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Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Offsite Post: ‘AI and the Image of the Beast at the End of the World’

 

Essays on the evils of AI are a dime a dozen, but this report from BusinessInsider.com (via the Children’s Health Defense web site) seemed to reveal something new:


Billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen — who has long been bullish on the tech — thinks AI is a lifelong "ally" for the children of tomorrow as they both grow up together.


Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast last Wednesday, Andreessen shared how he had introduced his 8-year-old son to the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT as an educational tool.


"The AI that my 8-year-old is gonna have by the time he's 20, it's gonna have had 12 years of experience with him, and so it will have grown up with him. It will know everything he's ever done." Andreessen said. "It'll know what he wants."


The cofounder of namesake VC firm Andreessen Horowitz talked about how AI can serve as a lifelong "ally" for his son and future generations. "They'll have basically a partner whose goal in life will be to make them as happy and satisfied and successful as possible."

This should alarm Orthodox Christians.  Every child, Orthodox or not, receives a Guardian Angel at his conception.  Furthermore, every Orthodox child, at his baptism, receives a Patron Saint.  These holy protectors, Guardian Angels and Patron Saints, are the God-given ‘allies’ with whom Orthodox children ‘grow up together’, who ‘know everything they’ve ever done’, who are their ‘partners’ whose ‘goal in life’ is not to give the children what will make them ‘happy, satisfied, and successful’ in a worldly sense but who will lead them safely through fallen earthly life to the Kingdom of Heaven.

But our Big Tech overlords, per the above, are intent on replacing the heavenly protectors of Orthodox children with an AI simulacrum.  The AI allies are a return to the demonic soothsayers that the Old Testament Law proscribed.  Some words from the Holy Elder Cleopa Ilie of Romania seem to bear this out.  Rather than trusting in God’s will for us as revealed through the revelations of the saints and angels, etc., unbelievers turn to the spirits of the dead (i.e., demons) and mediums in order to know what path to walk in life.  Elder Cleopa writes,


‘The conjurors have the aim and the need to call upon the spirits of the dead (I believe, however, that in fact they are spirits of demons which appear in the form of the spirits of the dead) in order that they may reveal to them certain secrets that relate to the future of the dead or other curiosities forbidden by the law of God.  Listen to what Holy Scripture has to say:  “And when they shall say unto you, seek unto the necromancers and unto the soothsayers, who chirp and who mutter, Shall not a people seek unto their God?  On behalf of the living should they seek unto the dead?  To the law and the testimony!  If they speak not according to this word, for them there is no daybreak’ (Isaiah 8:19-20; The Truth of Our Faith, 3rd edn., Peter Alban Heers translator & editor, London, Ontario, Uncut Mountain Press, 2007, pgs. 234-5).

These words are very apt, for what do our AI chatbots do but ‘chirp and mutter’ revelations to people who are not content with what the All-Holy Trinity has revealed to us?  Elder Cleopa warns us about this:  ‘Indeed, in the Divine Revelation that was given to us with Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition we lack nothing in the way of knowing about our salvation, nor do we have need to seek from the dead – or better, the demons [or even better, AI!—W.G.] – something favourable to our salvation’ (p. 235).

He adds to this the following:

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/ai-and-the-image-of-the-beast-at-the-end-of-the-world/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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