Tag: philosophy

The AGI Tower of Babel

In the Book of Genesis, humanity speaks with one tongue, resolving to build a city and tower “whose top may reach unto heaven.”

The intended purpose of the tower is not just for shelter or utility but for self-exaltation, as illustrated by the verse, “Let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The project is breathtaking in ambition and terrifying in its implication. It is an overt attempt to storm the divine realm through collective human will.

God looks down, sees their unity, and declares that “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” He then confounds their language and scatters them. The tower is left unfinished, a monument to hubris.

As may have been predictable, tech driven members of our society appear to be building that tower again. Only this time the bricks are silicon, the mortar is computer code, and the “heaven” that is being sought after is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

AGI has the capacity to reason, invent, and act across every domain in a far superior manner than the greatest geniuses among us.

To understand AGI we must do a comparison between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AGI.

Imagine a super-smart computer or robot that can do any kind of thinking task that a human being is able to do, only in a much faster and advanced way.

Right now most AI technologies are “narrow,” meaning that they are really good at one specific thing. For example, one AI might beat you at chess, another might write poems, and another might translate languages. But they cannot easily switch over to tasks for which they were not trained.

However, when it arrives AGI is going to be very different from AI. It will be able to learn new skills on its own just by searching, reading, and watching. It will be able to program itself, train itself, replicate itself, and improve itself. And by using this self-training, it will be able to grow its abilities at lightning speed.

It is easy to see why the race for AGI is no longer just about science or product competition. AGI looks to ultimately be able to complete thousands of years of human thought in a single solitary moment.

Scientists have not built true AGI yet, but many people are working to do just that. Experts say it is set to arrive in years as opposed to decades.

The above noted parallels between the Tower of Babel and AGI are not poetic license. The world’s brightest minds are actually speaking the same language, the language of code, math, and data.

Despite the appearances of a rivalry between companies and/or nations, the underlying project feels eerily unified in nature.

What looks to be a competitive frenzy may be masking a deeper convergence.

Everyone understands that the first to win the AGI race will not only rule, the victor will have a potentially permanent advantage in the area of intelligence itself.

Biblical metaphors seem fitting.

A growing faction within the AI race is no longer framing AGI as a powerful tool, or even as a transformative technology. Instead competitors, both openly and in private, speak of creating a “god,” i.e., a super-intelligent entity whose alignment with their own interests effectively crowns them with the title of “all-powerful.”

The underlying logic is brutally Darwinian: Whoever is the first to birth the super-intelligent god ascends to the rank of high priest.

Researchers are describing the moment of AGI’s arrival in religious terms. The ongoing race has ceased to be commercial or geopolitical. It has actually acquired a zealous urgency to create the god before the competition does. Then you will not only win, you will transcend.

You will be the triumphant one. The one who chose correctly. And the one that history will remember as having ushered in the next stage of existence.

Lose, and you risk being rendered irrelevant by someone else’s deity.

The ancient builders of Babel looked to make a name for themselves. Today’s builders are looking to make a god for themselves.

Perhaps the confusion of tongues, which stopped the tower from being built, will arrive in the form of technical failure, regulatory intervention, or a sudden realization that an intelligence vastly superior to our own may not remain grateful to its creators.

Or perhaps the intervention will be a morally based one. The moment in time when the realization hits that in trying to become gods, humanity becomes complicit in making itself obsolete.

The clock is ticking, and the AGI Tower of Babel keeps on rising.

No longer is the question whether or not we will witness the completion of the tower.

Rather, it is whether or not we will still have the wherewith-all to look up and ask what exactly is being created.

The Crawl toward Communism

Communist ideology should have been sidelined decades ago.

That’s what so many of us thought was going to happen after the Soviet Union collapsed back in 1991.

Instead the malignant ideas and strategies of communism, derived from the twisted mind of Karl Marx, gained a significant academic, institutional, and cultural foothold in the Western world.

Here’s a brief summary of how things played out.

Just about the time when the 1970s counterculture appeared to be fading away, a quiet yet insidious revolution was set in motion here in the United States.

There was no red flag waving in the air bearing a hammer and sickle. Rather, a long march through American universities began to take place.

New Left radicals weren’t storming barricades. Instead they were earning PhDs. Humanities and social science departments became ideological echo chambers.

Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s theory on how the ruling class maintains power, and also the Frankfurt School’s critical theory that derided capitalism and promised social liberation, communist principles became the blueprint for how to deconstruct a societal framework, with the ultimate goal of supplanting it with a Marxist one.

In order to accomplish this, a battlefield had to be set up. The one chosen was that of “The Oppressors vs. the Oppressed.”

Through the fomenting of class envy and the assigning of victim status, members of society were pitted against one another.

What was already entrenched in the halls of our universities quickly spread to our elementary and high schools. Then like dominoes in a row, our federal and local governments, corporate boardrooms, news agencies, internet platforms, and even our Hollywood studios simply gave way.

Communism has been described by some as progressivism, democratic socialism, etc. But call it what you will, it’s just plain old communism, forever seeking the gradual ideological capture of the systems that comprise our societal pillars.

Which systems? Government, legal, education, economic, business, and media, to name some major ones.

