Computers, AI and robots are signs of the End Of Times

We went to Bible Study at our church last night. No, this is not really about religion, at least not directly.

The Pastor is starting a series about the Book Of Revelation in the Bible. He’s going through the verses to examine them and possible influences in the modern day that indicate we are coming to The End Of Times. I’m going to say we must not be very close because, as has been said repeatedly, no man knows when the end of times and the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur. Therefore, if he is saying we are coming up on the End Of Times, he must be wrong and we’re safe.

But I digress.

We started going over the list of modern day signs and the very first two were computers / Internet / wide spread knowledge and Artificial Intelligence.

It seems that somewhere in the book of David there was something said about increased knowledge flooding the world and causing confusion. (I think that was his point). Obviously, this means the Internet where we can get almost any piece of information at a moments notice. He kept using the word knowledge, and how trillions of pieces of knowledge were generated every day. This is obviously a part of Satan’s plan to keep everyone distracted so he can enact his evil plans.

Now, my counterargument to this is probably just a matter of semantics but here is how I view it. We are not generating trillions of pieces of knowledge every day. We are generating trillions of pieces of information every day. Information is defined as facts provided or learned about something or someone. Yes, we are inundated with information, and most of it is useless. I don’t need to know anything about anyone named Kardashian, or anyone involved in a “reality” TV show, or any number of other things. Yet social media platforms and the Big Media push this stuff at us all day long.

Knowledge, on the other hand, comes from processing that information into something that makes sense in a greater context. Yes, we are inundated with information but many people don’t take the next step and process it into something more meaningful. We have to take pieces of information, review them, put them together with other pieces of information and get the “bigger picture”. For example, we can’t make a judgement about a person from one piece of information. It takes a great number of them, combined together and made sense of, to come to a conclusion about a person.

I would add that knowledge leads to another level, that of understanding. Even fewer people spend the time to think deeply enough to come to an understanding of the knowledge they have acquired. Generalist have a wide understanding of things, knowing a bit about a lot of subjects. Specialist have a deep understanding of one topic. All they do is spend their time thinking about one topic. They have gathered knowledge about their specific field and spent time thinking about it until they understand more about it than almost everyone else on the planet. Then there are polymaths who have a deep understanding of a large number of topics. I always wanted to be a polymath but I ended up being a Generalist.

The delivery mechanism of all this information tends to be social media and online videos. Yes, they are mostly vast wastelands of inconsequential stuff. They aren’t part of some evil nefarious Satanic plot as much as chasing the Almighty Dollar. It is a plot by the people who run them to make money off you. The more time you spend on the platforms the more money is being made off you. I’m sure there are political interest that are hoping you’ll be distracted enough by all the inconsequential shtuff that you won’t pay attention to their shenanigans, but that’s a topic for another time.

Another point the Pastor made was that his grandparents didn’t have the ability to get the type of information we can get today. Now, your name, address and phone number are available everywhere. (They are, but the majority of the places listing it make you pay for the information.) Well, his grandparents had the same access to that information. They were called phonebooks. OK, kids, they are like the contacts list on your phone, but they were printed on paper and bound into really thick books. They were distributed for free to every home in America. If you wanted to call your friend across town, but didn’t know their number, you looked it up in the phonebook. Think of something the size of one of Brandon Sanderson’s books, or one of the Wheel Of Time series and you get the idea. (Yes, the dead tree versions. The electronic versions will still give you an idea of the size but the physical version gives you a better understanding.)

Of course, Artificial Intelligence is the next evil. They were assigning many properties to AI that don’t exist yet. Most of what we call AI is a predictive text algorithm on steroids. It isn’t intelligent. It looks at the whole corpus of written material throughout human history and knows that if I say “Complete this phrase. A bird in the hand …” it will come up with “…is worth two in the bush.” Why? Because 99.99 percent of the time that’s how it came up in the writings of humans over time. If I say something like “Take the saying ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ but make it funny,” the AI might come up with something like “A bird in the hand is very messy”. Did it come up with that on its own? No. It came up with it because it was written somewhere and I put in a prompt that generated that response from the vast amount of information it has.

What about AI hallucinations? This is where AI will generate accurate sounding information that is completely false. In the computer field this is referred to as a hallucination. I once asked AI to give me the name of a TV show I was trying to remember. I gave it what I thought I remembered about it and I had one or two details wrong. It came back with the name of the program and a short synopsis about it. It then went on to give me the name and synopsis of a program that sounded like the first one but never existed. Did the AI come up with it on its own? No. It just output information that matched or were close enough to what I prompted it for to spit out the information.

AI generated art is similar. There are so many drawings, paintings and photos of, say, a lion, that it can assemble something that looks similar. But it isn’t creating it by its own thought processes. It currently is doing really sophisticated pattern-matching. They can match faces in facial recognition programs because they can pattern-match really well. They can also generate images of people the same way they generate an image of a lion. Yes, AI can generate videos of celebrities that look like the person and having them do things that the person didn’t do or say. Then again, movie special effects have done the same thing since the late 70’s. They’ve just gotten a lot better since then. If people just take the video at face value (taking in the information) and only react to that, then there is a good chance they are going to make decisions made on bad information. If they know more about the celebrity (knowledge) then they can try to make a judgement for themselves as to the veracity of the video. I’m fairly certain that a video of Mother Teresa shooting cocaine is a generated fake.

Another concern was that robots are going to take all our jobs. Yes, robotics are advancing. Yes, they will probably take over a lot of jobs. What do we do with the people who get displaced? Traditionally, every time his has happened in the past, those people went out and found new jobs. The justification used for robotic advancement is usually that any job that a person does now that could be done by a robot, we can replace the person to let them go do better things. I can sort of agree with that, especially as there are a lot of jobs that are pretty crappy and if a robot can do it, why not let them so people don’t have to do the crappy job anymore? Its a topic that should be covered in greater depth at another time.

AI is a tool, neither good nor bad. It’s how we use it that will either bring about great advances or terrible tragedies. It’s up to us to do the former and not the latter.

One other thing the Pastor lamented was that his ten year-old daughter won’t read a physical book. If she does read, she reads on her phone. (She also asks why she has to learn math because her phone will tell her the answers). He said the school systems discourage kids from reading or using the library. He said our generation wouldn’t have had that attitude. I had to stop him at that point.

“If your daughter doesn’t like to read, and has no appreciation for libraries, that isn’t the schools fault. It isn’t God’s fault, or social media, or politicians or anyone else. If our generation hasn’t passed a love of books and libraries to the next generation, that is OUR fault. We get the most influence on our kids.”

There were many other discussions about prayer in school and how the world is worse off than ever before, but they usually ended up at the same conclusion as I made. It is the parent’s duty to impart the lessons they think are important. That has always been true. It has also been the cause of society both advancing and stagnating. There are parents that hold on to outdated information and refuse to change their worldview. They push that on their kids and the cycle perpetuates. Other parents try to make their kids better than they were, which is also a mixed bag but generally lets some new ideas into the mix.

Ultimately, we are in a period of rapid change. Things change faster now than ever before in human history. For long periods in the past your life was mostly the same from the time you were born to the time you died. Now, the world changes on a daily basis. Change is scary. It forces us to adapt and that makes people uncomfortable.

Is it a sign of The End Of Times? Who knows? All we can do is try to ignore the useless information, process the useful information into knowledge, and use that knowledge to increase our understanding of the world to make it a better place. Let God worry about the end of the world.

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