And We Have Made a Beast

 

 

 

Qu’ran 27:82

And when the decree ˹of the Hour˺ comes to pass against them, We will bring forth for them a beast from the earth 

Revelation 13:4

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

 

And all the scientists and all the wise men from every corner of the world gathered in a great congress to see what the epitome of the fruits of their labors had brought forth. And after much deliberation and serious consideration they identified the greatest computer ever devised. So close to human intelligence that it was virtually indistinguishable. And they marveled and they said, “Let us propose a question so profound that mankind has never devised a suitable answer. And after much discussion a scientist sat before the magnificent machine and entered the question agreed upon by the learned men.

“Is there a God?”

And the computer silently began. Little dots began to appear on the screen, one by one, lining up in perfect order. There was silence in the room as the dots filled the screen for all waited in anticipation of the ultimate answer to the ultimate question and after several hours the screen went blank! Disappointment filled the room as all expected something, anything and then, letter by letter the answer came. And the scientists fell to their knees at what they had wrought. And the computer typed, “There is now!”

Verily verily I say unto you the Beast is not AI. The Beast is your illusion of AI. What you burn in your crazy minds that this new arrangement of subroutines and algorithms is anything but the same chicken soup with more salt. There are just so many things the shaved ape can do. Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun! Man makes the same mistakes over and over again trying to solve one simple equation. Looking at the mess his last ten thousand solutions have produced he looks upon the havoc and correctly thinks, “There must be something better than this!” So he comes up with a new religion, a new philosophy, a new government and at some time in the future he is right back at square one. That’s called “fundamentalism.” When everything gets so complicated that people start dancing with snakes in a church in Arkansas.

And now and again the ageless entity we call mankind rears its head. Just yesterday I read a paper on the study of a bit of sweet tar found. It had teeth marks in it and enough spit to extract DNA. And from that it was concluded that this chunk of whatever was 10,000 years old, chewed by a teenage girl and she had brown hair and brown eyes. At some point this Stone Age Juicy Fruit lost its savor and she spit it out along the side of the trail.

Now human nature tells me that all normal men are imagining the girl looking like the actress in the vintage movie 10,000 years BC but heed the words of my wisdom. She was most likely walking on her knuckles with fruit flies swarming around her ass. Hey! Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, right? Other than that the song remains the same. About the only thing we know for sure is that she still had two molars because she left impressions on the gum.

When computers made their advent sometime in the last century (God! That makes me feel old!) they were a marvel to behold. They could count. Well, they could differentiate between ones and zeros but who’s counting, right? The Astronauts went to the moon with what amounted to a Playstation to tell them where it was, and the GUI, or Graphic User Interface blew us all away. From there it was up up up with each subsequent generation of machines being hailed as the end of all things. And during this time, nerds the world over were inputting everything they could. But the key phrase there is “we’re inputting” because nuts and bolts will not know anything unless a human tells them!

Computers seem magical. The speed and efficiency have pushed man farther and farther. Then a new term came into being. Artificial Intelligence. “AI.” When you consider all things an abacus is artificial intelligence. Only it’s not. Humans move the beads just as humans punch the keys.

But the illusion. Oh, the illusion! Hollywood puts forth the idea that at some point “Artificial” will become “Actual” and will replace human intelligence. This is categorically impossible! As feverishly as the whistles and buzzers search the data they simply cannot originate an idea. They can come up with countless combinations, even outrunning man’s speed of computation but cannot and never will be able to come up with an idea that the bits and pieces did not come from a living being. So where’s the danger?

As man becomes familiar with the computer carrying the load he becomes lazy. And between the iPad and Skidity the head in the toilet toddlers know how to push icons on a screen but can’t say, “Mama,” or “Dada.” So, it is possible for humanity to fall behind and not evolve. At some point we must meet terminal velocity, which is no velocity.

The Alpha Generation is mostly lost. They scream when the WIFI goes down, their attention span rests somewhere around five seconds and the birth rate is diminishing in most developed countries. Man is limping to oblivion. Waiting, expecting the beast to save him.

People scroll on their phones, reading about things they cannot change. A war in some far away land that has absolutely nothing to do with them. Believe that they can affect global warming by eating more lettuce. Stress out over a meteorite hitting the moon. Actually believe the president has knowledge of their situation and all of these things are in some data base, put there by a person! Jesus said you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. Well DUH! Man’s inhumanity to man has been business as usual since Cheata picked up a stick. The earth heats up, the earth cools down. Every hear of an ice age? Where do you think the Sahara came from? The moon? Take a cheap telescope and look at that pin cushion. The president? When is the last time a president ever affected anything you did?

And through it all we waited for a beast to come and blow it all up. He didn’t come for 2,000 years so we built him. And we believed he would change the world, and it did. It changed us into the laziest most unproductive creature on the planet. And we are circling the drain. What’s that sound? Are those fruit flies?

The Reverend Wilbur