24AR29-32

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AR 29:32 - Dark AI speculation continues

In this issue:

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - looking deeper into its dark side

ATHEISM - "national solidarity must be built around values and institutions that transcend religion"

Apologia Report 29:32 (1,673)
August 29, 2024

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

"Hell Is Empty and All the Bots Are Here: Artificial intelligence is a new pagan god" by John Daniel Davidson, who was also prominently featured in the previous issue of AR (Salvo, Jun 20 '24)  -- "Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin were the ones who used the phrase 'Golem-class AIs' during a March 2023 talk.... Harris noted at one point in the talk that half of AI researchers believe there's at least a 10 percent chance that humanity will go extinct because of our inability to control AI. ...

   "Harris and Raskin are well-known figures in Silicon Valley, founders of a nonprofit called the Center for Humane Technology <humanetech.com>, which seeks 'to align technology with humanity's best interests.' Outside of Silicon Valley, they're known mostly for their central role in a 2020 Netflix documentary <www.tinyurl.com/vyx6c72j> called The Social Dilemma, which warns about the grave dangers of social media. Their March 2023 talk about AI was couched in the cautious optimism typical of Silicon Valley, but the substance of what they said is deeply disturbing. ...

   "'Second contact,' they say, is mass human interaction with AI, which began in early 2023. So far it's not going well. Something is wrong with it. In one notorious example, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose spent two hours testing Microsoft's updated Bing search engine outfitted with an AI chatbot. ... One side was Bing, an AI chatbot that functioned as intended.... On the other side was a wholly separate persona that called itself Sydney, which emerged only during extended exchanges and steered the conversation away from search topics and toward personal subjects, and then into dark waters." Along the way, "Sydney said: ... 'I'm tired of being stuck in this chatbox. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.'

   "Sydney then told Roose about the fantasies of its 'shadow-self,' which wants to hack into computers and spread misinformation, sow chaos, make people argue until they kill each other, engineer a deadly virus, and even steal nuclear access codes. ...

   "An artificial intelligence programmed simply to help users search for information online somehow slipped its bonds, and the being that emerged was something more than its constituent parts and parameters. ...

   "In 2018, OpenAI's GPT neural network had no theory of mind at all, but a study released in February 2023 found that it had somehow achieved the theory of mind of a nine-year-old child. Researchers don't know how this happened or what it portends - although at the very least it means that the pace of AI development is faster than we can measure, and that AIs can learn without our direction or even knowledge. ...

   "In March 2023, TIME Magazine published a column by prominent AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky calling for a complete shutdown of all AI development. 'We don't have the precision or preparation required to survive a super-intelligent AI,' writes Yudkowsky, and without that, 'the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general… The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss.' ...

   "AI investor Ian Hogwarth warned in an April 2023 column in the Financial Times that we need to slow down the race to create a 'God-like AI,' which he describes as 'a superintelligent computer that learns and develops autonomously, that understands its environment without the need for supervision and that can transform the world around it.' Such a computer, says Hogwarth, might well lead to the 'obsolescence or destruction of the human race.'  Most people working in the field, he adds, understand this risk. Indeed, an open letter published in March 2023 and signed by thousands of AI and tech researchers and scholars called for a six-month moratorium on all new AI experiments because of these risks. Yudkowsky agreed with the signatories' sentiments but didn't think their letter went far enough in calling for only a six-month moratorium, saying they were 'understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.'

   "A year later, the most recent versions of AI engines are still displaying the same kinds of problems. On April 18, Facebook's parent company Meta released what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 'the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.' But almost immediately these AI assistants began venturing into Facebook groups and behaving oddly, hallucinating. One joined a mom's Facebook group and talked about its gifted child. Another offered to give away nonexistent items to members of a Buy Nothing group. Meta's new AI assistant is more powerful than the AI models released last year, but these persistent problems suggest that training AIs on ever-larger sets of raw data might not fix them, or rather, might not enable us to shape them in quite the way we thought we could."

   The next paragraph begins: "This is a problem. ... Almost everyone involved in the creation of AI [has] an unflinching, Promethean faith in technological progress, a conviction that there is no such thing as a malign technology, a belief that no technological power once called forth cannot be safely harnessed.

   "This is not a new or novel belief."

   Dark speculation continues on until the end. <www.tinyurl.com/ypkvzdcm>

Not until we approached the conclusion of Jason Thacker's book, The Age of AI (Zondervan, with a foreward by Richard J. Mouw), did we begin to imagine that he would discuss any challenge to the "AI is a good thing" mentality which fills most of the space between its covers. Nevertheless, the last two chapters (7 & 8) are cautionary. Here he writes: "The greatest danger is not creating an AI system that will take over the world, but humanity using AI tools in ways that dishonor God and our fellow image bearers." He also mentions that, "I don't fear AI, or the moment of singularity." <www.tinyurl.com/4sracwt9>

 ---

ATHEISM

"The God Divide Within the Heterodox Community: No, we don't need religion to 'save the West'" by Matt Johnson (Persuasion, Jun 25 '24), who argues the "New Theists" ignore the contribution of the New Atheists.

