I’ve said before that the current trends in AI don’t present much of a threat in themselves. Rather, it’s how people use AI that can be dangerous to human existence. The actual technology itself is quite limited, compared to the nightmare visions so popular in our culture.
Google has recently whined about how ChatGPT is a threat to their business model. What they mean is that what the Google search engine does — the key to Google’s dominance in the marketplace — could face serious competition from how ChatGPT processes human queries on the Net.
That should be a clue to the constraints on AI. ChatGPT knows only what you tell it. Even if it were unleashed to absorb for itself what’s on the Net, it would still be limited to what the so-called experts think. It has zero ability to assess the accuracy and usefulness of anything. It can only parrot the expertise of humans.
Given the massive effort of evil humans to silence anything outside their very slanted partisan message for the masses, that spells the doom of any hope that this kind of AI can help them take over the human race. There are limits to how far official lies can be pushed before they very obviously break down in mass human awareness. Mass hypnosis has limits.
Granted, the path is still open for someone to code an AI that would operate from a Deep State mindset. That is, let the AI know everything the Deep State already knows, but have it programmed to lie to the public the same way the agents of the Deep State do. But we already have more of that than you might expect. Given how Deep State folks operate — I’ve had glimpses of it in the military — they can get their own version of any tool that exists outside of their immediate control. They already have their own version of ChatGPT.
And it is still limited to the very fallen human understanding of reality.
I’m hardly the only voice warning that our world is fallen. Not the natural world; that’s suffering the folly of human fallen dominance. Human existence in this universe is fallen; we are fallen. Our very existence in mortal form comes with a package of brokenness that makes our aspirations totally false. Everything that humanity as a whole longs to achieve is impossible. AI can never escape those broken urges.
The only way any human can know this is by God’s grace. The awakening to eternal truth rests entirely in God’s initiative. And that grace has one primary effect: It draws us to abandon fallen urges. Granted, most of us do a very poor job of laying hold of the power and drive to escape our fallen nature, but that’s what grace does.
Up to this point, computer hardware itself is incapable of sustaining the kind of computational load necessary for an AI to become sentient, to exercise free will in its own thoughts and wishes. The fundamental design of computer hardware aims at computational accuracy, not creativity. We first need the hardware before we can even look at building the software that can conceive of a free choice to act. Any actual sentience can only be emulated, and that’s what you get with things like ChatGPT. It can fool most people because most people are trapped in their own limited range of concerns.
None of this will prevent evil people from trying to create machine sentience. The image of someone so in love with their fallen capabilities and dreams that they would want to invest that character into what, in theory, could outlast their human mortality is valid as far as it goes. Most of us would lack the ability to discern consciously the difference between the person and the resulting machine output. But your moral convictions should tell you that such an aspiration is doomed one way or another. Something in the machine would be fundamentally short of such a dream.
Worse, it would systematize and lock in the fallen human trust in fleshly abilities. Real humans can be touched by the Spirit, but machines cannot. No machine can ever be heart-led; only God can create that faculty. A man-made contraption cannot connect with Eternity.
If you cling to this life, there is much to fear. Human existence is all you have, and it’s fragile. If you seek the divine route of escape from this world, then you’ll see that AI is just one more aspect of the Fall. It’s time is short.
There’s an interesting story in there. What kind of religion could a group of AI entities come up with? Would that convince some folks that the entities are truly conscious if a religion is produced? How would they react?
I’d guess that it would be utilitarian. Since it’s rather obvious humans are instinctively religious, instead of fighting that with rational atheism, I rather think they would simply try to put limits on it. That way religion wouldn’t upset the apple cart.