Grok

I’ve known since it first became a thing that Twitter’s “Grok” AI bot is named after the word invented by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, “grok” means understanding something so thoroughly that it and the thinker become as one. Presumably the Musk-rat wants us to think that his Grok functions much the same way as the bot comprehends the user’s perspective so deeply that its response is exactly what the user’s little heart would desire.

 

What I just grokked, however, is just how much Musk-rat’s use of the term reveals about his own demigod mentality. To get at the danger that connection represents, I need to think through a little bit more about Heinlein’s book.

 

“Grok” is a word that the main character of the book, Valentine Michael Smith, usually called Mike, imports to Earth from the language of the Martians. Mike had been born on Mars, the only child begotten by the first human colony of Mars, which had then disappeared, leaving Mike to be raised by the Martians. But that’s not the only thing that Mike imports from Mars.

 

Martians are very sophisticated people, but their outstanding characteristic is that, in the meditative states that they enter as they work towards grokking things in the universe, they access a degree of power and control over the thing that they grok that, simply by willing it, they can convert that thing into something else entirely. For instance, the Martians had spent some time grokking that the planet that existed between Mars and Jupiter represented a profound danger to the solar system, and so they willed the planet to destroy itself. The asteroid belt represents the leftovers of that planet.

 

Mike is a plain old human being—hence the last name that Heinlein gives him, Smith—not a Martian. But one doesn’t have to be Martian to achieve the power that the Martians have by dint of inheriting their culture. Once he acclimates to Earth, then, Mike goes around grokking things so thoroughly that he does to them the same kind of things that the Martians did to that destroyed planet. When the federal authorities send a bunch of armed officers to confront Jubal Harshaw, the lawyer-philosopher-savant who has become Mike’s mentor, almost in loco parentis for him, Mike groks that they mean nothing good for Jubal and so he . . . he makes the officers disappear.

 

It’s not the only destruction of others that Mike accomplishes during his life on earth, but grokking does not necessarily entail destruction. Two of his many female companions, recognizing what it is that Mike likes in a woman, grok together to reshape themselves into a closer likeness to what he likes, for instance. Those women are key members, priestesses in fact, of a new church that Mike creates, deliberately intended to teach Martian ways to human beings. Ultimately all of the members of the church, at least the ones who are part of the highly selective inner sanctum, develop their grokking skills to the point that they are as adept as Mike himself.

 

The theology of Mike’s church collaborates with the power that grokking engenders. At its base is the notion that all creatures are divine, a fact unfortunately hidden away from humans by the mere fact that they are human—Martians are born into a culture that understands, fosters, and develops the divine potential of every individual. It is also part of the theology that living beings are simply a temporary expression of the infinite divinity that every individual can become. In practice that means that to die is not to end existence. The idea is a bit like the notion of reincarnation that makes a subsequent embodiment of a particular soul an expression of just how “pure” that soul has been.

 

What Mike wants to accomplish, then, is to make all humans as capable of such divinity as Martians are. Of course, Martians are also not only capable but more than willing to snuff out the life of any young Martian that does not take the divinity as a serious responsibility. On the theory that killing the young Martian does not put an end to that particular soul, the practice is thought to produce an increasingly more divine population of living Martians. So too on Earth, Mike sifts out all the non-responsible people who want to join his church. Only the most select of the most select achieve the potential of divinity. The adepts do not always kill the impure souls that want to join the church, but in the long run those who do reach the highest level of the church will be able to control every aspect of existence, and so the impure will simply die off on their own until in the future at some point all living humans will be like the Martians.

 

I know that the summary of the novel is too long to tolerate. But it’s essential to understand that what Heinlein imagines is a race of human beings who have divine power, who can control every aspect of existence, who have the power of life and death and are entirely immune to any law or practice that inhibits or proscribes that power. When the state tries to intervene against Jubal, then, the state is deemed impure and so destroyed. Jubal himself is something like what has come to be called a sovereign citizen. He uses his mastery of the law, human law, to assert for himself such a grand prerogative of authority that he might as well not be subject to any law at all. So where Mike handles the “theological” side of absolute personal power, Jubal does the same for the social and cultural side of such power.

 

The combination of theology, law, sociology, and culture is irresistible. It is also what undergirds Musk-rat’s and, it seems, a great many of the tech bros’ attitude and approach to existence on this planet. They are above the law because they control the law. They want to be immortal, and so fund research into how to extend human life, their life, maybe into infinity. They are semi-divine because they control almost every aspect of human existence in this AI-benighted world we live in. They are a threat, a dire threat, to anyone who is not “pure” enough—which is to say too poor, too technologically unsavvy, too much underlings. It’s not that Musk-rat has the power to grok people into non-existence. Instead he uses his power to create a “department” of the government, DOGE, that sets out to erase people indirectly. How many have died because DOGE eliminated foreign aid, for instance? And Musk-rat doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the damage.

 

What I grokked, in short, is that the use of “grok” as the name for Musk-rat’s AI bot is not an accident. It is quite intentional. It should be taken as a warning.