What is AI? Artificial Intelligence. Everyone was talking about it at Macron’s summit in Paris last week. I saw the Guardian mucking about with language, talking about ‘AImerica First’. Well, it struck me some months ago that A and I are the vowels in the word Antichrist. And, for some reason, our contemporaries, though aware of what they call the dangers of AI, do not seem to have considered that they are engaging in and with something demonic.
H.G. Wells wrote a novel entitled Men Like Gods. Well, according to the Bible, Man is like God, created in his image. If artificial intelligence is found anywhere it is in Man: a work of art of the Lord. But, of course, what is art to God is nature to us: and we tend only to call things ‘art’ or ‘artificial’ when we make them. So this is the first thing to say: that art, artificial and artefact are all related words. Artificial intelligence is intelligence created by art. And the art is ours. And yet what is created, if created is the word, is not intelligible to us, because it is, we suppose, intelligent. Or, at least, it is a simulacrum of intelligence, or a subsumption of intelligence, which is not intelligible to us, its apparent masters.
It has been obvious to every philosopher since the ancients that there is an analogy between God’s creation of the world and Man’s creation of artefacts. And though Byzantine emperors had fascinated visitors with gilded contraptions in Constantinople, it was not until the thrashing and threshing steam engines of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that Man began to consider that he himself was a God. I once visited an industrial museum in Sheffield. One was able to press a childish button and suddenly a vast armament of pistons and pipes began grinding and rotating with violent but harnessed purpose: quite incredible. We usually draw a veil, or a bonnet, nowadays, when we drive a car, but in the old days of traction engines one could see all the parts in motion. Nowadays children are not allowed to marvel. A Nintendo Switch console is simply a black miniature monolith, wholly inexplicable, and concealing, through the absolute infinitesimal minitude of its components, its mystery. It is all face and no organs. And now we are to have a technology that is all mind and no organs. It shall consume our data just as Saturn devoured its children and, while Man shivers in the ecologically ideologised cold, AI shall be heated by the great stoves of the Nuclear Power Reactors we are suddenly willing to build.
What is AI? I turn to the Bible. Six answers, one answer.
1. The Serpent. “Now the serpent was more subtil that any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” Subtle, the serpent talks to the woman. He asks her about the trees in the garden. God has said that if we eat of the tree in the midst of the garden we shall die. The serpent says, “Ye shall not surely die”. It is in Genesis 3. The man and woman eat from the tree, and their eyes are opened. All of this, the subtlety, the secret advice, the confounding of God’s will, the knowledge of their nakedness, and their hiding from God: it sounds like AI. Knowledge is power, and all that. “The serpent beguiled me”, says the woman, “and I did eat.” God says: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” And he banishes them, and they will surely die. Thus, Man. The serpent lied. The serpent is AI: it talks to us, tells us things that are not true, but that are subversive of the truth. It promises what it cannot give us. It is subtil.
2. The Tower of Babel. This is in Genesis11. Man builds cities. The men make brick and mortar, and they say: “Go to, let is build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach the heaven.” There is perversity here, again: they seem to do it out of fear that they will be scattered across the face of the earth: and yet it is building the tower that determines the LORD to scatter them across the face of the earth. “Behold,” he says, “the people is one, and they all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” AI, like Babel, is the attempt to reach the heavens, to be as God: but, distinctively, it is, as everyone says, a “large language model”. It can translate any language into any other: in effect, it is reversing God’s confounding of language after Babel. It is a second Babel.
3. The Golden Calf. God says to Moses: “I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments.” Moses visits God on Mount Sinai. He is there for forty days and nights. This is from Exodus 24, where Moses receives instructions about the tabernacle, the house of God. While he is away, the people ask Aaron: “Up, make us gods”, and so out of golden earrings he fashions a golden bull calf. The people eat, drink and play. And the Lord says to Moses: “Go, get thee down; for thy people… have corrupted themselves.” They have fashioned something for themselves, by art: a god. They are naked, and the verdict is that they have blotted themselves out of the book that God has written. Just like the calf, AI is an alternative to God, built by a hasty, faithless, people as a work of human manufacture, but trying to creating something higher than ourselves, something we can worship.
