****************************************

From Eliyahu:

Shalom friends,

Are you sick of hearing about AI (artificial intelligence) yet? Other than flying machines, strong AI is probably the most anticipated technology in history. Interest in it, and predictions about it, go back at least to the early part of the 20th century. As far back as silent movies there were depictions of intelligent robots as friends of man, or as sinister overlords and enemies. Superman animations from the 30s pitted the "man of steel" against intelligent robot enemies. Later, movies like The Terminator and The Matrix predicted a future world dominated by super-intelligent machines. With its sci-fi past, it is hard for many of us to take AI as a serious threat to mankind. This reluctance to see such a threat is still true, despite dire warnings of the dangers of AI by some of this world's notables in technology, like the late Stephen Hawking and the wonder-boy, Elon Musk.

It appears that 21st century technology is developing far faster than the ability of most people to keep up with it. Already a lot of the science fiction of the 20th century is a normal part of 21st century life. For example, the hi-tech communicators of Dick Tracy or Captain Kirk are more than duplicated in your ordinary cell phone. If that technology could make the leap from fiction to reality, why not AI? Indeed some hold that AI has already passed the 'Turing Test' in a number of important areas. That test was named after Alan Turing, who invented it in 1950. In 1951 he predicted: “At some stage… we should have to expect the machines to take control.” What is the essence of the Turing Test?

When Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, racked his considerable brains for a test that would truly indicate that a computer program was intelligent, he landed on this area. If a computer could convince a panel of human judges that they were talking to a human—if it could hold a convincing conversation—then it would indicate that artificial intelligence had advanced to the point where it was indistinguishable from human intelligence. [singularityhub[dot]com/2017/09/27/how-close-is-turings-dream-of-conversational-machines/]

At first, it seems like a high bar for a computer program to hold such a convincing conversation with a human that it would be accepted as one. However, it turns out that human listeners make that easier than it would otherwise seem. Would you believe that a computer program from as far back as 1966 was able to get people to respond to it as if it were human? Here's the story:

Joseph Weizenbaum, as early as 1966—when computers were still programmed with large punch-cards—developed a piece of natural language processing software called ELIZA. ELIZA was a machine intended to respond to human conversation by pretending to be a psychotherapist; you can still talk to her today.

Talking to ELIZA is a little strange. She’ll often rephrase things you’ve said back at you: so, for example, if you say “I’m feeling depressed,” she might say “Did you come to me because you are feeling depressed?” When she’s unsure about what you’ve said, ELIZA will usually respond with “I see,” or perhaps “Tell me more.”

For the first few lines of dialogue, especially if you treat her as your therapist, ELIZA can be convincingly human. This was something Weizenbaum noticed and was slightly alarmed by: people were willing to treat the algorithm as more human than it really was. Before long, even though some of the test subjects knew ELIZA was just a machine, they were opening up with some of their deepest feelings and secrets. They were pouring out their hearts to a machine. When Weizenbaum’s secretary spoke to ELIZA, even though she knew it was a fairly simple computer program, she still insisted Weizenbaum leave the room ... The ELIZA effect was named for this computer program: the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize machines, or think of them as human. [singularityhub[dot]com/2017/09/27/how-close-is-turings-dream-of-conversational-machines/]

In recent years AI has had some amazing successes, such as beating all comers at even the most difficult strategy games, such as Chess and Go. Even Poker, a game of bluffing, has been mastered by AI. Further, a recent study found that AI can now diagnose medical images as accurately as human doctors. Even AI music and poetry, an area that many had thought could never be the domain of AI, is now becoming indistinguishable to humans. Consider this:

There is now a music-composing computer called Iamus, which produces work sophisticated enough to be deemed worthy of attention by professional musicians. Iamus’s developer Francisco Vico of the University of Malaga and his colleagues carried out a kind of Turing Test by asking 250 subjects – half of them professional musicians – to listen to one of Iamus’s compositions and music in a comparable style by human composers, and decide which is which. “The computer piece raises the same feelings and emotions as the human one, and participants can’t distinguish them”, says Vico. “We would have obtained similar results by flipping coins.” [bbc[dot]com/future/story/20150724-the-problem-with-the-turing-test]

The rate at which artificial intelligence systems are surging forward in just the last few years have some people delighted and others alarmed. A growing number of informed experts are starting to believe that Futurist Ray Kurzweil may be right. He famously predicted that “By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.”

This possibility has the scientific community talking about, of all things, spiritual questions. Further, they readily admit they don't have even simple answers to questions like; What is consciousness? Even harder; What is the human spirit? How about: What is life? Believing in materialistic Darwinism, they are wondering if AI will 'evolve' into a new form of 'life' - machine life, and if so, what will that mean for humanity? Clearly, AI can be programmed to present as human in any number of different areas, but is that the same as being human?

The Bible answer to these questions is very simple: God created man in His own image, with moral characteristics and abilities that transcend mere data processing. While machines may be able to process data far faster than any human, they will never be able to love anyone, or even care about anyone, despite a cute little face of molded plastic. Yet, more and more, we are foolishly handing the machines the keys to our communities, our communications, our economy, our homes, and even our lives. This is, indeed, a frightening picture for the near future of this world.

The ELIZA effect, the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize objects, is nothing new. In ancient times people worshipped carved idols as if they were real gods. Now AI is arising as a new kind of image, in a world that already idolizes technology and the pseudo-science religion. Revelation 13 tells us where this is all headed:

It was given to him to give breath to it, to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause as many as wouldn’t worship the image of the beast to be killed. He causes all, the small and the great, the rich and the poor, and the free and the slave, to be given marks on their right hands, or on their foreheads; and that no one would be able to buy or to sell, unless he has that mark, the name of the beast or the number of his name. Revelation 13:15-17

Realizing where the world is so quickly headed, we do well to look to Yeshua in earnest. He is our only real defense against the sinister plot of the enemy that we see even now being constructed before our eyes. Yeshua imparts to us light, truth and freedom that the world cannot even understand, much less overcome.

Shalom,

Eliyahu
Tsiyon.Org

****************************************

Editor's Note: This article is clearly written by someone poking fun at God and religion. I include it here purely as news.  

Reprint: ZDNet, September 20, 2019

Perhaps having a robot priest merely places us halfway to our own personal heaven. It's artificial, of course.

****************************************