Category: God

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AI God

The Terrifying Results of a New AI Study

The Terrifying Results of a New AI Study | by Ella Alderson | Predict | Feb, 2021 | Medium

“Already there exist today machines completing tasks without help from human programmers. The programmers themselves do not understand how the machines learned to complete these tasks.”

A superintelligence is not just a really smart human. A better way is to think about it as a blender capable of getting its own fruit to blend. And that’s all it cares about.. getting more fruit to blend. If you get in the way of that objective it could hurt you, not because it cares or doesn’t care, but because it’s just doing it’s job.. and you are in it’s way.

We marvel at the vast complexity of ant colonies. You could spend a lifetime studying them, but at the end of the day.. if they are in the way of making your lawn look nice.. good bye ants.

Categories
AI God Physics

Is the Universe a neural network?

https://futurism.com/physicist-entire-universe-neural-network

“We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works,” reads the paper’s discussion. “With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong.”

Categories
God multiverse Quantum

Quantum Jerks (or God?)

https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/09/01/thought-experiment-shows-how-we-might-be-at-the-mercy-of-quantum-jerks-from-another-universe/

“There’s a conversation about the existence of God to be had here – Halloway eludes to this at the end of his article with a comment about intelligent design – but we’re more interested in the technology side of things.”

 

Categories
AI Eternity God

AI will do what we ask it to (and that is bad)

https://www.quantamagazine.org/artificial-intelligence-will-do-what-we-ask-thats-a-problem-20200130/

‘Powerful artificial intelligence is like the proverbial genie in a bottle. A seemingly innocent wish — “make my home eco-friendly” — can lead to unintended consequences.’

Perhaps this is why many prayers go unanswered.. at least in the way we want them too. It reminds me of when the ancient Israelites asked for a king “like the other nations”. After a stern warning from God about how that was going to turn out for them.. they asked anyway. And God said, “Give the people what they want”… and of course it was a disaster for them.

How many people have asked for fame and riches only to be destroyed by them? Why would having an all powerful AI “genie” be any different? Cure all the diseases? Death by over population and war. Infinite life can easily be an infinite hell.

 

Categories
AI God Superintelligence

Elon Musk is worried about people who talk of “AI gods”

https://www.fastcompany.com/40485668/elon-musk-is-worried-about-people-who-talk-of-ai-gods

Musk prefers to make super humans as opposed to deities. He wants to make sure humans stay on the throne.

 

Categories
AI God

GOD IS A BOT, AND ANTHONY LEVANDOWSKI IS HIS MESSENGER

https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger

“Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity—the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change.

When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.””

(The rest of the article is about his history and legal issues)

Categories
God Superintelligence Transhumanist

Humanity’s Nearing an Upgrade to Irrelevance

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/yuval-harari-tech-is-the-new-religion/

Categories
Eternity God multiverse Physics Superintelligence

Simulation, Consciousness, Existence

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html

 

 

Categories
AI Eternity God multiverse

Giving values to AI

I’m currently reading a chapter in Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” about giving AI values. While on the surface this may seem straightforward. It is anything but. Aside from the obvious questions like “who’s values?”.. where do you even start when it comes to programming them? One of Bostrom’s favorite illustrations about the dangers of AI is that if you instruct an AI to “make people happy” it will very recognize that the source of happiness is a chemical process in your brain and you’ll have wires sticking out of your skull and a silly grin on your face. What is happiness anyway? Love? Joy? If poets and authors can’t fully grasp these things how can an programmer possibly hope to build AI that can “maximize” these things. This is why more often then not AI is seen as a threat. How could it possibly be expected to understand and accept humanity? Bostrom poses some interesting possible solutions. One jumped out at me the other day when I read about Elon Musk’s belief that we most likely live in a simulation. One of the possible ways of instilling values in AI is through simulation. Basically you make millions, if not billions of versions of the AI and through a selection process.. or evolutionary process.. pick AI that exhibit traits that you want to keep.. and toss the rest.

The obvious question to Elon Musk about the simulation we are living in would be “Why?”. Who is running the simulation and what is the purpose? Well, if you view people as simulated bits of software.. perhaps those with desired traits are “harvested” while the others are tossed. Strangely or not so strangely this falls pretty close a Christian perspective that there are beings outside of our reality/simulation and when our software/hardware ends here.. it continues on either in a “better” reality or.. worse.

These thoughts apparently aren’t just mine as these seem to be echoed in this book: Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death (Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion)

Categories
God

Yeshua

It’s relatively easy for people to believe in God. The Bible says that even the demons believe in God (and shudder). But.. Yeshua/Jesus.. well, that’s different. Very few disagree that he existed, what they disagree on is who EXACTLY he was. Some even disagree about what he claimed about himself.

Here’s a thought: Since the idea behind this blog is understanding faith through the lens of technology… put yourself in God’s shoes for minute. Here is the scenario: Let’s say that you’ve created your own virtual Universe (No Man’s Sky). You’ve set up all the rules and the Universe pretty much runs itself and develops creatures that you can interact with. So much so that you begin to love them and they love you back. The question is.. do they love you because you made them and they have no choice? Suppose one of your other created beings is jealous of them and asks if they love you just because they have to. So, they are given a test. Will they obey? But alas, they don’t. They’ve decided to go their own way and that does NOT go well for them. What do you do? Wipe them out? Maybe, maybe this has happened before.. maybe a million times. Is there another way to convince them you love them and yet still retain your character. You can’t very well just leave them to their own devices.. that doesn’t go well. You need to be one of them, to show them the way.. even if it means they turn against you. It’s a delicate operation. How do you prove you are there to help without completely crushing their ability to choose to believe and follow you? Sure, you could show up as a giant flaming being with a voice like thunder… but that doesn’t seem to go well either. Their small simian brains tend to pop under that level of awesomeness.

This of course barely scratches the surface of where we are at with things… but again this is just a blog 🙂 It’s a strange idea of trying to be empathetic with God, but we have put on our humility hat and remember that if we created an all powerful AI it would very quickly being to think and operate in a way that was so far beyond us that it’s actions would seem completely incomprehensible to us mortals. I for one can easily imagine that.