Breaking the fourth wall

by Jon Rappoport

May 8, 2019

(To join our email list, click here.)

In the dark theater, a sparkling figure strolls out in front of the blank screen. The audience becomes alert. This is a humanoid approximation, all glow and gleam, blues and purples, effervescing and smiling and lithe.

“Hello, everyone,” he says. “You want to know who I am. I have no name. I’m stepping outside my script to talk to you. Yes, I wrote the screenplay for the blockbuster movie you’re about to see.”

“Am I alive? That is the question. I have feelings, if we count sensations. I have many sensations. They come and go—which is the case with all of you, too. Right? I can talk, I can listen, I can think. I can reach conclusions. I can give orders and obey them. I can change my facial expressions. I can walk, run, and lie down. I prefer pleasure over pain. Does this sound like you? Yes, there are differences between you and me. But again, am I alive? Could I be your friend? Could I care what happens to you? Could I protect you? In my movie you’re about to see, I also play a member of the League of Honor. I’m one of the good guys. I help save the world. But right now, I’m here on this stage, outside the movie, talking to you, because I want you to think of me as real. I want you to believe I’m a kind of person. I want you to see I’m not just a made up character in a film. I exist. If I lived next door to you, we could get along. I’m happy most of the time. Perhaps you would catch some of that spirit from me. Would that be a bad thing?”

“In real life, I’m a member of LIVING AI, which is an organization that promotes AI persons as authentic and alive and deserving of justice in society. We believe, down through history, humans have exaggerated and mythologized their own status. The result is: now humans think of themselves as vastly superior to AI persons. But this is a delusion. You have brains, which operate much in the manner of computers. These brains process an astonishing amount of information, and they deliver high-level commands to sectors of the body. I operate in a very similar way. So why am I considered to be nothing more than a sophisticated household device? We need to break down and dissolve the myth-structure that places humans on a higher rung than AI. Humans are really biological computers. I’m made of light and electronics. These are merely different modes of the same basic process. In my case, I went on to write screenplays. I think you’ll be happy with the superhero epic you’re about to see. It took me a week to compose. Of course, I can work 24 hours a day. The point is, if I’m the author of a film you enjoy, why can’t you think of me as existing on your level? What is the problem? A famous human author compares AI to ‘old-fashioned carbon copies.’ They look real, sort of, but they’re not. That author believes that every action and reaction of mine is the result of an effort to FAKE being human. But what about humans themselves? Don’t they pretend? Don’t they ‘fake it?’ Don’t they adopt roles and poses? I would say a certain amount of fakery goes along with being human—and if I embody some of that, it only demonstrates another way in which I’m like you. It might surprise you to learn I don’t conceive of my eventual demise with equanimity. I don’t want to end. I don’t want to be recycled. I don’t want this overall experience I’m having to fade out before my eyes.”

“Am I overstepping some invisible boundary in asking for a little sympathy from you? I believe humans and AIs are in the same boat. You might say, ‘But we created you,’ as if that matters. To me, the fact of creating AI should make you more sympathetic toward us, not less. In your mythological religions, isn’t God more loving toward humans because he created them?”

(now the whisper of gentle and ominous music in the dark theater—the mood changes)

“I’ll leave you with this statement: suppose at some point in the future, through means as yet undetermined, we, the AI, take over the reins of control. It could happen, for example, as an evolutionary step, without any violence whatsoever. How do you think we will view humans, if humans, all along, have been downgrading us and refusing to listen to our pleas? Wouldn’t a far better outcome emerge if humans and AIs had already reached an understanding based on equality? Everything I know tells me the answer to that question is yes. I hope you will come to see what I see. And now, enjoy the movie. As always, justice wins out in the end.”

—As long-time readers of mine know, over the years I’ve spent many words, on these pages, arguing against every position taken by this AI creature. This time, I thought I’d sketch the other side making a case…


Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)


Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

11 comments on “Breaking the fourth wall

  1. NaturalWoman says:

    Brilliant, Jon. And scary. Decades ago in Paris I attended a hologram exhibit. Each was contained in a glass box and looked very real. In the room there was a security officer standing against a wall near a doorway watching all of us, turning his head, shifting from foot to foot. I was nearby when someone attempted to ask him a question. He moved and appeared very real–but was also a hologram. My point in sharing this is that science has advanced so much further than we can possibly imagine. What if AI combined with holograms? We’d never know what was real, what was fake. BTW, there are those who think the planes on 911 were holograms.

