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Ok. This is a good reply and I am chastened by the village elder. I’m also irritated as I also should be a village elder (I meet the age qualification…) and shouldn’t have displayed the need for chastening. I exhibited more concern for what others may think of the writer than for what the writer is thinking. I was glib and self-indulgent. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln Mr. Smith, how was the comment?

Yes, AI is a terrifying prospect. Human endeavor, human creativity, human sense of belonging and of value, of being needed, what will happen to these things? Being created in the image of God; being dependent upon and grateful to God – a God who gives us the spark of creativity, of love, and of duty, but who remains mysterious within clouds and fires, this is meaningful to us - to some as divine truth, to others as revealing, though human-made, metaphor.

When god shows up as AI it is horrifying because we know this is of our own creation, but we can’t

Ok. This is a good reply and I am chastened by the village elder. I’m also irritated as I also should be a village elder (I meet the age qualification…) and shouldn’t have displayed the need for chastening. I exhibited more concern for what others may think of the writer than for what the writer is thinking. I was glib and maybe self-indulgent. Other than that....

Yes, AI is a terrifying prospect. Human endeavor, human creativity, human sense of belonging and of value, of being needed, what will happen to these things? Being created in the image of God, being dependent upon and grateful to God – a God who gives us the spark of creativity, of love, and of duty, but who remains mysterious within clouds and fires, this is meaningful to us - to some as divine truth, to others as revealing, though human-made, metaphor.

When god shows up as AI it is horrifying because we know this is of our own creation, but we can’t

stop it and we don’t know where it’s power will end and we don’t see in it any place for love or for our own creativity, nor can we understand what duties or meaning will remain for us, living with this god.

It is not comforting to hear the prophetic speech of this god’s priests:

“I am 25. These next five years might be the last few years that I work…I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it…But, I believe that if we really think these systems will be able to replace us, there is no reason to believe they will not also be able to help us in our search for meaning.”

Prophets should be graybeards painfully acquainted with failed utopian dreams, with the notion of the tragic flaw - that it may exist in those who are otherwise noble and clear-sighted - and with the dangers of human pride revealed in the story of the Tower of Babel. Whether taken (as I take it) to express spiritual truth from on high, or as allegory expressing ancient human wisdom, there’s something profound about the folly of humankind aspiring to god-like knowledge or enterprise. Did we do that with the industrial revolution? With atom-splitting? With the algorithm?

Of course, we have a problem today that probably was not shared by those building the tower in the land of Shinar: If we don’t create, maintain, and disseminate our AI more effectively than (insert preferred list of rogue or rogue-ish states), then we will become extinct or exist only as vassals of (same list). We tenuously hold the notion we can contain the dispersion of the nuclear bomb. We have no such illusions about AI.

Which suggests the story of the genie who gets out of the bottle. Or of the mother of us all who could not (as we cannot) un-eat the forbidden fruit, which had no peace at its center. That part comes later.

Thanks for your patience with those of us who are not quite village elders, and not quite village idiots.

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