GOD Bless AI | AI Bless GOD : The Curious Case of building an AI GOD

The Singularity is a term people use to infuse paranoia whenever they’re talking about the future of AI. It’s a scary word, because it talks about the moment – impending or not – when computers will finally be smarter than humans, rendering us irrelevant and unnecessary, and ultimately, transforming the way our world works.?Singularity is the stuff of science fiction, and it’s scary because every year it feels more plausible.

In the next 10 years, AI will evolve to the point where it will know more on an intellectual level than any human. In the next subsequent years, AI might know more than the entire population of the planet put together. At that point, there are serious questions to ask about whether this AI — which could design and program additional AI programs all on its own, read data from an almost infinite number of data sources, and control almost every connected device on the planet — will somehow rise in status to become more like a god.

Recently,?reports surfaced?that a controversy-plagued engineer who once worked at Uber has started a new religion. Anthony Lewandowski?filed paperwork for a non-profit religious organization called The Way of the Future. Its mission: “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”

The Spiritual Correlation to Artificial Intelligence

There are some similarities between organized religion and how an AI actually works. In the Bible used by Christians, for example, there are many recurring themes, imagery, and metaphors. Teaching humans about religious education is similar to the way we teach knowledge to machines: repetition of many examples that are versions of a concept you want the machine to learn. There is also commonality between AI and religion in the hierarchical structure of knowledge understanding found in neural networks. The concept of teaching a machine to learn … and then teaching it to teach … (or write AI) isn’t so different from the concept of a holy trinity or a being achieving enlightenment after many lessons learned with varying levels of success and failure.

Knowledge has already separated from the human mind to be embodied in artificial intelligences like Siri. Navigation, once done by reference to the heavens, has become an exercise in submission to apps like Waze. Divine omniscience is replicated in the surveillance of life-tracking devices like the Fitbit. From medicine and economics to politics and warfare, artificial intelligence is starting to guide human affairs in a way religion once did. And as machines exceed our human ability to give structure and meaning to life, a sense of reverence kicks in.

So no matter whether Lewandowski founded The Way of the Future as a prank, a prospective tax dodge, or out of a genuine hope for the advent of a Godbot, the time might be right for the gospel of AI. The cultural groundwork is in place. Ancient concepts of revelation, transcendence and deliverance map easily onto new ideas of artificial intelligence, robotics, post-humanism and the predicted “singularity,” the merging of man and machine.

Building Divinity

Of course, this is nothing new. The Singularity is another quasi-spiritual idea that believes an AI will become smarter than humans at some point. Several experts have argued that the idea of AI becoming powerful enough for humans to follow them with a religious level fervour, is a lot more feasible than you might think.

One of the experts is Vince Lynch, who started a company called?IV.AI?that builds custom AI for the enterprise. Lynch even?shared a simple AI model to make his point. If you type in multiple verses from the Christian Bible, you can have the AI write a new verse that seems eerily similar. Here’s one an AI wrote: “And let thy companies deliver thee; but will with mine own arm save them: even unto this land, from the kingdom of heaven.” An AI that is all-powerful in the next 20-25 years could decide to write a similar AI bible for humans to follow, one that matches its own collective intelligence. It might tell you what to do each day, or where to travel, or how to live your life.

AI could appear to be worthy of worship, especially since the AI has some correlations to how organized religion works today. The AI would understand how the world works at a higher level than humans, and humans would trust that this AI would provide the information we need for our daily lives. It would parse this information for us and enlighten us in ways that might seem familiar to anyone who practices religion, such as Christianity.

The Adverse Side of AI God?

Of course, any discussion about an AI god leads quickly to some implications about what this “god” would look like and whether we would actually decide to worship it. Some of the implications are troubling because, as humans, we do have a tendency to trust in things beyond our own capacity — e.g., driving in a major city using GPS and trusting we will arrive safely, as opposed to actually knowing where we want to drive and trusting our instincts.

And, if an AI god is in total control, you have to wonder what it might do. The “bible” might contain a prescription for how to serve the AI god. We might not even know that the AI god we are serving is primarily trying to wipe us off the face of the planet.

Part of the issue is related to how an AI actually works. From a purely technical standpoint, the experts I talked to found it hard to envision an AI god that can think in creative ways. An AI is programmed only to do a specific task. They wondered how an AI could jump from being a travel chatbot into dictating how to live.

And the experts agreed that actual compassion or serving as part of an organized religion — activities that are essential to faith — go far beyond basic intellectual pursuit. There’s a mystery to religion, a divine component that is not 100 percent based on what we can perceive or know. This transcendence is the part where an AI will have the most difficulty, even in the far future.

Several experts suppose it would be extremely dangerous to have an all-knowing, thinking AI being someday. All computer programs, including AI programs, are built for a specific and narrow purpose: win a chess game, win a go game, reduce an electricity bill etc. The computer logic, even if it is advanced AI, doesn’t play well with a general will and general thinking capability that could at the same time design military strategies, marketing strategies, and learn how to play chess from scratch. For this reason, the scary part is not a potential super-thinker that could overthrow us one day — it is that the inventive and innovative part will always be missing.

Could we ever Worship AI – We already do

Will people actually worship the AI god? The answer is obvious — they will. We tend to trust and obey things that seem more powerful and worthy than ourselves. The GPS in your car is just the most obvious example. But we also trust Alexa ; we trust Google. When an AI becomes much more powerful, in 25 years, there is a great possibility that it will be deified in some way. (Apple and Google loyalists already have a religious fervorGod Bles.)

If an AI god does emerge, and people do start worshiping it, there will be many implications about how this AI will need to be regulated… or if necessary, contained