The main impetus behind A.I. is driven by secular visions that seek to transform humans into gods and create utopias through technology. Many negative scenarios involving AI have played out in popular science fiction movies. They are in fact exactly that…fiction. We’re nowhere near these negative scenarios yet in the reasoned and rational opinion of the top thinkers in this area. But there’s enough going on in artificial intelligence that works at the moment to give us huge ethical concern.
There are two main strands in artificial intelligence. There’s narrow AI, which is very successful in certain areas though raising deep problems in others. This is simply a powerful computer working on huge databases, and it has a programmed algorithm which looks for particular patterns. Today the main one has to do with facial recognition. You’ve got a huge database of millions of photographs of faces labeled with names and all kinds of information due to social media and phone apps. You can immediately see that a police force would find that useful in checking for terrorists and criminals. But it can be used for suppressing people and manipulating and controlling them. In China today, there’s every evidence of extreme surveillance techniques being used to subdue, incarcerate or exterminate the Uyghur minority. That has raised ethical questions all around the world.
This is not the 1984 Big Brother. We’re already there. That’s where the second strand of A.I. comes in: Artificial general intelligence is where we develop a super intelligence that’s controlling the world. That’s sci-fi stuff. It doesn’t exist and likely will not. Anyone that tells you different is sensationalizing it for profit or is an uninformed idiot. Like Elon Musk and Rapture/Tribulation oriented Dispensationalist Christians of Trinity Broadcasting Network. They're likely both doing it for profit. They're certainly not new age prophets.
If you start to play about with humans as they are and introduce A.I. and genetic engineering, what happens is you create an artifact—that is, something you have made that is not greater than human, but subhuman. Less than God originally intended. In other words, you abolish human beings in a sense (See: Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis). The powers that be are trying to convince you that in AI and Genetic Engineering, mankind has or will make something that you think is more than human. Truth is, it’s actually less than human because we, who are not God, have contributed to its creation. We are made in the image of God. That gives us dignity and value. Anything we create cannot and will not overturn that. It’s been tried and it always fails (Tower of Babylon, Second Temple, etc.).
The brain is physical, the ‘mind’ is not. We have lived to see the information age where we realize that information, which is a non-corporeal entity, has become fundamental to physics and our understanding of the universe. That matches exactly with Scripture, which tells us in the beginning was the Word. Not in the beginning was the universe. The universe is derivative. All things came to 'be' through the Word. So, God the Word is primary. The universe is derivative, whereas atheism believes the exact opposite, that the universe is primary and our mind is derivative. If you deny God as creator, you don’t get rid of the idea of creation because you’ve got to explain life, and in particular human life and consciousness. So, you often end up endowing material elementary particles with creative powers—which there’s no evidence that they have—so that the material universe has got to, in some sense, create life and create itself, which is philosophical nonsense.
I believe in the end there can ultimately be two major outcomes to how people deal with A.I. They can do it in fear and ignorance or they can forge ahead educated and learn to harness this tool for good. I believe the fear of AI is unfounded, but due to that fear it's making people look to their Bible more to try and find answers to the newest unknown. If they are clever enough they will see that this is just another false religion in a long line of them. The Bible tells us how to deal with that. That is why this scenario can become infinitely better. Those that look to Scripture are infinitely better off.
Sadly, many will look for answers in non-biblical sources and will be led by their fear like sheep to philosophical, intellectual or literal slaughter. They will be infinitely worse off. Consulting non-biblical sources or even the A.I. itself (which people unwittingly do when they Google search for answers) is no different than consulting oracles or summoning spirits. A form of techno-paganism.
A person that needs to find the answer to this needs to tread lightly and discern greatly. If they Google an answer by opening an online Bible, this is kind of an end-around but is still done with a spiritually good motive and the arrive a righteous answer. On other side, if they are looking for answers about AI from an AI…it is like asking the wolf guarding the henhouse: “Who killed the hens?”
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