FEBRUARY 9, 2019
A. I. AND THE TOWER OF BABEL
God, the earth and humanity belong together. Draw a triangle. Place God at the top; on the base corners position the earth and humanity: draw lines to a fro from God to Earth, from Earth of Humanity, and from Humanity to God. This indicates that earth and humanity depend on God and also that earth and humanity are interdependent. When there is perfect harmony then Shalom is all around. When the earth suffers, as it does now, then the other entities, God and Humanity suffer too.
The USA and the business world in general give the wrong picture. Last week at a press conference Sarah Sanders, spokeswoman for Donald Trump, said that it is up to God to heal the damage done to the earth: we don’t have to repair it: that God’s business.
In other words we can exploit the earth with abandon. That shows that the USA – and its boss and what is wrongly labeled Evangelical Christianity – sees no need to preserve and engage in Environmental Protection, something clearly evident in the current policies.
Implied in that mindset is unlimited technological progress, regardless of human dignity and meaningful engagement of every citizen, man, woman, child.
What prompted me to write all this?
It was Thomas L. Friedman’s recent column in the New York Times. It made we think of THE BRAVE NEW WORLD. After reading it, my first reaction was to give up my Credit Card, my debit card, my TV package and Internet access, but then, on second thought, I looked at the consequences, buying everything in cash or paying by cheque, even though there would be fewer bills to pay. Yet I think there will come a time, perhaps in the very near future, where I may have to take that step.
So why am I so concerned?
Here’s what Friedman wrote.
“Warning! Everything Is Going Deep: ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
“Deep learning, deep insights, deep artificial minds — the list goes on and on. But with unprecedented promise comes some unprecedented peril.
“Why? Because recent advances in the speed and scope of digitization, connectivity, big data and artificial intelligence are now taking us “deep” into places and into powers that we’ve never experienced before — and that governments have never had to regulate before. I’m talking about deep learning, deep insights, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition, deep voice recognition, deep automation and deep artificial minds.
“Some of these technologies offer unprecedented promise and some unprecedented peril — but they’re all now part of our lives. Everything is going deep.”
That’s what scares me and reminds me of THE BRAVE NEW WORLD.
Friedman then traces technological development in the last 2 decades. We all are well aware of this: in many ways – my life included – we have been sucked into this phenomenon so gradually, that our lives are now dominated by our electronic devices.
Friedman again, “Scientists and doctors can now find the needle in the haystack of health data as the norm, not the exception, and therefore see certain disease patterns that were never apparent before. Machines can recognize your face so accurately that the Chinese government can punish you for jaywalking in Beijing, using street cameras, and you will never encounter a police officer.
“Today “virtual agents” — using conversational interfaces powered by artificial intelligence — can increasingly understand your intent when you call the bank, a credit card company or an insurance company for service, just by hearing your voice. It means machines can answer so many more questions than non-machines, also known as “humans.”
“The percentage of calls a chat-bot, or virtual agent, is able to handle without turning the caller over to a person is called its “containment rate,” and these rates are steadily soaring. Soon, automated systems will be so humanlike that they will have to self-identify as machines.”
So far the Friedman column.
What I am really concerned about is AUTOMATION. Here’s what the Davos billionaires are contemplating, “Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”
All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few. People no longer matter: only money talks.
FRAUD!
Money motivates the Bad Guys exclusively. Everything can be exploited for fraud. The bad guys can fake your face and voice so well that they can create a YouTube video that will go viral of you saying racist things or make it look like the president of the United States just announced a nuclear attack on Russia. They can use technology to fake a bank manager’s voice so well that it can call your grandmother, and, with a voice command, ask her to transfer $10,000 to an account in Switzerland and she’ll do it — and you’ll never catch them in time.”
All this thanks to A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. And that brings me to the Bible and very early human history: THE TOWER OF BABEL.
There our early ancestors got carried away and put God on the alert. He said, as recorded in Genesis 11: 6, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do this will be impossible for them. Come let us confuse their language.”
Well, today the computer language, the A. I. Artificial Intelligence Language is all English. We also have the Tower of Babel in the form of our satellites in the high heavens. And, exactly what God feared, today nothing is impossible for the human race, and also today, thanks to increasing computer power, it seems that a major portion of the human race is becoming superfluous.
In order to know what I know, I must feel.
I know this because I feel this to be true. The march of ‘progress’ is unrelenting. Bonhoeffer was right when he wrote that, “Technology is the power with which the earth seized hold of humankind and masters it. And because we no longer rule, we lose the ground so that the earth no longer remains our earth, and we become estranged from the earth”.
