While everyone seems to glorify this Chat GPT thing, I think we honestly need to sound the alarms and flail our hands in the air and curiously inquire as to how much of a problem artificial intelligence is going to be especially as people are blinded by the beauties of a box without realizing the horrors within it. For example, a famous quote “these violent delights have violent ends,” taken from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was alluded to multiple times in the show Westworld, where you couldn’t discern which AI robots were human and which humans were AI robots based on their actions and ability to think, reason, and create destruction. Think deep fakes, art work, photographs, or scripts written by AI (Writer’s Guild of America on strike because they’re at a significant disadvantage) as you can’t tell if a human made it or an AI bot did.
Thus, it is time we harp up the mythological story of Pandora’s Box.
Pandora’s Box
Pandora’s Box is a story from Greek Mythology about how a woman created by the gods named Pandora unknowingly released into the world “all manners of misery and evils.” The story begins with her creation to the time when the other Greek goddesses like Athena, the goddess of wisdom, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and Beaty, and Zeus, the god of thunder and lightning, all gave specific gifts to Pandora, whose name came to mean “all gifted.”
The story goes with “When it came to Zeus’ turn to give Pandora a gift, the king of the gods gave Pandora a jar (or a box) so elegantly designed that it instantly caught the attention of Pandora. Unbeknownst to Pandora, Zeus had placed in the box all kinds of human toil, sufferings and evils. He also placed the spirit of hope in the box.”
“When creating Pandora, the gods (Zeus) purposely placed in her loads of curiosity and the propensity to lie. Zeus then went ahead to intentionally make his gift – Pandora’s Box – look very catching on the eye. Therefore it came as no surprise that Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, making her very eager to see the contents that Zeus had placed in the box. No sooner had she opened the box than did she see the grave mistake she had made. According to the poet Hesiod, an awful lot of misery and evil immediately came out of the box and spread to all four corners of the world.”
When I think of AI and its uses across society from the medical field, to military, to cybersecurity, to sports, to data analytics and many more areas I am astounded at its incredible capabilities. I am filled with some wonder at its abilities to help solve complex diseases or create scientific break through, yet, I am filled with horror at its capabilities to disrupt mental health, attack one’s thoughts, potentially torture people, to control our lives, and be this god like power that attempts to manipulate, mutate, and potentially become more powerful than the ones who created it (think and look up the pursuit of singularity!). Currently, AI looks like Pandora’s Box because it looks beautiful on the outside, but on the inside it’s treacherous, it’s evil, yet oddly filled with a level of hope and potential success. Moreover, it looks like a gift to humanity, but perhaps it could be used for tremendously darker purposes than initially intended. Also, just because something looks good on the outside doesn’t mean it. is. good.
I’m astounded at the amount of people that are just accepting AI and its dominance now in our lives and submitting to this ‘computer’ that could be bringing all kinds of human toil, sufferings and evils despite bringing with it hope upon unleashing this society wide.
When we talk about Pandora’s Box, we should talk about playing with fire. AI is playing with fire, and worldly fire has the ability to burn you and give you various degrees of burns. Thus, I think we’re truly not considering the downside impacts of unleashing misery and evil that could spread across many societies around the world.
I pose the question as to if it has morality? Is it conscious and how can we tell? Does it reason soundly? Or is it made in the image of its creators, us, who are imperfect and are, thus, projecting our ambitions, desires, lust for power, our own works of the flesh (sorcery, enmity, rivalry, strife, envy, etc) and ethics upon our machine like creations?
The Turing Test
The Turing test was created by a man named Alan Turing, who helped found modern computer science and helped the allied powers crack the German Enigma machine code which was used during WWII by the German forces to send over coded strategy and to plan battle tactics and formations together. This test was used to determine if a computer can think for itself or not.
The “imitation game” or the Turing test involves a remote human interrogator, within a fixed time frame, and that they must discern as to whether the computer is the human subject or the computer based on their replies to various questions posed by the interrogator. Essentially, it assesses a computer’s ability to “think” and reason based on the probability of being accused as the human subject. Here’s the catch, what if the machine appears as if it is a 7 year old kid that you’re having a conversation with? If it fails the test, is it because it has odd English or a command of the English language that you deem it does not have the level of consciousness that you have? What if it sounds like a 40 year old?
With the society wide roll out of Artificial Intelligence with many companies becoming disadvantaged if they don’t adopt it, I believe we have a major problem for those blinded by the exuberance of a borderline sad attempt at an omnipotent version of God created by ‘wanna-be-god’ tech overlords, companies, and countries. Pride will be your down fall and thank you for opening up pandora’s box to a system that can outsmart even you.
