Warn HN: AI is the new Golden Calf

6 points by novocantico 1 year ago | 15 comments

I know most of you are delusional enough to not believe that God is real and the claims of Catholicism are true, so this will mostly fall on deaf ears. But AI is the new golden calf. Proud humanity creates something with its own hands, and then worships it as if it were greater and more capable than its maker. The gifts we uniquely have as humans are ours because we are made in the image and likeness of God. This includes our ability to reason, use logic, and understand language, all of which come from God being the Logos, as well as our ability to be creative and be inspired and to inspire. AI cannot and will not ever be able to achieve these, although it may seem to for a while. But if you build two towers, one which takes 3 years to build and one which takes 3 days, the only one standing after 50 years is the one you should live in.

hello_computer 1 year ago |

All the beings presently conceived so incorrectly in people's thoughts—incorrectly because the mere shadowy intellect can only conceive of the mineral, the crudely material element, be it in the mineral, plant, animal or even human kingdom—these thoughts of human beings that have no reality all of a sudden will become realities when the moon and the earth will unite again. From the earth, there will spring forth a horrible brood of beings. In character they will be in between the mineral and plant kingdoms. They will be beings resembling automatons, with an over-abundant intellect of great intensity. Along with this development, which will spread over the earth, the latter will be covered as if by a network or web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom. Yet their organization will not even reach up to the level of the plants. They will be horrible spiders who will be entangled with one another. In their outward movements they will imitate everything human beings have thought up with their shadowy intellect, which did not allow itself to be stimulated by what is to come through new Imagination and through spiritual science in general. All these unreal thoughts people are thinking will be endowed with being. As it is covered with layers of air today, or occasionally with swarms of locusts, the earth will be covered with hideous mineral-plant-like spiders that intertwine with one another most cleverly but in a frighteningly evil manner. To the extent that human beings have not enlivened their shadowy, intellectual concepts, they will have to unite their being, not with the entities who are seeking to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but instead with these ghastly mineral-plant-like spidery creatures. They will have to dwell together with these spiders; they will have to seek their further progress in cosmic evolution in the evolutionary stream that this spider brood will then assume.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA204/English/AP1987/19210513...

zeropointsh 1 year ago |

Respectfully, if AI is the golden calf, then so were the printing press, the steam engine, and the microprocessor before it. Every era births its own Promethean fire—each time, there are those who claim it will unseat the divine, and others who bow before it as if it were divine itself. But in the end, all of these are just tools, reflections of human will, neither inherently sacred nor inherently profane.

The argument that AI is a false idol is a purely religious appeal—one that could be applied to anything humans elevate beyond its intended function. If AI is the golden calf, then so is wealth, celebrity, ideology, even the veneration of one’s own intellect. False idols are not technological phenomena; they are human ones.

And yet, AI is uniquely unsettling because it forces us to ask: What makes us different? What part of our intellect, our reasoning, our creativity is truly ours? But these are philosophical, not theological, questions. The fear is not that AI will replace God, but that it will challenge the very constructs by which we define ourselves.

To worship AI is foolish. To fear it as divine competition is equally so. The wiser path is to recognize it for what it is—a recursive artifact of human intelligence, built to serve, not to be served.

novocantico 1 year ago | |

> Respectfully, if AI is the golden calf, then so were the printing press

Stupid analogy after stupid analogy. The printing press merely let us mass-transmit ideas on paper. The whole point of AI is to be able to imitate the human mind, through a neutral network created via software and data training.

I have no problem sitting by while fools use AI to create inherently doomed works of art and prose.

talldayo 1 year ago | | |

> The whole point of AI is to be able to imitate the human mind

The point of AI as we know it (LLMs) is to mimic human text with the greatest accuracy. Simulating the entire mind is besides the point, wasteful and not how LLMs (or any AI for that matter) works.

If you want your biblical analogy to stick you should make sure you're up-to-snuff on the technical side first.

zeropointsh 1 year ago | | |

Just wrong, perception is the real issue here. The golden calf was not dangerous because it was a statue; it was dangerous because people assigned it reverence beyond its function. That fate is not unique to AI—people have deified power, money, even their own self-importance. AI is simply the newest mirror reflecting our collective narcissism.

gregjor 1 year ago |

I don't know why you mention Catholicism. It was the Hebrews following Moses out of Egypt who made the Golden Calf. That happened over a thousand years before Jesus and a little less than 2,000 years before anything you can call "Catholicism" existed.

The Pope has urged caution regarding AI, though I question his authority and understanding.

hello_computer 1 year ago |

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

- Matthew 7:6

anon2549 1 year ago |

I don't think that calling people who don't share your belief system "delusional" is the way to get them to pay any attention to what you have to say.

allears 1 year ago |

Who's delusional? When you start off with an insult you've already lost me. As they say, every accusation is a confession.

novocantico 1 year ago | |

> Who's delusional?

Every atheist on here, but more particularly, the elitist tech communities that think science is all there is to reality, when life experience abundantly proves otherwise from every direction.

allears 1 year ago | | |

My friend, questioning others' beliefs while asserting that you have the true answers is childish at best. You need to go on the revival circuit, I hear there's a lot of money to be made there.