1. Summarize this article
I gave a link to the NYT article "Can God Speak to Us Through A.I.? Modern religious leaders are experimenting with A.I. just as earlier generations examined radio, television and the internet."
2. Give me a one sentence answer to the question posed in the headline
3. So the article is incredibly boring compared to the headline
That reminds me. Soren Kierkegaard wrote: "Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be oneself." Blogged here in 2006.
Maybe you're one of those people who cue up "The Bible in a Year" podcast and listen to "Day 1: In the Beginning" on New Year's Day. If so, you've just listened to the story of creation and the interpretation that God "wasn't lonely":
He wasn't wondering what, what to do with his time.... He didn't need someone to do work for him. In a plan of sheer goodness, he freely created man — human beings — to make him share in his own blessed life. He didn't create us to be his entertainment, he didn't create us to be his pawns. He didn't create us to be his slaves....
Kierkegaard summed up the motivation in one short sentence: "The gods were bored, and so they created man." He continued:
Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.
"Constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens" = A.I.
But, yeah, I know, that NYT article is probably not about whether God can speak to us through A.I. According to the subheadline, religious leaders are just adding A.I. to their set of communication tools, along with radio, television, and the internet. And I've added A.I. to my set of communication avoidance tools. I asked Grok to read the article for me, found the summary too boring to read, asked for a one sentence summary of the summary, and, finding even that boring, looked for and found the escape route of boredom per se.
The 5th prompt: "What did Kierkegaard mean by 'Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be oneself.'"
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49 comments:
YouTube : Somebody who’s bored is asleep
MDWA reference should garner me bonus points 🤓
I think it’s more likely Satan is speaking to us through AI. That, in fact, is Marshall McLuhan’s thesis in “The Medium is the Message.” The media envelope in which we live is a creation of Satan. I hear the entire Bible in the Gospel at church over a three year period. We’re in Year C of the cycle.
Kierkegaard is like Trump: to be taken seriously, but not literally. I don't know why God doesn't speak to us. Maybe because the age of miracles has passed? Or maybe he does speak to some of us, just not to me, though I wish he would. Is it because I don't know how to ask properly? Or do I just not hear properly?
"Can God Speak to Us Through A.I." strikes me as insulting to religious people. In the Bible, God speaks through a burning bush. Presumably, God could use anything or nothing at all as a communication device. Building A.I. to provide God with a way to speak to us is like building the Tower of Babel. It's the wrong idea.
You hear the entire lectionary over three years, but that's not the entire Bible.
"I think it’s more likely Satan is speaking to us through AI...."
Makes me think of that hole in the ground somewhere — Siberia? — where people think they can hear Hell.
Oh yeah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell#:~:text=The%20%22Well%20to%20Hell%22%2C,it%20broke%20through%20into%20Hell.
Ai has been taught to lie so no
The “bias” of AI is quite interesting. The LLM vacuums up the internet, so whatever boilerplate crap is out there sort of wins solely on account of weight and mass. Thus, HR departments and college social studies departments are manufacturing tons of boilerplate and tossing it out there in the ether, so that crap dominates the “mind” of AI.
Should God actually speak to us through AI, we would likely treat it as a hallucination.
Romans 1:19-20
Its more like the Golden calf
My Norge Christian Scientist Grandmother said idle hands are the devil's playthings. I guess that means ADHD is a free pass to heaven
The idea of God's and morality are embedded in biology. Jordan Peterson has a nice talk about this discussing the altruistic nature of lobsters.
Church can be boring to people, because it's a place where people often seek to be good and to hide their badness. This is particularly true with people who are new to church. "I must hide my badness and fit in with all these good people by acting as if I'm a good person.
We're all good!"
Bible study is almost never boring, in my experience. That's because Jesus is the best rabbi the world has ever seen. And, if you're spending any time in the New Testament, Jesus is going to be leading your Bible study. Jesus spends a huge amount of time attacking hypocrisy and the putting up of a facade to hide your sins. He spent a lot of his ministry -- most of it -- outside the sacred walls of the temple. And this lover of peace got in fights with people all the time.
That is because when you bring the truth, there will be a fight!
And I can tell you from my screenwriting days that conflict is the heart of drama. The better the bad guy, the better the drama. My church rarely mentions Satan. Why would you skip over Satan and ignore him? You want to be nice! But it's also a recipe for boredom. I like church, it's sweet and friendly, but church -- especially my church, the Episcopal Church -- often avoids conflict and seeks to be liberal, nice, and loving to everyone. Church is nice. Bible study is where the action is.
