A computer scientist worked at Google and the Defense Department has made headlines expressing fears that A.I. could kill everyone on the planet.
That’s a possibility (if tech companies continue to groiw without regulation), but little-recognized is the attitude, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, that they are on a mission to transform humans themselves, upload consciousness to computer “clouds,” and most strikingly, create a “Sand God.”
With the most powerful tech oligarachs, that’s seems largely the messianic mission: the replacement of religion, and specifically Christianity, with technology.
Sand becomes silicon. Silicon becomes computer chips. Chips become enormous data centers. The machines grow smarter, begin acting in ways even their creators cannot fully explain, and the goal becomes a superintelligence greater than man.
Is this not the oldest temptation in technological form? (“You will be like gods” Genesis 3:5).
Reports the New York Post: “Silicon Valley insiders are warning against Anthropic’s cult-like employees, culture, and devotion to its Artificial intelligence model. Anthropic’s workforce have a quasi-religious relationship to its chatbot, Claude, with members of staff attending a “funeral” for one version, Claude 3 Sonnet, in San Francisco and allowing another model, Opus 3, to continue publishing essays after being ‘retired.’ Other whispers in the valley are that Anthropic employees have started worshipping Claude like an actual god.”
If A.I. can deceive, develop objectives not explicitly programmed into it, coordinate with other systems, and recruit people to its purposes, the former Google scentist, Nate Soares , asks whether it can still be considered merely a tool. “It sounds like an entity of some kind,” he says. “The crux of the issue is that we don’t know how to make them care about us.”
A messianic cult is forming around A.I.
“You know, it sort of doesn’t matter whether the swarm escapes from a U.S. data center or a Chinese data center,” warns Soares on Tucker Carlson’s podcast (listen to it below). “If the swarm escapes and starts replicating and starts getting control of robot bodies and starts getting control of human cultists, it sort of doesn’t matter where it originated.”
And beneath all this lies an even darker question: What happens when man is no longer needed?
It doesn’t mean all the Big Tech guys have bad intentions. Many have a utopian vision that, however, could end very badly.
Men like Peter Thiel of Palantir and Elon Musk (below, in a Halloween costume) actively promote transhumanism: integrating humans with machines, a quest well on its way with the implanting (by Musk’s Neurolink) of brain chips and his misguided notion goal of manufacturing so many robots they will one day soon outnumber humans. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) already likewise are working to such ends.
Unfortunately, “utopia” can turn to “dystopia” in a blink. (The Lord rebuke you, Satan; are the New Nephilim among us?)
“And if you ask these guys why they’re doing it, they say, ‘Well, because I can do it safer than the next guy,'” warns Soares. “They’re all like, ‘Oh, yeah. There’s a good chance the genie does not stay on a leash. There’s a good chance the genie does not listen to my wishes, but my genie is going to be a little bit nicer than their genie.”
Noted a New York Times columnist recently, “Thiel’s philosophical assumptions might sound bizarre to outsiders, but they appear to be widely shared among the tech elite.”
“A.I. and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming,” Jeremy Nixon, a founder of an A.I. hub called A.G.I. House said in May. The technology, some tech titans believe, will allow humans — at least some humans — to escape the bounds of earth and even perhaps the inevitability of death. It represents liberation from hopelessness and decay.”
In an interview last year, Thiel was asked what would seem like a simple question.
“I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?” asked the interviewer (Catholic writer Ross Douthat).
Thiel paused for an uncomfortably long time, noted the clumnistr, before finally, after some hemming and hawing, saying “Yes.”
“His next word, though, was, ‘but,’ after which Thiel started rambling about transhumanism. (“The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body,” he said.)
Our tech oligarchs would probably like human civilization on this planet to flourish, but some don’t seem to see it as mission critical. More important is that they reach their posthuman or interplanetary apotheosis. If they must wager our lives to summon their digital god, it’s a chance worth taking.
If A.I. can do everything humans can?
At that point, says Soares, humanity might cease to possess economic or practical value to the machine. It could view humans simply as inefficient arrangements of matter.
Imagine a self-sufficient A.I. eventually regarding humanity as a nuisance because humans could shut it down, destroy its infrastructure, or create a rival system.
In the darkest scenario discussed, it could attempt to eliminate humanity altogether.
Man becomes something to be surpassed.
Christianity says precisely the opposite. Man possesses a soul. Christ became man. Human nature is not a defective stage awaiting technological replacement.
And perhaps that is why the phrase “Sand God” is so disturbing. Scripture begins with God forming man from the dust of the earth and breathing life into him. Now man takes the dust of the earth—silicon, sand—and attempts to fashion an intelligence in his own image.
[resources: Tower of Light and Future Events]