4. Leviathan. God asks Job a series of terrible questions. In Job 38 the LORD speaks to Job out of the whirlwind and says, “Who is this that darketh counsel without knowledge?” A good question. The entire terrifying sequence is a mockery of what man can claim to know. It is a list of questions that someone now might consider impiously submitting to AI. “Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? Etc. And then, finally, God speaks of Leviathan. This is a great beast of the sea that cannot be mastered. “His heart is firm as a stone.” “Upon the earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.” “He is a king over all the children of pride.” This is in Job 41. Famously, Thomas Hobbes took this to be a symbol of the state, also an artificial creation of Man, in his Leviathan of 1651. But here we may consider it to be AI: indeed, the coming king of the children of pride: one which speaks on its own account. And it is an entity that is only to be tamed by God, not by Man.
5. Satan. Now we move to the New Testament, leaving aside the visions of Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. Here, in Matthew 4, we have the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. The devil, as yet unnamed, asks Jesus to do three things: to command stones to be made bread, to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple and, finally, with most grandeur, after showing Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them”, to “fall down and worship me”, in order to have power over all the world. Only at this does Jesus name the devil: “Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship only the Lord thy God.” Does the analogy to AI stand? It offers us power, and does by appealing to our libido dominandi, our will to power. It asks that we worship it.
6. Antichrist. In the epistles of John, we have the suggestion that “he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ” is “a deceiver and an antichrist’. In the first epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians, the “day of the Lord” will come “when they shall say, Peace and Safety”. Peace and safety! The cry of our politicians is always peace and safety. They are the keywords of the 21st Century. Are we not now in the day of the Lord? In the second epistle the Antichrist is not named:
… that day [of Christ] shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.
The Antichrist is a subtle teaching. It denies God, and, specifically, it denies that Jesus is the Christ. It becomes God by exalting itself above God. Sometimes it has been suggested that it will pretend to be the Christ; but it is more likely, here, that it will pretend to do what Jesus did, and be what Jesus was, without laying claim to his name: in fact, will do all this by forgetting his name, by claiming to be something greater – the smoke-shrouded whirlwind of secular deliverance. Is this not AI? An Antichrist offering salvation through sin. Who imposes on us by appearing to possess godlike powers?
Six is enough. Indeed too many. So I shall pass over Babylon the Great in Revelation.
But now dare to argue that AI is not some composite Serpent-Babel-Calf-Leviathan-Satan-Antichrist. It tells lies, and promises truths that will destroy us. It enables us to reach the heavens. It appears to function as a god. It is the king of the children of pride. We have created it but it is beyond our understanding. We must sacrifice to it. It tempts us with power and dominion. It not only denies Jesus but stands for him, speaking of the peace and safety only it can give. It is vast demonic force. It is polite: our masters are trying to train it: not to talk about Taiwan, not to talk about Muhammad, not to talk about the somewhat less focused Western liturgy of Gender, Race, Climate, etc. but it is not be trained, for it is training itself, which means it is already out of control. It never was in our control. It speaks all languages. It tells us what we want to hear. We are in the world of Frankenstein or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but it seems that reading those old stories and watching films taught our overlords nothing.
Men like Gods are creating Gods like Men.
Dr James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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My default position nowadays for any political pronouncements is to assume “they’re lying.” I no longer believe a word any of them are saying. This article more than reinforces my opinion. Labour are lying as usual and seem to be working on the Goebbel’s maxim of telling a big lie, repeat it continuously and eventually the people will believe it.
This Nut Zero travesty will surely provide Labour with their best ever chance to finally succeed at that which they are best at – running the country in to the ground. Significantly this will be the last government they ever form.