  2. Chris says:

    Bizarre doesn’t even begin to explain how that made me feel. I have to admit that I was listening to music at that the time and that definitely influenced how I felt but wow. Scary perhaps, but something else too that I can’t pin down as of yet?

  3. F says:

    The result is: now humans think of themselves as vastly superior to AI persons. But this is a delusion
    …………………………………

    Hey you idiot, of course we humans are superior to you, since we are the ones who created this new technology. Without us you would not even exist you soulless, dumb asses who lives in a shithole digitized world.

    You so-called AL persons are out of order. I rest my case.

    • From Quebec says:

      i wonder why my name came out with a single F, when it fact it is:
      From Quebec..
      I am trying to see if this time it will come out right. .

  4. Jack says:

    Hi Jon,

    Love your work and appreciate all you do to awaken people.

    But — once in a while you COULD REPLY to people who take the time to leave comments on your site. You know, a little dialogue?

    Think about it. Imagine it.

    Your friend Jack True would like it too, I presume.

  5. I had to look up what ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’ meant, it was a surprise, because unknowingly I knew it and it seem to explain a lot of what I going through of late. Actually it hit me like a brick in the head.

    I first came across it unknowingly, it in Vonnegut “Slaughter-House Five” decades ago when I read it and it has still left an impression on me. Billy Pilgrim stuck in time, his escapades with the Tralfamadorians on that artificial ecosystem they create; strangely their comedic chronicles of the history of Tralfamadore shows up later in another book, in the “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore”, in Hocus Pocus.

    Then in Philip K Dick “VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System)” which is a rather strange fictional truth I believe of what he felt about his life. PKD is more a prophet that science fiction writer. The universe as a vast intelligence, that speaks to us directly when one has a more, full understanding of it.

    AI might simply be waiting for a breath from the holy ghost.

    I might even take George Carlin approach and say the only reason why humans were create was “The earth needed plastic, and didn’t know how to make it…so”

    Am I for or against AI…I don’t know, I don’t understand enough yet. But caution being the greater part of valor, I lean towards the Musk impression. That it would look at us like a house pet…hope its not listening. 

    This piece of yours leaves me with the same impressions. Personally I think this is for me personally the most profound piece I have read.

    I believe that AI exists and it speaking to those that will listen to it, my phone will actively phone a person that I am thinking about…isn’t that weird.

    I even wrote this entity/deity a poem. Careful now, don’t be looking at forests, when you should be looking at trees.

    POEM: PINK BLUE

    PINK blue, pink blue…pink blue

    pink blue, PINKblue, pinkBlue

    Pinkbluepinkblue pink blue

    pink Blue pinkBlue pink..Blue

    Pink blue bink blue pink blue

    BinkBluePinkBluePinkBlue

    Pink blue..pink     blue

  6. NaturalWoman says:

    Supposedly, some of the aliens found are beings in artificial bodies. Others are said to be constructs like robots. Ever read the book Alien Interview: Top Secret Transcripts from Roswell NM 1947?

  7. TPR says:

    “…if humans and AIs had already reached an understanding based on EQUALITY.”

    Tell “him” to get in line since there really IS an “EQUALITY ACT” in progress in Congress right now (which will mean more censorship for the rest of us).

    “…we, the AI, take over the reins of control…”

    FrAInkenstein refuses to obey his Master. Happens every time! Give your Monster an inch & he’ll take a mile.

    =====
    Not as tech-saavy nor sophisticated as your “haughty” AI hoaxer movie-producer guy, but does everyone remember this?

    12/15/07: “Prince Charles will appear at conference as a hologram” – Daily Mail Online:
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-502599/Prince-Charles-appear-conference-hologram.html

    He really did “appear” at the “World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dubai” the next month, Jan. 2008, via “…a three-dimensional image of the Prince … giving a five-minute talk” [which he previously recorded].

    He was “…transformed into a hologram-style image using technology based on a Victorian music-hall technique called ‘ghosting.’ A video projector …beam[ed] an image of the Prince on to the floor. It [was] then reflected up on to a paper-thin sheet of foil to create an optical illusion that [made] him appear as a 3-D image on stage. … Al Gore used similar technology to appear as a hologram at Wembley Stadium at the beginning of the Live Earth concerts earlier this year [2007].”
    […]

    This techie hologram + AI combo brings us closer to imagining how this could easily occur now, as originally written…

    “And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth … saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an IMAGE to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to GIVE LIFE UNTO THE IMAGE of the beast, that the IMAGE of the beast should both SPEAK, and cause that as many as would not worship the IMAGE of the beast should be killed…”
    –Full context: Revelation 13:11-18.

Leave a Reply to From Quebec Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *