Posted on 10/12/2017 7:05:04 AM PDT by St. Louis Conservative
Turning to the future, Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine.
"We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other," he said, forecasting the emergence of "some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine".
"Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us ... will diminish and eventually disappear."
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
How many time in history that God has been replaced?
If there is anything any more anti-Christ in the world today, I don't know what it is. Dan Brown must be possessed.
AI may replace God in some folks' minds but they will be very disappointed somewhere down the road....
I understand, and the Nazis said we have better weapons of killing, and the Ottomans said we have control over their areas, and the Romans said we have all the swords.
Each group had what they considered the unbeatable combination of anti-Judeo-Christian hate and the technology to do it.
Voltaire believed that the printing press would tell the world about the evils of Christianity and bring about its death. In actuality, the printing press became the greatest tool the world had ever seen for the promulgation of the faith.
Nohting new from Brown and his ilk. The Jacobins made Notre Dame into a Temple to Reason. Rousseau talked about a general will.
I don’t think God is planning on handing off power to anyone. Much less a crappy computer.
Software engineer. Tools and backend mostly. With extended experience with geographic data such as that found in digital maps and google earth and gps nav systems etc.
Rather than serving and obeying the God who created us in His image, people like Brown want to create a god in their own image who will serve them and do what they tell him (or her) to do.
God intervenes in human history. He did not allow Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of life after they sinned. He did not allow mankind under the leadership of Nimrod to achieve immortality, omniscience, or omnipotence. He put a stop to their actions. He will intervene again when the time is right.
Don't know the name. Did a quick web search to see what he is about and found this:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
I might read it after work.
Nice. Yes a central tenet of Kurzweil’s ideology is that Moore’s Law applies indefinitely into the future and that exponential increases in tech will bring about a super intelligent AI that will have power over everything including life and death.
666 = Man is Father, Man is Son, Man is Holy Spirit
I dunno, I just get a little nervous when somebody pops up with “And ye shall be as gods”. It’s almost like I heard that somewhere before...
Still haven't read it, but I am skeptical about people that think they can track how fast and in what ways technology will advance.
Even tracking my own work, I find it very difficult to give an accurate guess as to when I will be done. And its not just me, it effects just about all software engineers.
Thinking at a high level and looking to the horizon is easy...implementation is something else. There are always details you didn't think through when looking at the big picture that you must deal with.
While technology can surprise you too. Something software tool developed with one purpose in mind can turn out to be useful in ways that the designer did not think of. Future tech may be amazing in ways we have not thought of....but the easy obvious predictions like flying cars and computers that operate as humans...is likely not going to be what happens.
There is some truth and insight. Particularly technology does accelerate by enabling other technology and paradigms certainly shifts will take over when a certain approach has been optimized.
But he seems to have a sloppy mystical idea of "progress" that is nothing I have not seen some people go on about before. There are trade-offs in technology. We regress as we progress.
We have faster access to information. But less patience. We have better health, but more suicides. We have faster cars and taller buildings, but less green and less peace.
Not all the trade offs are as poetic as those. I have not spent as much time thinking about them as this guy obviously has...but its disturbing to me that he mentioned not even these simple ones...its like he has his grand vision and inconvenient facts be damned.
He also seems to conflate many concepts together to make his point: From abiogenesis as part of evolution to processing power being the essence of mind. Also his assessment of the human brain's current capacity made me shake my head...because he seemed to skip recent theories that the brain uses quantum computing already. Which has not been proved, but is at least a topic in neurology that even a complete layman like myself has heard of...but the omission seems to help make the idea that computers will "surpass us" easier.
Doubtful destruction of their ideals is part of the calculus. They’ll learn.
Dan Brown’s view is that religion will never survive “science”. And that super intelligent AI wisdom will “replace” God as AI reveals the origin and nature of life and creation (obvious in Brown’s view it will have nothing to do with God).
In Dan Browns latest novel “Origin” he makes the argument that AI and science can explain the origin of life and all of life’s mysteries, thus rendering religion and God “obsolete”.
This is a very common belief among many atheist/agnostics nowadays. And it’s being pushed in pop culture quite heavily (did you see HBO’s Westworld?).
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Kurzweil, Musk, and their ilk truly believe that Tech and super AI will eventually reveal all of the mysteries of the universe, including the origin of the universe and of life, thus “eliminating” God and religion. In their view humanity is destined to evolve beyond our biological existence into a Silicon life form, shedding our mortal bodies altogether and our consciousness living forever in a machine.
It’s a dystopian ideology to me, but it has a growing number of adherents.
These modernists should do the math on God first.
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