April 8 2023
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI), THE BABEL TOWER, AND THE FATE OF HUMANITY.
“If as one people speaking the same language…”
Genesis 11: 6.
Let me start with that Babel structure, related in Genesis, the first Bible book. An interesting and instructive tale, supposedly having happened during the early stages of modern humanity. Then, apparently, the construction techniques were already so well advanced, that they remind me of the pyramids in Egypt, whose stone building expertise too was so unbelievable, that current experts still scratch their heads, wondering how they managed to hoist those big blocks of stone so high without our modern mechanical aids. Perhaps these people had retained some original wisdom, still simmering from the Paradise days, or who knows, they had been infused with the Devil’s urgings, whose celestial knowledge still lingered on, purposely imparted to these humans, with the intent to thwart God. At any rate these unbelievable advances in building techniques, had God worried, so worried, that God prevented them from finishing it. His words,
“The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” (Genesis 11).
And today, Anno 2023?
Well, think again. Today we have a similar situation in the form of AI = Artificial Intelligence, ‘one people speaking the same language!” This time it is not God who is worried. He, who surveys developments from earth’s very infancy to the current earth’s old-age ‘over-maturity’, shakes his head. He already predicted in Deuteronomy 32: 20, “I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.”
Solomon, too, in his wisdom, saw through human folly: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
Modern day Jacques Ellul, in his The Technological Society, had this to say, 70 years ago:
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”
Where are we now?
“The danger”, the researchers claim in the “The Future of Life Institute”, a non-profit think tank with offices in California and Brussels, is “ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict or control.” It added: “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.”
My question: God did not allow that famous tower to be finished. Will he do the same with AI? Will God intervene before it becomes totally pervasive?
One thing is sure: we live in interesting times, which also happens to be a Chinese curse. In addition to Climate Change and monetary collapse, the challenge with Artificial Intelligence is more extreme than the Babel Power. T. S. Eliot, about a century ago, wondered, “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
Yes, we have lost The Fear of the Lord, we have bent God/Creation to our will, and in the process have surrendered our humanity to the machine, as Jacques Ellul posited. Essentially, we have ceased to be human: we no longer resemble ‘the image of God’.
Just as God saw human progress at the Babel building, and feared being challenged in his hegemony, so today ‘progress’ has advanced beyond the human mind to absorb. That could well mean that today the only alternative left for God, is to make a new start with a new people, people who have learned their lesson.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGNCE (AI),
THE BABEL TOWER
AND THE FATE OF HUMANITY.
We have a choice. Ruled by a machine, reduced to robots.
OR
“On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” Revelation 22, where the New City is described.
The choice is yours.