Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."
Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." -- Voltaire
This game also introduced me to Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, from an optional dialogue with a bartender in a hidden area in the hong kong game map.
Deus Ex was way ahead of its time, like a lot of cyberpunk media is.
I can't read the full text, but the materials has this at the end: "Finally, we examined the impact of God salience on respondents’ propensity to use technologically new and/or innovative products." They find a significant effect ("God salience was associated with greater early adoption attitudes") there, too. Why?
My take is that the effect is the other way around: early adoption attitude explains AI acceptance.
Which turns out to just be a consequence of "people who are religious are more often old fucks"?
https://intotheclarities.com/2014/08/23/charles-taylor-on-di...
One of them you can test, the other you have no input and no output.
Is trusting gravity blind trust?
I think this paper makes sense. If you think of the God concept as a kind of externalized decision-making system that enables “cognitive work” that is beyond human capabilities - or the perception of human capabilities- then acceptance of AI is a similar phenomenon.
On a similar note, I haven’t done the research myself, but I have a solid feeling that the contemplation of an infinite, eternal, etc. God-concept (as opposed to more localized polytheistic concepts) can be tied to developments in mathematics throughout history.
(English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian.)
An abstract God concept that is infinite, endless, etc. encourages humans to understand and justify/argue against such an entity, in the process forcing them to think in more abstract ways, which in a basic sense is what mathematics is. This is more-or-less the history of intellectual thought in the Western world since Christianity until fairly recently. (Dominated by God-adjacent topics.)
A question I might ask in researching this would be: why does it seem like mathematical development really accelerated in Europe after Europe had been thoroughly christianized? Throroughly here not meaning recent, but “sunk into the psyche over centuries.”
Edit: interesting that the article doesn't seem to be visible on the first 4 pages of the front page to me any more. This is why it's bad to have most social networking based in the US and censored according to their morals...
A recent related development I find interesting is the rise in apparent AI/LLM Apologetics. Nearly every discussion thread about LLMs I read lately includes numerous posters attributing abilities to these models which are far beyond anything documented or demonstrated.
> Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient
It's not about their beliefs, it's about the instruction.
Animals solve 'the problem of other minds' by assuming that everything is like them, ie., conscious. And then walking back from this presumption upon evidence to the contrary.
This kinda mild 'default schizophrenia' is something I've always been allergic to. (I imagine my defaults are lower than most, which no doubt runs the risk of under-valuing the actually conscious).
Nevertheless, it's one of the things that makes me most concerned about the hype around AI: I see nothing more in it than a nascent secular religion. Born "from the ground up", as all religions are, by immediate experience 'of the divine'. Ie., of that impulse to analogise the world to one's own mind.
I think you're stretching the word religion very far from its meaning. No one is deriving any meaning or analogy to the world from AI beyond the answers to technical questions. Certainly no one attributes moral authority to AI?
The hype is about its applied value, not some new insight into the world.
The argument seems to be: Belief in God implies a belief in the fallibility of humans, which leads to a reduced reliance on humans and therefore increased willingness to accept AI recommendations.
Most of the logic in that argument checks out. I just don't understand the last step in the logic. How do decreased reliance on humans lead to increased willingness to accept AI?
I'm a religious person myself, and my argument would be to not trust AI all that much. It is a creation by fallible human beings trained on fallible human data.
Good point. How is A.I. different (in this respect, and possibly in some other ones, too) from a really huge, partially pseudo-random spreadsheet?
We need to remember, though, that we live in a relatively small bubble where A.I. is perceived as (more or less) what it is. For a layman, both an A.I. and a huge spreadsheet may be similarly beyond comprehension.
I will always remember talking to a very nice old lady (it could have been about 25 years ago), who told me that computers can read people's minds. She saw someone type a few characters on a computer and suddenly a whole page appeared. Since she had a mental model of a typewriter (which has no memory), the logical conclusion of text appearing without a person physically typing it was that the machine read his mind. In fact, that made perfect sense!