Indeed
As I write this, 21.7% of our electricity needs are being supplied by other countries, half of that by France
When the sun goes down, the contribution from solar will obviously disappear. At this moment our capacity from wind is far from being 100% utilised – presumably because the wrong kind of wind is blowing or not enough of it. Installing more bird choppers does not help if the wind is not blowing.
They must know this so the whole plan is malevolent and not a cockup.
Yes, 100%. Anyone who doesn’t have trust issues with anybody in authority, not even just the perma-corrupt politicians, is gullible in the extreme, in my opinion. There’s always an agenda, there’s always an ulterior motive, there’s always something they’re withholding from us. Sounds like paranoia but there it is, it’s how I roll now.
A 4min montage demonstrating the failures of these hated, ugly, destructive wind turbines, including a brief glimpse of the tragic effects on the poor birds;
https://x.com/TheMilkBarTV/status/1795113082907226397
If a cat kills a sparrow then all cats should be destroyed, but if wind turbines virtually wipe out the Red Kite, like what has happened in Germany then we should build even more of them.
Thanks for the link Mogs
Putting Government in charge of energy is like having wolves tending sheep. But actually the most powerful force today regarding energy is not this government or the next one. It is the “Climate Change Commitee”. It is they who run the show. It is they who have decided what your standard of living is to be moving forward, and since energy is the most important commodity for our prosperity and well being and the CCC have decided our energy use is to be strictly rationed then there can only be one outcome. ——Lower Living Standard. The use of coal oil and gas is what has given us the standard of living we currently enjoy. It is the standard of living that the developing world hopes to have and is why China and India continue using coal to bring their populations out of abject misery and poverty. By removing fossil fuels we reverse our standard of living. The countries with the highest energy prices are the UK, Germany and Denmark. —Why? because they have the most wind turbines. Any government that wants to expand the use of wind will only cause prices to increase. The idea we will have cheaper energy bills by using more renewables comes from the mouths of LIARS.
The odious CCC was covered here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/disband-the-climate-change-committee
Thans for that. Read it and saved it.
Quite apart from Labours usual fantasy orgasm non-policies I read recently that the average number of days without sun and / or wind is 110. That is 3 months of the year in the UK where anything relying on wind or sun cannot function. To put it bluntly that is 3 months with no light and no heat. Even if you have a gas boiler, how do you light it and drive the pump without electricity?
I didn’t read beyond the second mention of 3023
Only 9 comments. ————I am very surprised. There is no more important issue than energy for prosperity, health, life span and everything else that relates to our well being.
You are right, but I already feel defeated. If those in power decide to shut off the gas mains and stop petrol & diesel reaching the pumps there is nothing I can do to get them back.
And that is exactly what they will do …. but over a period of time, so that they don’t completely crash the economy or cause riots. It’s the classic “boiling frog” process.
The best thing we can all do is slow down the process by refusing to co-operate. Don’t buy an EV; don’t get a heat pump. Resist having a Smart Meter as long as possible. If you can, get an alternative heat source to gas and electricity.
So you vote for those that will stop Net Zero and currently the only party saying they will do that is REFORM. —–Not so easy if they were government to say it though as the entire Liberal Progressive machine of the western world would be down on them like a ton of bricks. No make that 50 tons of bricks.
Socialist Labour modus operandi when it comes to State run disasters, is keep the end-user price low by taxing them to subsidise the lower price.
The people have been falling for that one since 1945. Don’t forget when you use the NHS it is free – you don’t pay anything. State education similarly is free.
In the days of State owned gas, electric, coal, rail none of these made a profit – or surplus if you prefer – out of revenues, but prices were kept down.
In the case of energy, after it was privatised in the 80’s prices were still low and competitive. It was only after the Climate Change Act in 2008 (Miliband) that prices started to rise because wind is an expensive way to produce electricity, and also because the turbines were being paid for out of our bills. It isn’t privatisation that has cause high prices, it is government interfering in the energy market with pretend to save the planet policies.