A Theology of AI

I was texting a Christian friend yesterday. The poor guy is stuck in the middle of a disagreement with the CRA (Canada’s IRS) over his assessment for a previous year. Everybody he talks to at the tax office tells him a different story about what he owes and why.

Having a little inside knowledge about the way bureaucracies operate, I could assure him this will continue to be the case, and to suggest that he keep talking until he finds an auditor who agrees with him. Enough calls and polite appeals, and there’s a good chance one eventually will. I see it happening all the time. People have a tendency to give up too easily when they are in the right.

The big illusion about both tax law and every other kind of law is that putting instructions in writing with exacting precision leads to greater certainty and a single, predictable outcome. In fact, the more we multiply words, the more interpretations proliferate.

Semi-Random Musings (48)

A Christian man looking for a wife thought his Facebook connections might help, so he inquired on the social media site recently about churches in his area where he might find higher than average numbers of single women. As he put it, “Same faith is a priority.” No kidding.

Much to this poor fellow’s surprise, the response to his query was most unfavorable. “Church isn’t for dating!” was the most common reaction.

Really? That’s a new one on me.

AI Reads the New Testament

From time to time these days you will come across online opinion pieces warning about the perils of AI. This is hardly surprising with any technology in its infancy, but artificial intelligence raises hackles more than most innovations for the simple reason that the average person doesn’t understand it. No matter how many times you explain to some users that they are looking at the results of algorithms, not the natural responses of an independent personality, they talk about AI “interactions” as if they have some higher meaning.

I put it down to the failure of Western educational systems over the last forty years to teach math comprehensibly. People who understand the basics of computer programming know AI is all ones and zeroes. People who don’t, don’t.

The Erosion of Trust, Part 89

True confession: I haven’t actually written 88 previous instalments under this title in our blog’s history, but I may as well have: 89 is more approximation than exaggeration. If we count the entire 13-part Language of the Debate miniseries, add in more than half our 38 “COVID 19” posts, 90% of our 30 “Media” posts, a few Too Hot to Handles, a few “Technology” posts, and no small number of our 57 “Government” posts, we are probably closing in on the century mark.

In one way or another, these posts reference the growing untrustworthiness of all mainstream information sources. If your Spidey-sense doesn’t tingle at just about everything you see in the news cycle at this point, you are not paying sufficient attention.

Subjective Reality [Part 2]

The quest to control the input into our own consciousness is probably thousands of years old. We all have our ways of trying to backburner the unpleasantries of life while maximizing the good bits. My brother and I shared a coffee on his deck last week, and we talked about a friend whose way of dealing with things he doesn’t like, even in adulthood, is simply to refuse to acknowledge them. “I don’t think about that,” he’ll say.

If you have no distracting technology to aid you, I suppose affected stoicism or denial are the best available refuges from truth, if a tad primitive.

Subjective Reality [Part 1]

It’s hard to believe digital computing has been around for less than a century.

Perhaps you are old enough to recall the annoying punch cards we were compelled to fill out in public school so our standardized test results could be graded and printed without human intervention, probably my first experience with “computing”. In my teens, a friend’s father paid me to input data on the Commodore PET and first generation TRS-80, staring at ASCII screens for hours on end and hoping I’d remember to save my work before it crashed, as frequently occurred.

Back then, it was all shiny new tech. Less than a single human lifetime removed, it all seems hilariously primitive.

More Beads on the Abacus

A Belgian man obsessed with climate change reportedly took his own life recently after a series of exchanges with a so-called artificial intelligence (AI) on his smartphone. His widow says “Eliza” (the app’s default chatbot) had become his “confidante” and encouraged him to consider suicide as a contribution to saving the planet when his worries about the effects of global warming on earth’s environment became the primary topic of their “conversations”.

I read the article the morning of April 1 and immediately started thinking the writer was pulling my leg.

Too Hot to Handle: Sophistry

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

We’ve all seen this story before. Those of us who’ve lived long enough to remember Hal Lindsey have seen it repeatedly: a guy who specializes in the study of prophecy and has been teaching one book of the Bible for thirty years all over the world. His bread and butter (often quite literally) is finding something new to say about the same old subject that is also both current and, ideally, sensational.

Tom: And so, hot on the heels of Hanson Robotics’ press releases about their new “artificial intelligence” creation (and ‘her’ subsequent appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show), here comes Bible teacher Mark Correll with his latest twist on prophecy: the first beast of Revelation 13 could be … AI.