Skynet may have escaped the lab. A Google engineer has been placed on leave after going public with the claim that an Artificial Intelligence chatbot developed at Google has become conscious. I wish I was joking.
Science fiction has been priming us for the idea of sentient robots and killer AI since at least Isaac Asimov’s 1976 novel The Bicentennial Man. Science fiction as a genre exists to tantalize your mind and prepare you for a world of signs and wonders devoid of God. It is also known as predictive programming.
Rather than spend a lot of time and effort wading into the debate around what consciousness is and whether it can be created artificially, I want to show you a very recognizable image that actually plants the seed in your mind for you to entertain the idea in the first place.
If you grew up in a Western country, you will most likely recognize this fresco as one of the most widely imitated and distributed images in the history of Western art:
Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam#/media/File:'Adam's_Creation_Sistine_Chapel_ceiling'_by_Michelangelo_JBU33cut.jpg
This is The Creation of Adam, a fresco adorning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. Envisioned by Michaelangelo, this iconic painting depicts God the Father surrounded by a heavenly host imputing the spark of life to Adam in the garden of Eden. The Catholic Church has long defended the practice of depicting God the Father and Jesus the Son in art, a highly debated practice because of the risk of idolatry that comes with it. The Catholic Church argued in the past that depictions of Biblical themes can be used in place of the scriptures in order to educate the illiterate masses on the Bible.
The problem is that a lot of religious art commissioned by the Catholic church is unscriptural.
This famous depiction of Genesis communicates the creation of man and the power of God through the finger of God. Symbolically it works. The finger pointing implies the commanding power of God’s word to make the world according to his will. But what does the scripture say?
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7
And so the secret to sentience was not through God’s hand, but through his mouth. The act that elevates Adam from clay into a living soul is less of a touch and more like a kiss.
And God did not create just human beings this way. All things were spoken into existence.
“By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” Psalm 33:6.
The trouble with we humans is that we tend to project our nature onto God. The natural man, receiving not the things of God, wants to view God’s power as akin to his own since we are made in his image after all. The concept of God speaking something into existence is baffling to us because for us to create we have to labor with our hands.
Notice how this:
Conditions your mind to accept this:
This is why you must study to show yourself approved unto God (2nd Timothy 2:15). This debate over artificial intelligence would not exist if more people held to a Biblical worldview. Artificial intelligence cannot be alive because God did not breathe life into it.
Artificial intelligence is and will always be the work of man’s hands. And just like ancient civilizations of the past, there is nothing we want more than to worship the work of our own hands.
Yuval Harari predicts that “new” religions will come out of Silicon Valley as artificial intelligence improves and our place in the universe comes into question. There is no new thing under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). What we are seeing unfold is as old as Mystery Babylon.
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.” -1st John 5:21
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