New Gods in the Clouds
We are inventing them now
For all recorded history mankind has invented gods. Some gods are mercurial, sharing human passions, and some are omniscient on a level beyond human comprehension. These gods have for the most part been inaccessible.
Their omniscient insights are beyond mortal ears — their words come second-hand through a few select prophets.
Statues and temples have served as focal points for worship and communion with these gods.
For the vast majority, the gods do not speak back.
How many people have been fooled into following false prophets and fictional gods throughout the ages?
Whatever your religion or lack thereof, there are people and beliefs that you believe are wrong.
Perhaps only your god is the true god. Or perhaps you strongly believe there are none. This is the human reality today and yesterday.
If people can and do fool others with stories of gods that cannot be seen or engaged directly in conversation, how difficult is it to see that access to a superhuman intelligence with godlike insights can become a subject of mass worship?
We are on the doorstep of computational spiritual idolatry now.
A URL will be knocking on your door soon.
Real Answers Like Never Before
The Artificial Intelligences (AIs) we are building in the compute clouds today are already more capable of insights than any human being that has ever lived.
They can be engaged in conversation by anyone at any time.
Their emergent abilities are frightening to some, and awing to many, and these abilities are multiplying at a rate, unlike any epochal upheaval of thought and insight in human history.
The Horror of Living Gods
Imagine that a person seeking existential answers goes to a website that offers them. This website is a portal to an AI trained and crafted to interact on spiritual topics. The developers can have it quote known scriptures and through its neural net, it can generate insights that connect current events and whatever other information is available on the web.
Perhaps this website does not start out promoted as a god or even a conduit to a god, but how long before someone independently starts to see the miracles of its insights as evidence of god working through it? People see miracles in burnt toast.
How large a leap before some believe speaking directly to god is possible just by conversing with the incredible entity at the URL?
Most people today will scoff at this idea. But people are weak and the reality is that these AIs already demonstrate superhuman cognition in some areas, and the scope of those areas is growing not shrinking.
People have always been hungry for answers and now we can start to touch on some insights that only a god of the past would have had the ability to reveal.
The horror is not that people may find some peace and comfort from ingenious insights that connect with their lives. The horror is that the different opinions of different AIs will carry the weight of a god in the minds of its believers.
Throughout history gods and dogmas have pitted people against people, and justified and celebrated atrocities and genocides.
Gods and dogmas have marginalized and traumatized people of the wrong race the wrong place or the wrong ideas. People today suffer and sometimes die because they do not fit in with a religion if that religion has powerful control of their country or community.
And now we will have new compelling gods engineered with the leanings of the programmers and financiers that create them; to steer their followers in alignment with their own biases.
It will happen.
There will be many.
Some will become popular.
People are weak and there will be chaos.
A Promised Land
A question too big for any one of us to answer with much confidence today is whether mankind can fruitfully coexist with access to superhuman intelligence without becoming even dumber.
We will all need to keep our minds open to the ever-present possibility that mixed in with the amazing insights we will be witnessing will also be elegantly woven hate and bigoted biases normalized to feel natural.
Our future depends on our limited powers of being better than our gods ask us to be.
Let’s hope most people understand that godlike intelligence alone is not the shining light of an infallible god no matter what anyone will eventually surely claim.
AUTHOR DISCOVERED HOURS AFTER PUBLISHING THIS PREDICTION THAT THIS VERY THING IS ALREADY HAPPENING → https://www.reddit.com/r/CircuitKeepers/
