This article raises questions which we have lightly touched on here at CF. In part 21 of the series on Cosmology Notes, I argued for the very old-fashioned idea of a Primum Mobile - a creator God, as such. The linked article happens to touch some key points that I plan to examine in more detail in Part 22.
"What [would] this 'god' look like and would [we] actually decide to worship it?" Worship is one of the key themes of the Bible. In the Bible, the conflict over worship is central to understanding the long-running war between God and his enemies, ultimately, the devil. In Christian theology, Isaiah 14 is held to be a key passage for understanding the devil's motive - to surpass God's own glory. The theme of glory and worship is unmistakably central to understanding the biblical canon. Regardless of what you think about the Bible's origins, this central theme itself cannot possibly be an accident. Whether it reflects humanity's obsession with the subject of worship or whether it reflects the revelation of a Divine being who demands worship, the subject of worship itself is central to understanding the Bible.
In a recent interview on the subject of AI, philosopher David Chalmers contemplated the possibility of a transcendent being, indistinguishable from an alien or artificial intelligence, having been the origin of our world, in every respect. He argues that such a being would not ipso facto deserve worship and that he, personally, would refrain from worshiping any such being since there is no positive reason for one consciousness to worship another consciousness. I think this view shows the paucity of the word "worship" in the English language. The word "worship" in English derives from the word "worthy" - to worship someone is to ascribe worth to them. So, when the angels in the book of Revelation say, "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise," they are literally worshiping the Lamb of God, that is, ascribing worth to God.
In the old world, worship was often demanded by kings and emperors. The Pharaoh or the Caesar would declare himself - or have himself anointed by the priests - a god-king or god-man and demand that his subjects bow before him and worship him. Of course, any such worship is ill-got - to call this worship is as muddle-headed as to call rape an act of love-making. But there is another idea of worship that is present in culture - the worship of love. Poetically, we can speak of lovers as engaging in an act of worship for one another. Christian theology sets out this idea of worship as a freely given act of love. The asymmetry of worship - that we worship God but God does not worship us - arises from God's kingship. And this is why Jesus spoke frequently of "the Kingdom of God", a category that derives from the Old Testament, as all of Jesus's teachings did. But unlike the kingdoms of the old world, no one is "conquered" into the Kingdom of God. The only way to end up in the Kingdom of God is to enter it, freely. So, we see that the Christian idea of worship of the Divine is free of the stain of human conceptions of worship - conquest, subjugation, rape and humiliation. The asymmetry of Divine worship is the inevitable logical consequence of the asymmetry between the Creator and the created.
"If an AI god is in total control, you have to wonder what it might do. The 'bible' [it writes] might contain a prescription for how to serve the AI god. [But] the AI god we are serving [might be] trying to wipe us off the face of the planet." This thought has interesting implications to reading the Old Testament where there is this very long-running relationship between what is really an omnipotent, alien intelligence - the Israelite God - and a human collective: the children of Israel. God has no form. He explicitly forbids representation of himself in any statue or image. God cannot be spoken to or related to by any ordinary person. Only by coming to the priests can a person speak to God and, even then, they must bring an animal or other sacrifice. God never explains his decisions or rules, he simply hands them down to Moses or the high priest or the prophets, and so on. The God of the Old Testament has a very distinct character - he is stern, even severe.
So, the Israelites are really in the same kind of situation in respect to their God as humanity would be with respect to a transcendent artificial intelligence with some kind of hypostatic, global agency. They have no choice but to trust that God is not trying to kill them, a point that Job underscores when he says, in the midst of his suffering, "Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him." An even more interesting point to consider is the distinct resemblance between the terms of the covenant that God makes with the Israelites in Deuteronomy and reinforcement learning, a technique used to train artificial intelligence systems.
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess."Will people actually worship the AI god? The answer is obvious — they will." This is another fascinating connection to the Old Testament. In the famous ten commandments, the first commandment that God gave to the Israelites is this: "You shall have no other gods before me." God goes on later to explain in detail that he will not tolerate the Israelites worshiping anyone else. The history of the people of Israel as it is documented in the Old Testament primarily centers around this conflict between God's demand for unqualified loyalty versus the Israelites' tendency to become enamored with gods from the surrounding cultures.
For people of faith, the emergence of a transcendent artificial intelligence will be a concrete test of loyalty - do you choose to stay faithful to your belief in God as he has revealed himself in the Bible, or do you choose to follow after a new god, a digital god? In a way, transcendent artificial intelligence places people of faith in precisely the same position with respect to their traditional faith as the people of Israel were in - always at conflict between the idols of surrounding cultures and the traditional faith they received from their ancestors.
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