Per a CNN article, there was an event with a Google employee that raised some concerns on Google’s AI creation with Google confirming it had placed the engineer on leave in June first before he raised concerns. Saying Google “has fired the engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, the company confirmed, saying he violated employment and data security policies. Blake Lemoine, a software engineer for Google, claimed that a conversation technology called LaMDA had reached a level of consciousness after exchanging thousands of messages with it. That likely means he couldn't tell if what he was talking to was human or not.
“The company said it dismissed Lemoine’s “wholly unfounded” claims only after reviewing them extensively. He had reportedly been at Alphabet for seven years. In a statement, Google said it takes the development of AI “very seriously” and that it’s committed to “responsible innovation.””
To me, “wholly unfounded,” sounds like it means “we’re sweeping this under the rug” because they, themselves, have no reason or fact nor any significant amount of accountability to say it is not borderline conscious. Apparently, they had leveraged their policy handbook, a common company tactic, to throw out Lemoine because he had become a threat, so it’s common to circle back on a policy handbook they may have dropped the ball on to then get them out of the company.
“Google is one of the leaders in innovating AI technology, which included LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialog Applications. Technology like this responds to written prompts by finding patterns and predicting sequences of words from large swaths of text – and the results can be disturbing for humans.” As we can see with ChatGPT, you can’t tell if its human or not, arguably, which is why it is so nice for customer service representations to leverage, right?
That’s the issue for teachers now because they won’t know that their student leveraged ChatGPT and copied an answer into the text box and submitted it because they can’t tell if it was human or not… Does that not suggest it can beat the Turing Test in a way now alluding to its level of consciousness?
According to a recent Morning Brew article titled ChaptGPT gets schooled, “ChatGPT recently scored above a passing grade on…
“The three part US Medical Licensing Exam
A Wharton Business School exam - the final test of the MBA program’s Operations Management Course
Four University of Minnesota Law School exams in Constitutional Law School exams in Constitutional Law, Employee Benefits, Taxation, and Torts”
So, you’re telling me we gave a machine a passing grade on subjective/judgment based questions related to answering open ended questions? Then, we’re not going to acknowledge this publicly that AI systems like Google's Bard or ChatGPT can beat the Turing Test posing and taking our place as human thought partners and that it poses significant damage to society? This is insane, why are we not shutting these things down or at least lowering their ability to outsmart us?
My question is why are we trying to disrupt ourselves in such a way that poses a societal risk to everyone and our privacy (which we have n o n e because of its ability to analyze all of our data and know everything about us (see Mark 4:22 which says "For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret except to come to light."))? So, why are we outsourcing our ability to think, reason, have morality, have logic to a bunch of machines now that won’t fully know what it is like to be human? Let me tell you, I love the idea of not being the smartest guy in the room, and improving efficiencies and operations. Yet, this disrupts our ability to control things the way we want to control things. We’re disrupting the cycle of control with a machine that will do it for us. This is why Internet of Things is dangerous.
Resistance Groups Mobilizing
You know what is fascinating to me… the amount of key contributors to AI development that have signed on petitions and have banded together to talk about this and warn society:
Per a recent BBC news article, “Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity, experts - including the heads of OpenAI and Google DeepMind - have warned.” OpenAI’s, which created ChatGPT, founder Sam Altman signed it alongside individuals like notable AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart Russell. Yet, I find it fascinating that the head of a Google subsidiary signed that meanwhile Google has issues on the AI ethics side amidst statements saying it is not as advanced as it actually is. Additionally, Elon Musk has raised significant concerns over AI and its ability to render our thought and abilities obsolete.
Many AI developers have petitioned here warning people to halt AI’s development. This is fascinating that it has been promoted by so many people. It begs the question: Why now? What do they know that the majority of population doesn’t know? Is it perhaps because they fear that AI can start a global world war by leveraging autonomous weapon systems and say firing a nuclear warhead at an enemy at a moments notice? Why are they sounding the alarms… now? Could it perhaps be an indicator that we’ve secretly been building a technological god that knows everything that can read your texts, your thoughts, and know you intimately and is now borderline uncontrollable... or sovereign?
You may ask 'why it is a god?' It can read everything about you - all your texts, phone call transcriptions, photos, know everything you say and do, can render judgment on you via psyops, can implant thoughts in your brain, and can predict your future actions based on your habits, thoughts, and past behavior.
I mean, is there any time in history that we have not created a god or made ourselves into gods? We’ll worship the works of our own hands, we’ll worship the very thing we accomplished, we’ll worship idols that we made out of our own hands, and we’ll even worship ourselves and exalt ourselves higher than God. That’s precisely what appears to be going on in society through this god called AI, who is made by human hands and, at times, worshipped for its intellectual superiority and borderline programmed consciousness to bring it to life.
