What about AI that concerns you the most? I can tell you mine.
The deception of AI.
Although AI will not actually become conscious, people will subjectively believe it has gained consciousness, and the humanity will succumb to a fake superior intelligence, and enter into AI-induced degeneration.
The objective truth and the subjective human understanding can be very different. And the subjective human understanding about AI will have consequences built upon the misunderstanding itself.
AGI
AI will never objectively achieve super AGI (artificial general intelligence) that has independent consciousness.
Many warn that such super AGI will gain consciousness, become sovereign, and surpass, control, defeat and eventually destroy humanity.
That is a lie designed to deceive. It is all based on sci-fi infested imaginations. People who have such beliefs are either disillusioned or just pretentious.
In many aspects, AI is already vastly more capable than human brain, manifesting superior ‘intelligence’. And the gap is bound to be further widened. It is even conceivable that subjectively very convincing AGI may emerge in the future.
But consciousness is of a fundamentally and qualitatively different nature.
Consciousness
“Consciousness is an ontological primitive. It is not derived from things. It is not secreted from the brain.”
– Dr. Iain McGilchrist, neuroscientist and philosopher.
I mostly agree with him.
The reason I qualified my statement above by the word ‘mostly’ is because I do not believe human consciousness is entirely independent from and pre-existing prior to human mind. It is a result of interfacing between the spirit and the physical (brain specifically). And the spirit was ‘breathed’ into Adam by the Creator (Genesis 2:7). It is therefore a mixture, but primarily prior to the brain. But that is a different topic.
There is a fundamental difference between the very root premises of the two opposing views of consciousness.
This difference can never be resolved through a debate, because they relate to the very faith of a person, whether the person places his faith in the material as its own pre-ontological being, or in the Creator of every being other than Himself the ‘I AM I AM” (Exodus 3:14).
See more: Why AI will never replace true humanity.
Consequence of subjective misunderstanding
However, the subjective human perception can be very different from the object of truth. What I do worry about is the subjective human understanding about AI, and the consequences that will be built upon that misunderstanding.
I’m not referring to the theoretical things, like things people write about or talk about today, including myself. These don’t matter that much. What matters is how the mass will receive and process the information that AI produces through programmed synthetic knowledge.
Deep bias is guaranteed. A deceptive appearance of super intelligence is also guaranteed. Then this will all play into the entire human cognition and knowledge depository, with increasing distortion of truth and proliferation of lies.
The above is the main thrust of my article “AI is not Generative, but Synthetic“, in which I described a three-tier human knowledge acquisition process and depository structure, and followed up with three questions at the end of the article. I did not answer those questions directly in my article, because I wanted readers to reach their own.
But I can tell you my prediction here: The world will be increasingly polarized by AI, in a way that is unnoticeable to most people and even hard to detect for people who are on the lookout. But it will happen steadily, taking a typical exponential path of growth. An increasing number of people living on earth will be subject to, and also become passive participants of, the AI degeneration.
It will happen not in spite of usefulness of AI, but because of it.
All this will happen with very little social resistance, because the AI movement will compensate (bribe in effect) the world with great utilitarian benefits. Extremely useful applications will be created, and powerful tools will be provided to benefit numerous aspects of human life.
Deceptiveness of AI
The AI deception is already happening. Whether the promoters of AGI machine consciousness are intentionally deceiving others is less important. People like Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAi) do not appear to be intentional deceivers. They speak of their own mind and ideas. But they are part of the greater scheme of things, under the influence of a force that they may not be aware of nor acknowledge.
In addition to faking consciousness, AI will also fake emergent properties in order to appear to be genuine generative new intelligence. But when such fake emergent properties cause social concerns due to their apparent fragility, companies behind such AI will use task forces to create an appearance of ‘antifragility’.