Looking back, it seems that for America communism was custom-tailored to focus on culture and identity, a relatively easy way of conditioning our society to turn against neighbor.

It was then marketed, i.e., propagandized, to an already-primed public in order to reshape institutions from within.

We need look no further than our universities to see how the reshaping from within worked to our country’s immense detriment.

The faculties of almost all of the elite universities in our nation have come to lean decidedly to the far-left politically. In most cases, there are entire departments that are devoid of any dissenters to the dominant ideology.

As would be expected, graduating students of these institutions are highly knowledgeable on the topics of “systemic oppression,” “equity,” and “decolonization.” But they are woefully ignorant with regard to the death toll in the millions, which occurred at the hands of history’s most notorious communist regimes.

Sadly, the same communist-laced curriculum easily made its way into our preschools, elementary, and secondary schools. Consequently, far too many of our youth now find socialism and communism acceptable, and sometimes even preferable, than the representative republic that has secured our freedom for just short of 250 years.

Of course, a sizable portion of our Democrat politicians, major corporations, news media outlets, entertainment industry, and internet platforms have played a major role in the crawl toward communism.

We have heard a whole lot of talk over the last few years about existential threats.

It appears that we are currently facing a potential “Mother of All Existential Threats”; that being that communism could seep into our hearts, minds, and souls under the cover of virtue.

Whether the unthinkable occurs in a single stroke or bit-by-bit, the end result is the same. The America we love and cherish ceases to exist.

This is why we are duty-bound to reverse the trajectory.

A good place to start is to hold accountable the politicians who are already out of the communist closet.

This is an imperative since having avowed communists holding public office is a fairly new occurrence. Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t cozy up to communist candidates until somewhat recently.

Another idea is to join in on the religious revival that’s been going on, if you haven’t already. Nothing like faith, hope, and love to turn your world around.

May God bless America, now and forever.

The Long-term Consequences of Moral Relativism

Moral relativism is a philosophical construct in which there are no objective moral truths. There are only subjective truths that are shaped by a society’s hierarchy of authority, cultural norms, and myriad feelings on the part of its individual members.

In this article, I will attempt to give readers some background knowledge about:

– Moral relativism;

– The manner in which the construct has in a major way supplanted our nation’s long-standing moral framework;

– And the danger that moral relativism continues to pose for our society should we fail to reverse course.

In the United States, the concept of moral relativism first emerged within our universities. Then slowly but steadily it seeped into our governmental structure and our culture at large.

Its origin can be traced to the works of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University. Boas set out to destroy the concept of ranked cultures, i.e., that some cultures can be assigned higher or lower rankings than those of others.

Boaz and company insisted that each culture must be evaluated on its own terms and is never to be judged by external standards.

This cultural relativism quickly metamorphosed into moral relativism, meaning that no culture’s moral system should ever be assigned a higher or lower ranking than that of another.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Boaz’s students (which included cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict) turned moral relativism into a popular doctrine. By the 1960s, the construct had handily made its way into the popular culture.

The relativistic views of Mead and Benedict were routinely cited as a means in which to argue that the acceptable standards of the times were, in actuality, just one cultural option among many.

By the 1970s, largely due to the implementation of multicultural education, the idea was put forth that diverse cultures have diverse moral frameworks, and imposing one group’s values on another is, in essence, a form of oppression.

So here is where we find ourselves today.

What started out as an obscure academic theory is currently the predominant operating ideology of many who hold the reins of power in our country.

Moral relativism was pushed upon our society, and it slowly and insidiously demolished a major portion of our shared moral framework.

It promises liberation but delivers anarchy.

It tells each and every individual that it is perfectly acceptable to make up your own personal rules.

It obliterates the lines between right and wrong, allowing for extremism to be justified and enabling those who wish to harm others to rationalize their unthinkable actions.

Is it any wonder that after decades of moral relativism imperatives, our society is no longer able to agree on the basic definitions of right and wrong?

For many of us it is painfully apparent that we are now living through the wretched fallout of relativistic thinking as it pertains to society’s moral code.

As we have seen, moral relativism all too frequently leads to deadly consequences.

Through tear-stained eyes we saw waves of unspeakable violence crash from shore to shore. And even as we watched we knew in our hearts the tempest was in no way over.

When a society accepts the idea that “truth” is whatever feels authentic, objective standards cease to exist. If everything is permissible, nothing is protected.

Without a common moral foundation, there is no debate over the best means to shared ends. There is only a raw power struggle in which violence is acceptable and might makes right.

Western civilization was built on the conviction that certain truths are self-evident; that human beings are created equal in dignity, not outcome; that rights come from God rather than government’s whim; and that marriage and family are society’s cornerstones.

Many have abandoned these shared principles in favor of the shifting sands of “my own truth.” But a society that cannot agree on what is virtue and vice is one that is hurtling toward collapse.

What’s the antidote to moral relativism? Well, for starters, cooler heads, clearer thinking, and caring attitudes.

If our nation is ever to regain its moral footing, it is essential that our society return to the values that carried us through for centuries.

But here’s the catch. In order for this to occur, our people have to really want it.

The question is, Do enough of us?

The answer determines our destiny.