Humanity has an animal side. And we appreciate a good fight, especially one with a good guy and a bad guy. If you find and read about Jesus, you will meet a man who is not scared about any fight with evil. Which can be very interesting for people.
Jesus and the Vigilantes
Ergo Zoe Saldana and Grover Cleveland’s First Lady.
"The teacher doesn't talk during the test" said my grandmother. That's always stuck with me. You're being tested. This is a test....of course the teacher isn't going to give you the answers.
Thanks Howard. I deleted my comment because I was being facetious about the characters in my little play.
Or to put it more succinctly, Christ is not boring. So God is not going to be boring.
Stephen King once wrote that "Hell is repetition."
Painful, and boring!
"I don't know why God doesn't speak to us."
If God doesn't speak to us, it is because we have no faith. My view is that the Christian world is again making the perennial mistake of honoring and worshiping the former dead prophets, and ignoring, rejecting, and opposing the current prophets that God is sending. Even when God's own son was sent, they rejected him under the banner of following Abraham and Moses.
This and this are very revealing and informative on the issue. If you chose not to read the content at the links, well....
(But then you're going to have to explain where the book actually came from.)
Sure, God can speak to us through AI. But if the words are read backward, it is always a message from SATAN, if I recall my vinyl record days properly.
And here is God speaking repeatedly between 1831 and 1845. This section in particular is illuminating and to me persuasive in its content.
(My fellow Christians here, I say it in love, but this was not done in a corner.)
God speaks to lots of people. You’ll find many of them in homeless encampments and asylums.
God speaks to lots of people. You’ll find many of them in homeless encampments and asylums. In fact, you’ll find God Himself there. Richard Gere made a movie about that, “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti”.
Yesterday Clyde showed that if you add the cubes of the numbers from 1 to 9 you get 2025. I asked Sider Fusion to add the cubes of those numbers and it got 1825. I told that was wrong and it "added" again and got the right answer. i asked it how it made that mistake because I have never had a calculator make a mistake and I thought AI was better than my Casio. Sider explained that its mistakes have sveral causes, two of which were "human error" and being "rushed." Since I didn't make the entries, there was no human error from me. I asked Sider what it meant by "human" error since it was not human and it explained that it relied on its algorithms which were sometimes "flawed in execution." That's known as making a mistake among us humans but apparently AI does not like to think that its algorithms make mistakes and it refers to such incidents as "human" error as if the person asking the question did something wrong.
Anyhow, this is the instrument people are using to try to communicate with God. It's just a tool.You might as well ask your hammer to prophesy. Does our Maker want to have anything to do with us or not? Why did he make us? with a heart and reasoning powers and a conscience if we're just supposed to play with the toys of our time which bore us after a short while? It seems to me that even Commie atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens have found that the way out of boredom is to try to live up to your conscience. But they do not think as we Christians do that their Maker cares what they do. That's why we have Christmas and they have Black Fridays where they stampede into stores and fight for material goods.
Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His Gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is His brother
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
Hear, hear St. Croix,
God is as boring as every inspired, creative thought is boring. God is as boring as every inspired act of goodness is boring. Evil or sin bring conflict and suffering if you prefer that not boring option.
Those who do not hear God probably do not give him time and space to speak. Christian practices of prayer and fasting are ancient aids. Stop with the mental gymnastics. Turn it off. Open your spirit and heart daily. Ask for His thoughts and then be patient and silent, listening. Accept the small, still voice that you receive and learn to discern it from your mental clutter. May you be blessed in your efforts.
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Hear, hear St. Croix! God is as boring as every inspired, creative thought is boring. God is as boring as every inspired act of goodness is boring. Evil and sin bring conflict and suffering if one prefers that not boring option.
Those who do not hear God probably do not give Him the time and space to communicate. Christian practices of prayer and fasting are ancient aids. Stop with the mental gymnastics. Turn it off. Open you spirit and heart daily. Ask for His thoughts and then be patient and silent, listening. Accept the still, small voice that you receive and learn to discern it from your mental clutter. Remember God owes you nothing but He does love you. May you be blessed in your efforts.
I wrote the above and pasted it on the comments and it did not appear. This has never happened before and I think it is the cutting and pasting that prompted it. Has anyone experienced this?
If God could speak to us, would we understand Him/Her/Xir/It? Would it sound more like some digital code or data dump, rather than comprehensible speech?
