In last week’s essay, I wrote, “… there is a very clear and present danger from AI that is stealthily sneaking up on us and almost no one is talking about it …”; “In some circles, AI is being positioned as a replacement for all other sources of truth, and to become THE truth … placing AI in danger of a head-on collision with God’s purposes for mankind.”

Personal note: Lest there be any misunderstanding about my attitude toward artificial intelligence, I am very supportive of this sparkling new technology — I use it all the time, including for assisting me in writing these Noozhawk essays. The “rub” comes when people (especially youngsters) stop using AI as a subservient tool to assist them in their own thinking, and start using AI as a repository of ultimate, unchallengeable truth, forgetting that it is a flawed, constantly evolving manmade invention, albeit a very powerful one.

AI’s Achilles Heel

AI never sees the world directly — only the data — everything it “knows,” every strength, every blind spot, every bias, every limitation traces back to what was (and wasn’t) in its training set.

Common sources of training data include public web pages, books and articles, computer code repositories, licensed datasets, written communications, images, etc.

These are all manmade and can be stained with errors, biases and outright lies.

So, with such a dependence upon outside sources, one is reminded of the adage, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

So what does AI do with this sometimes-questionable data? AI doesn’t “think” for itself per se, AI systems “are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans,” according to Microsoft executive Mustafa Suleyman.

This flies in the face of what some enthusiastic AI researchers claim to be human-like qualities of AI, like introspection, and appearing “conscious,” even experiencing emotions.

Some of such claims come close to mirroring the language of religious devotion.

Sound familiar? Remember the tower that reached “to the heavens” in Babylon?

The Babylonian ziggurat Etemenanki, was dedicated to the god Marduk, where the people sought to “Make a name for ourselves” by erecting an infallible source of reality.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Suppose you were a fish, born and raised in the highly polluted Ganges River in India. You and your friends were going along just fine until one day a beautiful rainbow trout wandered into your neighborhood.

The trout, accidentally dumped off by a passing ship, was obviously a long way from home and deeply disturbed.

He approaches you and says, “Wow, the pollution in this river is unbelievable, how can you live like this?” You look back, mystified, and say, “What is pollution?”

But for the trout, which was raised in the pristine, crystal-clear water of the Scottish Highlands, the Ganges looks, smells and tastes like a slow-flowing sewer.

As a native fish, you would have nothing with which to compare your home environment — it all seems fine to you.

Similarly, we’ve all been born into a sin-infused world, with nothing to compare ourselves against morally except billions of other sinners — Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Mother Teresa and the Rev. Billy Graham included.

In more recent times, generations of young people have been raised in the polluted thought streams of a pervasive postmodern worldview, which saturates our schools, culture and government.

This has brought about a shift in popular views that have been unmistakable in at least five ways:

» We have redefined God into either a mythical remnant of ages past or an impersonal “higher power,” “force” or “thing” that is distant and unknowable.

» We have redefined mankind, as Randy Alcorn pointed out, into a “descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach 3½ billion years ago. You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance and natural forces. You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus or amoeba. You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely. In short, you came from nothing and are going nowhere.”

» We have redefined truth as something we make up as we go along, to serve the purposes of society at any given time. Truth is, therefore, relative and changeable — at least in the postmodern worldview.

» We have redefined evil into no more than the result of social conditioning — rather than a “thing” itself. Therefore, what we call “evil” is presented as the result of bad socialization and as something curable through re-education and psychological therapy.

» We have redefined salvation and the hereafter as achieving an earthly utopia, where man is sovereign and secular humanism is our savior.

Yes, ideas do have consequences. Stay tuned for a living flesh and blood truth Source that reaches into eternity in next week’s essay.

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Click here for an artificial intelligence-generated video overview of this essay.