Is there something inherently nefarious in technology, including the internet itself (“www” in Hebrew reduces to “666”).
One wonders.
As for A.I.: could forces of evil use it like a Ouija board?
You’ve heard of Palantir, that company that offers data-collecting services that some fear is like Big Brother?
One notes this from the London Guardian:
“Palantir’s founding mission was ‘defending the west’—a nebulous and pliable goal admittedly, but also an unfashionable one, at a time when early 00s Silicon Valley was all about giving tech a consumer-friendly face. While the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft shied away from working with the military, Palantir—which was never a consumer company—embraced the prospect, arguing that Silicon Valley should be helping the U.S, to maintain its edge over threats from countries including China, Iran, and, lately, Russia. The company’s name is derived from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythology: a palantir is a ‘seeing stone’—something like a crystal ball—a surveillance device, in other words. Karp has spoken of Palantir’s mission in terms of ‘saving the shire,’ and employees were sometimes referred to as ‘hobbits.'”
Observes “There is a system that is surrounding us that is almost closing around us like a net.
If we actually step out of it for a minute and look at it from the outside, we’ve become utterly dependent on this web of technology that’s around us. It’s a radical situation — and it’s a very strange one — and it’s been normalized because it’s just happened so steadily. Yet, at the same time, almost everyone has a level of discomfort about it.
I think the technologies we’re talking about here — the phones and the screens and whatever else we’re using — are not so much the machine as a manifestation of it. The machine is a giant technological, economic, cultural system, which actually stems from a particular way of seeing. A peculiarly modern way of seeing, in which we move away from the relationship to culture that we had in the past, the relationship to nature, and especially the relationship to religion, the relationship to God. And we take the scientific revolution. We take the Enlightenment, we take the technological and the industrial revolutions, and they become almost a new theology. It’s really ultimately a war against nature, including human nature using technology.
So we’ve got to the point now where this thing that we might call the machine is closing around us to such a degree that we feel like cogs in it, but it’s very difficult to take us out of it.
And I think there’s something deeply unholy and sacrilegious and destructive about a culture that can ravage the natural world to the degree that we’re ravaging it now.
So if this whole thing has been a war against nature, then the last part of the war against nature is the war against human nature. And I think that when we start to talk about creating artificial life, creating new intelligences, uploading our minds, all the stuff that comes out of Silicon Valley theology at the moment, that’s where we are. This is the war against human nature, which is presented as the next stage in progress.
If you wanted to look at it from a Christian perspective, another way you could look at it is by opening the Bible and going to the first chapter of Genesis and seeing what happens in the garden when God tells us to exist, to tend and keep the creation he’s given us. And we choose instead to eat this fruit which gives us the knowledge of good and evil because the serpent tells us that if we do, we can be as gods and we choose to be as gods.
And we then fall out of relationship with God and out of relationship with creation and into civilization. And the next thing you know, we’re building the Tower of Babel. We’re trying to build this great technological effort.
Talk to a guy in Silicon Valley; he’ll say everything’s terrific. The singularity’s coming. We’re moving in the right direction. Talk to a doomer like me; I think we’re dehumanizing ourselves and destroying the natural world, but to me, a realization of the fact that we’re in a revolutionary moment gives us a chance to actually say, well, what’s actually true? What’s real?
Sometimes I think the internet is a giant Ouija board and we use it to summon things. And things appear through it. So if you want to be supernaturalist about it, if you want to be Christian about it, the world is inhabited by powers and principalities and demonic forces, which have it in for us, and which want to turn us away from God. That’s their purpose. I think if C.S. Lewis was writing “The Screwtape Letters” today, there would be a good few letters about how the demons can use the internet, how they can use the phones, how they can use this to completely delude us and distract us and take us away from our true purpose.
There’s a couple of chapters in the book in which I speculate quite openly about this, and I’ve done it in other parts of my writing, especially in fiction as well, because I think there’s something very spiritually dark about the internet, actually. Just on a practical level, we see chatbots persuading teenagers to kill themselves. We have all sorts of dark, horrible stuff going on. But there’s something about the very deliberate drive to ask our Silicon Valley overlords, say, to create God, to make God.
We’re creating God, we’re building God, we’re replacing God. We’re creating machines that will have a spirituality to them. That’s where we’re going. So we have a sense that what we’re doing with the internet is not simply using a bunch of ones and zeros to give us a load of stuff we want, but actually creating a new religion, a new spiritual worldview in which we are going to upload our minds. We are going to live forever.
And in the process of trying to create an artificial intelligence, the question that haunts me is: Are we creating these things or are we summoning them?