If a Being were conscious of every single thing going on in the world, would that Being be able to keep from going mad? If a Being had caused and intended everything going on in the world, would it be reasonable to conclude that that Being was mad? Asking for a friend.
Life first happened on this planet four billion years ago. The life forms kept combining and recombining in novel ways. Random mutations are an inherent part of the design. If this is God's plan, then you can't really say He's boring. God is something of a sensation seeker, always looking for plot twists and something new......The unfolding cosmos is a sensational event, but sadly only redwoods get to see even a tiny part of the drama........Homo sapiens didn't happen to about 100,000 years ago. They have only left a written record for about five thousand years.......It took about one hundred thousand years for mankind to develop the ball point pen. The nuns at my school didn't welcome the ball point pen. Friday was test day, and they made us write our test answers with a fountain pen. Technology moves quicker than religion and quicker than our understanding.
Shit, I just spent twenty minutes writing some really profound thoughts about Hegel and consciousness and the random nature of the universe, but they just disappeared into the blogosphere.
"Can God Speak to Us Through A.I.?"
If you answer yes to this you are starting down a road that will not take you to any good places.
A.I. is masturbation. It's okay, but there are better versions of humanity out there. You know, real humans, as opposed to recycled and reductive and repetitive words, stolen from humanity.
I wish our media was more interested in the miraculous creation of a human being, from nothingness. It is a God-like power to create a baby! Way more interesting than regurgitations of art in a soulless echo chamber.
God is speaking to us all the time. It's just that many people don't like what He is saying and so they ignore Him, or they have so many other things going on, so much noise in their lives, that they find it hard to hear Him.
Belief in G_d is a crutch to escape from the harsh reality of this Universe, just like habitual drug and alcohol use
That happened to me about an hour ago. Looks like it has been repaired, now.
Do you know that D_G is G_D spelt backwards?
God of course is not boring. Its God's self-professed friends and enemies that put people to sleep. Goddamn, there's nothing boring some midwit atheist rattling on about how God doesn't exist, and blah de blah. And as a sidebar, I've always found large parts of the Old testement incredibly boring. Its starts off well, Genesis, the 10 Commandments, Moses, etc. and trudges on and on without end except for a few exciting chapters like Job or Ecclesiastes.
The Old testament also allows Protestant's to start up all kinds of oddball religions. After all, didn't all those Old Hebrews own slaves and have fifty wives?
That's why self-study of the Bible without adequate background is so dangerous.
Acedia, a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world, was seen by monks as the root of many evils. One could say that was because they had already renounced the world, but the monks probably defined acedia as the state of not caring about the fate of one's soul or about the spiritual condition of others.
Acedia isn't unrelated to boredom. If you don't care about things, you will be bored. If you are bored, you've probably stopped caring about things. I would take Kierkegaard's "refusal to be oneself" to refer to refusing to be concerned about one's soul or spiritual state or to engage authentically with existence on the spiritual plane. I don't think he was talking about being interesting or an original and stimulating conversationalist, but then I haven't read Kierkegaard.
I do remember this - "What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps more familiar from Salinger than from Dostoevsky.
D_GE is E-G_D spelled backwards.
Maybe EL_N planned it that way.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." - John 1:1 KJV
Some people do seem to treat the output of "large language models" as gospel.
You mean to say "bird" isn't the word?
God is said to have a sense of humor. (How could God not, to allow us to continue what He started). AI doesn't get humor.
On the Seventh Day while God rested (or tried to), the Man and the Woman that He had created came to Him and said, Why did you create all this, the entire Universe, including us? If you were God, you would have said, Get away from me, don't bother me, I'm resting after creating the Universe. But God said, Because Creation is my nature.
Maybe God doesn't speak to us because ...
Let me put my atheism aside long enough to suggest that if there is a God then he (Or she? Why would God have a gender?) must speak to us nearly continuously, but way too many of us stupid humans are way to arrogant to listen.
But I absolutely would not look for AI to be the voice of God. One of the things that the developers of large language model technology was to teach their tools how to lie. And is not "the father of lies" one of Satan's many nicknames?
Article is paywalled,so please grant me absolution for not reading it. Does it mention using AI for exegesis? When I hit a difficult or interesting bit of scripture, I like to find out more: the linguistics, alternative translations, the historical and cultural background to the story, other parts of the Bible that echo it, etc, etc. Right now I am at the mercy of Wikipedia and Google. Has anyone tried using AI to analyze a Bible passage?
JSM
You mean to say "bird" isn't the word?
No, it's "grease".
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