We see that in the way Capitalism uses the earth. We see that in the remarks by Sarah Sanders, speaking on behalf of the current US government denying any responsibility for what is happening to the earth, totally estranged from the very substance out of which we were formed.
Today the computer rules, in all its ever growing capacity already outclassing the human brain, already making human muscle power redundant, already alienating people from each other much more than even television was capable of doing.
Rereading Friedman’s article and reading how God dealt with the Tower of Babel crowd, when technology was in its infancy, then I feel how it all fits into the totality of creation, because believe it or not, “It’s all part of the unfolding of creation”.
God expected all these events. In God’s design the Fall into Sin was a foreseen possibility. It is all part of God’s plan that his kingdom shall be built, even though Satan aims to destroy that kingdom. Satan brings into the world the principle of division, negativity, and unbelief in the power of God’s Word and Spirit. But all these recent developments – Satanic as they are – have a place in God’s design and are made to serve the Coming of the Kingdom.
The appearance of devices and tools, basically the unleashing of the powers of sin, can also bring about God’s grace. Who knows: in the New Creation Artificial Intelligence may be an important factor, just as the confusion of tongues as the result of The Tower of Babel, brought about multi-faceted cultures and different approaches to art and science.
This does not mean that we have to go all out to embrace these innovations: the dangers of losing our humanity are too great. That’s what my feelings tell me, anyway. I feel that we are losing the feel of creation.
I am beginning to realize that in order to know God – and that must be our goal in life – we first have to know ourselves, and in order to know ourselves we must constantly learn about the earth. It is from the earth that we are formed: it made us, it feeds us and sustains us. Estrangement from the earth – so easily done in our urbanized world – makes us foreigners to ourselves, so we no longer recognize what is good for us and what kills us
We are more than simple matter, flesh and blood: we are body, soul and spirit, just as God, earth and humanity are integrally related.
I am convinced that by killing the earth – as we are doing constantly – we are simultaneously killing God. In order to know what we know, we must feel: we must feel what God feels when we destroy his earth, his artful design. We must feel what the earth feels when we abuse it.
Current technology kills, kills God, kills the earth, and kills ourselves. If we can’t feel what the earth feels, we can’t love God and we can’t love ourselves and we can’t love our neighbors. Everything is connected to everything else: that also applies to our love relationships. Look again at that triangle you drew.
There is a caveat: the universe –the world around us – is conscious only to the conscious person. We must see the earth as alive, as a human is alive. The Bible, especially the Psalms, is full of living language: hills clapping their hands, mountains skipping like lambs, and in Romans 8 the earth suffering as in Childbirth. There too the Grand Law applies: love your neighbor as yourself.
Our fight is total.
Today everything conspires to sever us from reality, and reality requires us to be consciously in touch with the earth.
Nietzsche in his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” wrote, “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
By Super Terrestrial he means, of course, Heaven. In that same book – also decades ahead of his time – he wrote. “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence.”
In the Lord’s Prayer, the first line, after the salutation, reads, “Hallowed be Thy Name”. We drone it automatically but it really means that whatever is done by God, whether in his name, or by his hand, is HOLY, and thus sanctified. “God spoke and it came to be”, says Psalm 33: 9. That’s how the earth came to be, making it holy. By polluting it we ‘take God’s Name in vain.’
After reading Friedman frightening column I took out my copy of SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL written by E. F. Schumacher. It has as subtitle, “Economics as if People Mattered”.
Had we followed the directives given in this 1973 book, we would have avoided the situation we are in today, where people no longer matter, where THE MACHINE rules thanks to Artificial Intelligence. A.I. replaces humans, makes living bodies superfluous, kills off human dignity, destroys communities, and shatters minds.
Schumacher shows that there is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness of human knowledge. We are small, have no clue what we are doing – witness Climate Change – and therefore, small is beautiful. To go for GIANTISM is to go for self-destruction, all too evident today.
Friedman wrote, “Warning! Everything Is Going Deep.
Yes, we have to go “deep”. But a different ‘deep’ than where Thomas Friedman talks about.
What we need first of all is a ‘deep’ reverence for God the creator. Without a ‘deepening’ of our faith, a ‘deepening’ of our devotion, a ‘deepening’ of our love for God’s creation and for our universal neighbors, all our efforts are in vain.
This does require a ‘deepening’ approach to life in preparation for the NEW LIFE to come, something that we must work out in ‘fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2: 12).