Billionaires become doomsday prophets without God – 04/15/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

I can’t resist the temptation to start this column by repeating a classic joke about the beginnings of computing. It is said that, in the 1950s, when the US put its first supercomputer into operation —a tube monster, bigger than most São Paulo apartments today—, President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) would have asked the machine if God existed. The answer: “Now there is.”

Well then: it’s hard to escape the feeling that, when it comes to artificial intelligence, there are a lot of powerful people out there agreeing with Eisenhower’s interlocutor. Billionaire investments in the area, with all that classic aversion to criticism or external regulation so dear to Silicon Valley, are often accompanied by the belief that it would be desirable and/or inevitable to develop artificial intelligences similar to or superior to humans soon. For yesterday, if possible.

And it doesn’t stop there, of course. This week the appeal of one of these futurists made the rounds on social media so that we obtain the maximum amount of audio and video recordings of our elderly loved ones. The reason: with advances in AI (I’m going to have to cut this thing short, there’s no way out), we’ll soon be able to use this data to create extremely realistic computer simulations of whoever will let us. Want to talk to the late grandpa? Just download this application here, look.

That is, the subjects not only want to entrust AI with the task of creating God —or something far superior to a human being, at least—but they also think it will open the doors to immortality.

After taking a deep breath, saying an Our Father and a Hail Mary, and thus taming my instinct to shower anyone who defends this type of thing with chairs, I realized something curious. The new heresy of the AI ​​devotees is, deep down, nothing more than a secularized —and therefore (superficially) non-religious— version of one of the oldest strands of Christian theology: millenarianism.

Brutally simplifying a theological discussion that could be a book, we can say that one of the great inspirations of millenarianism is the videogame-paced narrative of the book of Revelation, the last one in the Bible. It is also common, nowadays, for this current of thought to manifest itself through the belief in the rapture, the supposed dramatic moment in which true Christians would be raptured to heaven body and soul. (It is no coincidence, incidentally, that the idea of ​​”uploading” human consciousness to a computer has been dubbed the “geek frenzy”.)

In common with Christian millenarianism, the beliefs of AI devotees (and also those who think that biotechnology will be able to produce some form of biological immortality) have as a corollary the possibility of a kingdom of heaven to be experienced soon, here even on Earth.

There is another similarity even more disturbing: sectarianism. While Christian millenarians believed (and some still believe) that only a handful of God’s elect will have access to the keys to the kingdom, the paradise of devotees of AI and biotechnology is for those who can afford it.

I am not convinced that it is possible to create an AI with intelligence similar to or superior to that of humans, and it seems to me practically certain that the search for biological immortality ignores basic aspects of the functioning of living beings. But, even if such ideas were feasible, the essential thing is to realize that they spring from the most scrotum of human nature. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that all attempts by millenarians to wield power in the real world ended in disgrace for all involved. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

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