted on my main channel, as well as a special shout out at the end of every single one of my videos. Go sign up today. Anyway, I've talked a lot about Sam Alman, but what about Jensen Hang, the Nvidia guy? Boy, he sure does remind me of Elaine Deil, the 12th century French polymath. A polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning across different fields. And polymath is the medieval mindset word of the week. So try to weave that into some conversations over the next few days. Ela Deo was another medieval genius and he wrote this masterpiece called the anti-Cladianis. It's a poem and in the poem, nature looks at the world and sees that it's corrupted by vice. She decides that the only way to save humanity is to create a new kind of man who is physically, intellectually, and morally perfect. Maybe you think you know where this is going because you read Frankenstein. But I assure you, you're wrong. Just like you or I would do, nature gathers the seven liberal arts, grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy to build a chariot that can travel to the heavens. Then along comes prudence. Now, it's worth mentioning that like most medieval writing, this is an allegorical poem and these sort of intangible ideas like nature and prudence are depicted as living beings. Anyway, Prudence takes the chariot and drives it all through the celestial spheres. Along the way, she encounters the limits of human reason and has to be helped by faith and theology to finally reach the throne of God. But wait, we in the present day have reached the limits of human reason. But instead of using faith and theology to ascend to divinity, we're using algorithmic models that nobody really understands. Interesting. In the end of Deil's poem, God grants a soul to the new man, and nature crafts a body for it. It all wraps up in this big boss fight where the new man and the virtues fight against and defeat the vices, which are greed and luxury and pride and so on and so forth. Now, this poem isn't about alchemy in the turning lead into gold sense, but it's actually super alchemical in its philosophy. Alchemists obviously wanted to purge metal to find the gold within. And in the poem, nature purges the elements to create the body of the new man. It all ties into this idea that as humans, we carry an inherent imperfection within us. But there's something out there, something that we have the power to discover that would somehow do away with that imperfection and allow us to step into a new ascended life.

At this point, I'm sure you're probably wondering what literally any of this could have to do with Jensen Huang. Well, in the poem, De Leo focuses really specifically on the physical requirements and ingredients that would be needed to create this new man. He's locked in on the material structure of perfection. That's Huang in a nutshell. When you look at all of the top AI guys, he's the one who's the architect of the material. There's those like Altman who give these prophecies about how AI is going to save the world and cure cancer, blah blah blah. Huang isn't as concerned with that. He's concerned about the physical hardware. Let me frame this in alchemist's term first so we know what we're talking about. For medieval alchemists, the athanor, a word derived from the Arabic alanor, which means oven or furnace, was the most important piece of equipment you could have. It was designed to maintain a steady, unfluctuating temperature for weeks or even months without the alchemist having to stay awake to tend the fire. You see, when these guys were trying to turn lead into gold, they weren't just blasting everything with fire. They actually believed in this really specific progression of temperature that was supposed to mirror the growth of a child. Exactly what Paraselis was trying to do with the horse tongue. Heat grade one was a gentle warmth called the heat of a human. Then there was heat grade two, the heat of a setting hen, which was a little hotter to encourage the quickening of matter. Next, they would crank things a bit higher to grade three, the heat of calcination, which was a stronger fire to strip away impurities. Finally, they would max out at heat grade four, which was the melting fire. This was the most intense heat that was used for the final transmutation into gold. Jensen Hong and his boys at NVIDIA are really concerned with heat, too. Because if you want to turn AI technology into something usable and profitable, the physical conditions have to be just right. The data centers that Hang supplies are all about thermal management. The chips are liquid cooled because the heat to compute is so intense that it could actually destroy the hardware that generates it. This is where all the controversy about AI's water usage comes in. I'm sure you've seen this on social media. These data centers are a huge drain on the local energy grids of the areas they occupy because they need an uninterrupted power supply to keep the hardware running 24/7. So the alchemist belief that intensity plus time equals transformation is actually becoming a reality. If you throw enough energy at a large enough data set for a long enough time, intelligence starts to emerge from the noise. That's the gold being transformed from the lead of all of ourformational randomness on the internet.

So, let's land the plane here. I think we're all a little scared of AI, and rightfully so. It's been forced into literally everything against our will, and it feels like nobody truly understands what it's capable of. But it's worth mentioning that people in the Middle Ages were terrified of alchemy, too. They said it was witchcraft, and clergymen were constantly calling out for being satanic. These alchemists claim they could cure all diseases and create immortal beings and turn lead into gold, but they never actually achieved any of the insane stuff they said they would. However, all of their experimentation laid the groundwork for the modern fields of chemistry and biology and medical science. Maybe AI won't cure cancer or bring about world peace, but it might have some other downstream effects that could actually be pretty helpful in the long run. For now, you should definitely subscribe to your favorite YouTube alchemist if you haven't already, which is me, because I'm here turning these ridiculous historical comparisons into pure gold. And I want to know, what do you think? Are we right to be afraid of AI, or should we welcome our new overlords with open arms? Let me know in the comments. As always, I'm John. This has been Medieval Mindset. And remember, the past isn't gone, it's simply waiting to be rediscovered.