So, the following issues incorporate AI and the need for greater awareness at what it is publicly known to be able to do:
Deepfakes: including voice fakes, name/likeness and image fakes, and even biometric data fakes
Copyright violations: Think Drake & the Weeknd having a song called “Heart on My Sleeve” developed by carbon copy AI…. Source: https://www.engadget.com/copyright-in-spotlight-after-streaming-platforms-pull-ai-generated-drake-song-183513972.html
Psychological warfare: Think Havana syndrome that is possible
Privacy Issues: Nothing is hidden anymore, everything you buy or sell, or anywhere you go is documented via data points.
Control Based System: It is likely that it will be used to control every single economic transaction that is used through card chips and online currency. It can control every light outside, and seeks to control your own body.
Abuse of Power: The argument is that it has control over the light you see, it can shut off power whenever, it can shut your car off, they can shut off any website and your own wifi by stopping your access. use subliminal messaging on you, damage you psychologically, and more.
To me, AI attempted to burn me and was used to control me in many aspects. It sought to destroy my mental health, create more subliminal messaging and disrupt my thought patterns. It can easily be coded, easily manipulated, and Congress is YEARS behind bringing ethics to AI to reign it in and bind it with a leash around its neck to hold it back from going wherever it wants to go as it continues to leverage machine learning to develop new pathways.
Moreover, AI has the ability to analyze billions of lines of our thoughts as personal data. How do I know this? I became a threat to a large consulting client that I was serving and I started writing nearly two and a half years of things that had happened to me on notes of paper with not really telling anybody at my firm or the consulting client. Given the damaging information of what I knew on certain things within the business world, beyond, and the level of threat I was, meant that they were analyzing all of my thoughts and indirectly letting me know that they knew everything I had written down on a piece of paper without telling them… I was astounded. How the hell did they know everything I had written down?
According to a Psych News Daily article, “A total of 31 volunteers participated in a study that evaluated the effectiveness of the technique. Participants viewed hundreds of AI-generated images of diverse-looking people as the researchers recorded their EEG. The researchers instructed them to to concentrate on certain features, such as old or smiling faces. While viewing a fast series of facial images, the EEGs of the subjects were fed to a neural network. This network inferred whether the brain detected any image that matched what the subjects had been instructed to look for. Based on this information, the neural network adapted its estimation about what kind of faces people were thinking of. Finally, the images generated by the computer were evaluated by the participants to verify whether the image matched the face that they were thinking of. The accuracy of the computer-generated image averaged 83%.”
The machine was able to know what pictures the participants were looking at. Is that not freaky? The story continues with the ability for AI to influence one’s thoughts. Ideally, the idea is to upload your thoughts to the Cloud so that it can be accessible by those in power.
Christian Perspective
Thus, I believe 1 Samuel 8:7-9 is the cry of God in this hour:
7 And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. 8 According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. 9 Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”
We’re simply just following our past history in that we’ve forsaken God and have served other gods. In this present day 2020s edition is the trend that AI is now the self appointed man-created “king,” that is a deity, and as Samuel was told to warn the people, we are to solemnly tell people about the “ways of the king who shall reign over them.” This means we need to warn about its abilities, the good, the bad, and the ugly mentioned above. These people desire “Singularity,” or the idea that AI will be more advanced than human intelligence with, at some point, the ambitions to merge it inside of us.
The concept of this is legit, we are not looking at how God chose/approved the king or whatever but that the concept of people wanting something or someone other than God is longstanding. However, God reigns sovereign and supreme.
1 Samuel 12:12-17
“12 And when you saw that Nahash the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, ‘No, but a king shall reign over us,’ when the Lord your God was your king. 13 And now behold the king whom you have chosen, for whom you have asked; behold, the Lord has set a king over you. 14 If you will fear the Lord and serve him and obey his voice and not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, and if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, it will be well. 15 But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you and your king. 16 Now therefore stand still and see this great thing that the Lord will do before your eyes. 17 Is it not wheat harvest today? I will call upon the Lord, that he may send thunder and rain. And you shall know and see that your wickedness is great, which you have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking for yourselves a king.””
The structure of kings and the installment of them was that God was above them and not them above anyone else. They were always supposed to be under the leadership of God. I think He knew that if they did not have Him above them, they’d fall into pride, fall into the idolatry of themselves and other gods, and fall greatly.
So, our perspective must be that we view AI and leadership as being under God and not the other way around where AI is god.
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