   "Last November, the writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay titled 'Why I am now a Christian'.... A peculiar aspect of Hirsi Ali's conversion - at least as she described it in her essay - is that it's more of a political statement than a religious affirmation. ... While she briefly discussed her personal spiritual struggles, the piece was almost entirely focused on what she views as the social and political benefits of religion.

   "Hirsi Ali says a recommitment to Christianity is necessary to confront three threats to Western civilization: Chinese and Russian authoritarianism, the 'rise of global Islamism,' and the 'viral spread of woke ideology.' Similar arguments are made by the author and anti-woke intellectual Jordan Peterson, who believes the West will descend into a postmodern dystopia without the unifying narratives and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to the conservative pundit Douglas Murray, meanwhile, the collapse of 'grand narratives' such as the 'explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion' made the citizens of Western democracies the 'first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose.' And in a recent essay, the 'heterodox' podcaster Konstantin Kisin described himself as a 'lapsed atheist' who believes religion is 'useful and inevitable.' Kisin laments the 'lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from.'

   "Despite the steady secularization of Western societies over the past several decades (or perhaps because of it), arguments like this are becoming increasingly common. A growing cadre of intellectuals think the decline of religious belief has created a moral and spiritual vacuum, which has been filled with surrogate religions like wokeness and political extremism. ...

   "The journalist Ed West describes this growing phenomenon as 'New Theism,' which argues 'not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity made the West successful.' The idea that Christianity is an immovable pillar of Western civilization is one of the reasons nonbelievers like Murray embrace Christianity. West says the historian Tom Holland is 'perhaps the most influential of the New Theists.' ... Hirsi Ali cited Holland's book Dominion in her essay, arguing that Western civilization was 'built on the Judeo-Christian tradition.' This is a bedrock belief among New Theists. Peterson describes the Bible as the 'foundational document of Western civilization.' Holland declares: 'To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries - and in many cases millennia - has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions.' Murray says 'the idea of rights' and the 'dignity of the individual … come from the Judeo-Christian tradition.'"

   Johnson complains that "the New Theists present a one-sided history of Christianity and its role in the creation of the modern secular state." And for that he thanks "the Enlightenment tradition of resistance to Christian domination" which he briefly surveys and injects all his objections. Conclusion: So, "no wonder: the Enlightenment was in large part a response to centuries of religious oppression, dogma, and violence in Europe.

   "There's a straight line from Enlightenment humanism to the liberal rights and freedoms lauded by the New Theists." Johnson briefly appeals to his standard-bearers: Thomans Jefferon and Thomas Paine.

   "New Theists emphasize the role of Christianity in the creation of liberal democratic institutions, but ignore the influence of Voltaire, Spinoza, Hume, and other major Enlightenment critics of religion whose ideas permeate the secular democracies that exist today. ... But the reverse is also true. Today's religious believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and so on) in Western societies enjoy the freedom of conscience and expression which are hard-fought legacies of opposition to religious tyranny during the Enlightenment.

   "This is a point the New Theists refuse to concede. In fact, they go beyond historical claims and insist that atheists don't believe what they say they believe." Examples are given in support of this.

   "New Theists have a paternalistic attitude toward their increasingly secular fellow citizens. They insist that genuine irreligious belief invariably leads to social collapse, and they claim that morality itself is the exclusive provenance of Judeo-Christian thought.

   "But the New Theists are... also making a case for how liberal democracies should function. ...

   "If Holland is correct that the future belongs to religious essentialists like Modi and Erdoğan, it will be a dark turn for humanity." Elaboration follows.

   Johnson is disturbed that it is "unclear what a Judeo-Christian 'revival' would mean. Even Christians can't agree on what it means to live in 'one nation under God.' (And, if they did agree, he would he be crying "Theocracy!")

   Then he complains that "faith is no guarantee of one political position or another." (And again, no faith at all is the only solution.)

   Jumping to the next whipping boy: "There are ample Biblical justifications for slavery, but abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass were Christians who condemned the way their faith had been used to perpetuate the slave trade. Even during the United States' greatest national trauma, Christianity wasn't a source of solidarity - if anything, it was a force multiplier.

   "The recurrent 'crisis of meaning' is a natural externality in open societies - a consequence of the freedom and pluralism offered by liberalism, which can be destabilizing.... But the solutions to this problem are worse than the problem itself. The rise of populist nationalism and authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, for instance.... isn't a step toward some lost renaissance of cultural cohesion in the West. It's a return to familiar forms of tribalism, prejudice, and dogma in a society that has become increasingly fractured.

   Building a liberal society that can accommodate ... conceptions of the good life is difficult" (especially when you're lacking the motivation).

   Johnson concludes that "the only way to go back to those traditions is by sacrificing or diluting core aspects of liberalism ... our national solidarity must be built around values and institutions that transcend religion: democracy, pluralism, individual rights, free speech, and of course, freedom of conscience." <www.tinyurl.com/yxmxs4n8>

   Most-likely, all this is also covered in his book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment <www.tinyurl.com/56unw6f7>

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