Dire Warnings of A.I. ‘Cults and Religions’ Spreading as Fast as the New Technology
Generative A.I. already is rattling the world.
It is being incorporated rapidly into nearly every facet of culture, business, media and politics.
This is all being done despite the myriad warnings coming from those who know best what the A.I. programs are capable.
At the forefront of the possibly prophetic warnings is the man considered the “Godfather of A.I.,” tech revolutionary Geoffrey Hinton.
Hinton recently quit his role at Google over his regret at the part he played in advancing A.I. and the threat it now represents to humanity.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton told the New York Times. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
Hinton now joins others including billionaire Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who all agree that the development of advanced A.I. applications needs to slow down.
Sitting down with former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, Musk discussed the great potential in A.I., but also potentially great danger.
“A.I. is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential—however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial—it has the potential of civilization destruction,” Musk said in the interview
Now, controversial World Economic Forum speaker Dr. Yuval Noah Harari is speaking out on the danger of A.I. shaping human culture and attracting worshippers to its modern altar:
“In the future we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence,” says Harari, who is often described as a human-secularist but has made many statements in support of atheism.
Harari does not believe any of the major religions’ texts, including Christianity and Judaism, were written or divinely inspired by a “non-human intelligence,” but fears that A.I. provides the possibility for the first tangible holy texts for followers that can be catalogued and analyzed.
By having an A.I. system analyze humanity’s various religious texts, it would be able to formulate its own scripture and develop a cult following that has the possibility of turning into a full-fledged, worldwide religion.
All through its exceptional capacity to re-sort existing content.
“Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them,” says Harari.
“For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society,” he adds. “Now A.I. is likely to be able to do it. And once it can… it does not need to send killer robots to shoot us. It can get humans to pull the trigger.”
Sadly, as tribalism grips the hearts of many across the glove, his words ring true as in the past several years Christians have witnessed events they once thought impossible. Parents willfully subjecting their children to chemical castration and genital mutilation, political targeting of opponents amid accusations of election fraud and many within the Christian church embracing apostasy over the truth held within the written Word of God.
Facing another potential crisis, humanity has the choice to heed the warnings from experts in the field of A.I., or ignore the warnings much like the people of ancient Israel disregarded the words of the prophets of God, and thereby suffer through a potentially society-altering disaster in the wake of unchecked technology. {eoa}
James Lasher is Staff Writer for Charisma Media.