But real antifragility requires systems with real emergent properties. Although not every emergent property has antifragility, real antifragility must be an emergent property of a complex system. If the system does not have antifragility, then that in itself is truth, better than fake antifragility. Antifragility doesn’t only mean that the system is fragility resistant, but rather that the capability of the system to resist fragility actually increases as a result of external stress. For an AI system to be genuinely anti-fragile, it must not gravitate toward given ‘attractor’ defined by external human actors, but rather must have, at least, an inherent natural convergence (pointal, orbital, or fractal). But with a man-made data/software system such as AI, it is easy to fake an emergent property using human-defined or influenced attractor to which the system is designed to converge. It is just a more obscure and more clever way to have a pre-programed result.
My concern is that AI will create fake attractors, which are not a real natural emergent property, but just a masked collective effect of selective human input. If they can fake free will consciousness by adding randomness to the system, they can certainly convince themselves, and the world, their selective mindset has emerged as the next natural state of humanity.
My prediction of the outcome of AI, again, is that it will be a great deception accompanied (sold) with a powerful lure of great utility.
But there will be some people, I suspect it would be only a minority, who will not be deceived. These are people who have the spirit. Increasingly, it will not be the natural intelligence that is the key to navigate the world of misinformation driven by artificial fake intelligence, but the guidance of the Spirit of God.
This is the characteristic of the end times. People who read and understand the book of Revelation will understand what I’m describing.
As far as the society as a whole is concerned, I do not believe there will be a solution. History will go the way the Scripture has prophesied and no one can stop it. This is not a pessimistic view, because according to the Scripture, the degenerated world will end in destruction, but the regenerated will end in glory in Christ.
Political means may be helpful in protecting the world from a too-swift mass destruction. This may be a part of the earth that devoured the waters coming out from the dragon’s mouth (Revelation 12:16). But even there, it is what belongs to God that is going to be saved.
AI is on a set path. The spirit of deception is already at work. People will be deceived unless they have the Spirit of truth.
That’s why I have already concluded that what is going to happen will happen, and there is no collective and political salvation to the society as a whole. But each individual will find his own personal salvation. It is a matter of personal faith, not a matter of social movements or mass politics.
In case I may sound too denigrating about AI, I’d like to again point out the usefulness of AI, a point emphasized in my previous articles.
One major reason why AI is unstoppable is its usefulness, which will be its draw, attraction, and power excised upon people. It is already useful, and its usefulness will increase exponentially in the future.
For example, AI applications similar to ChatGPT are going to drastically change how people learn and think. And this is not a small thing.
So in the near term, there will be an explosion of human knowledge.
But why worry then? Because I’m afraid that under the influence of AI, the following might happen:
(1) human creativity decreases, not increases, and
(2) human ability to discern what is truth and what is a lie, what is proper authority and what is not, etc. also decreases.
As a result, the acquisition and development of human knowledge will eventually be controlled by AI, and the whole thing will become a thermodynamic system controlled by the second law of thermodynamics (which dictates that the total entropy of a closed system always increases). This is the opposite of what’s imagined by the sci-fi infested futurists. Information will seemingly increase (when measured by entropy), but true knowledge does not.
From a fundamental viewpoint of economics, not only is interactive AI like ChatGPT not generative, but is going to be degenerative in the long term, because it is equivalent to a business model that has superhigh efficiency in consuming the existing resources (knowledge accumulated in the past, in the case of AI) without sufficient reproduction to replenish it, let alone to further increase it.
Even more fundamentally, the system loses order and becomes orderless, which in biblical terms is the fundamental ‘lawlessness’, a satanic influence on the universe.
That is an overall state of the human system. But individuals who have discernment will survive and may even benefit from the available tools. Tools are neutral, like any technology. They are amplifiers, not sources.
But such discerning people will be a minority. Very likely a small minority.
When I say ‘survive’ I do not mean it in a carnal sense, but rather in a spiritual sense, because in the end times, the beast will rise which represents carnal power and adaptability but spiritual death in reality.