We often have no idea how weird (from our POV) the people's mental models of computers are.
They assess belief in god in different ways. Details are found within the 8 preregistered study PDF documents.
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"""Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the reduced reliance on humans is driven by a heightened feeling of smallness when God is salient"""
I'd expect this to be less true for pantheons.
"""followed by a recognition of human fallibility."""
In pantheons, I'd expect this to vary by the nature of the god/goddess in question; Greek revivalism probably has different answers when considering Athena vs. Dionysus.
"""Study 5 addresses the similarity in mysteriousness between God and AI as an alternative, but unsupported, explanation."""
Yeah, that feels plausible.
"X and Y are mysterious, perhaps they're the same?" seems common for any {X, Y} — AI, consciousness, quantum mechanics, god, evolution, prime numbers, art, …
Combined with well designed software LLM's can be used to create intelligent agents, but that's still not what Kurzweil envisions.
I have to politely disagree with this statement. To place faith in something means that you believe it to be true regardless of evidence. If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.
Well, I've had theist friends who'd disagree with that, who've said, paraphrased, that "if your faith has no doubt, then it's not faith, it's a dogma." I can't speak to this myself, but I do find their choice to believe despite their doubt more honourable than someone's blind certainty.
There's insufficient contempt for psychology and sociology academics who pretend this incredible witch-doctory screw-up with so many BS un-retracted papers fitting a curve to noise and booking a ted talk hasn't happened and everything is ok. Huge kudos to these ~270 authors [1,2] who took it on and got data. They found some good research that reproduced too, just a lot less than you'd expect, like or be remotely comfortable with.
[1] https://osf.io/ezcuj/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_ProjectAlso, "AI" has been a part of pop culture and pop science for decades... people have been conditioned by Star Trek and Star Wars and the like to accept that a computer you can "just talk to" is self-aware, and that computers never make mistakes.
It's a bias you even find in discussions about self-driving cars. Computers are perfectly logical, rational, mathematically precise and if they were to be self-aware, would hold to a perfectly mathematically correct and provable model of reality based only on concrete data, without any prejudice or bias. Commander Data can't lie, can't even use contractions. Of course we can trust them to drive our cars, we just can't trust humans.
So we're left with the idea floating around in popular consciousness that whenever AI shows up, we should trust it implicitly.
The one thing computers have never done (until now,) and certainly never been known to do, is make up completely plausible nonsense and gaslight you into accepting it. LLMs can't even do math. This isn't the way "computers" behave.
One doesn't even really have to conflate any of this into religious belief for it to make sense. "LLMs being intelligent" is the model that just already happens to fit everyone's priors. It just happens to be dangerously wrong.
...And just where do you think those computers came from, sparky?
Back to square one.
If you can't trust the humans in the chain, trusting the system as a whole is the act of a fool. You've abandoned rationality, and comfortably ensconced yourself in the plush comfort of irrationality and ignorance, setting yourself up to get rolled by the real master's in the house, who'll be the ones who make, run, and operate the machine. Double points for not even realizing the only one pulling the wool over your eyes is yourself.
You're trusting something that half the time needs effing cross-checking by a squishy bit due to bored programmers misusing computing primitives in ways in which their integrity and soundness is undermined by their physical implementation.
It's not blind trust just because you don't understand it.
> It was not until the fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian theology with Christianity that the concepts of strict omnipotence, omniscience, or benevolence became commonplace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Ancient_Greek...
It's a basic historical fact that mathematics in Europe accelerated dramatically from the Renaissance onwards. This isn't really debatable.
As I said above, the important cultural group was not recently converted Christians, but those that had grown up for centuries in Christian culture. As in, the entire Middle Ages…which led to the Renaissance.
Newton was a devout Christian. While he had unorthodox views, this is irrelevant for the point I’m making. It has nothing to do with the specifics of Christian denominations, rather the idea of an eternal and unchanging God.