Thomas Moynihan, Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates, Noēma, February 27, 2024. From the article:
Despite vehement disagreement on almost everything else, proponents of AI safety and acceleration, alike, share the belief in a coming, potentially imminent, historic threshold beyond which all things recognizably human may dissolve. At least some accelerationists seem to welcome this outcome, though this may be more of an attempt (with predictable success) to court notoriety than any serious commitment. By stark contrast, those concerned with AI safety, fearing the construction of powerful AI systems not “aligned” with human interests and values emphatically want to avert any such fate.
It is, by now, trite to point out the resemblance of such belief to age-old apocalyptic and millenarian patterns of thought. But many cultures exhibit such strains. What remains hidden is a deeper, and more specifically Christian, consonance of convictions. Namely, that history is intelligible as the perfecting of mind or spirit, that this perfection is somehow inevitable or imminent, and that arriving at this threshold may precipitate the endangerment of everything meaningfully human.
Perfection here merely denotes the complete fulfillment of what something fundamentally is. Importantly, this need not have any moralizing or humanizing component. You can have the perfect murderer or storm, after all. Indeed, as we shall shortly explore, perfection has accrued — since Christianity’s beginnings — thoroughly eschatological connotations.
Note, now, that superintelligence is often formulated as perfected intelligence: the ultimate culmination of agential potency or bare cogitation. Especially so in conjectures concerning explosive self-improvement, wherein an agent is pictured rapidly approaching the limits of instrumental power.
Should such cogitative cataclysm ever actually be sparked, this would, indubitably, be cause for concern for us humans, as we’ve absolutely no way of anticipating what a mind vaster than our own would do with us. Acknowledging this, however, doesn’t preclude additionally acknowledging the fact that the basic idea also conspicuously resembles conceptual knots embedded at the roots of Abrahamic and Hellenistic thought.
Engendered by ancient ambiguity about climactic points, insofar as these have long been pictured as heralding that perfection which endangers our essentially imperfect existence, this tension has expressed itself, again and again throughout European history, as a recurrent split. A split between those who, on one hand, respond to this promised climax with profound wariness and those who, on the other, express an impatient desire to usher in its arrival.
It is, at the least, noteworthy that there seems to be, in today’s AI discord, a recapitulation of this basic schism.
There’s more at the link.
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Bonus: Compare this with The Alliance for the Future Manifesto:
Alliance for the Future is a new Washington D.C. based nonprofit organization. We’re a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists, and policy experts who believe that artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. We have banded together to oppose the escalating panic around AI.
AFTF will work to inform the media, lawmakers, and other interested parties about the incredible benefits AI can bring to humanity. We will oppose stagnation and advocate for the benefits of technological progress in the political arena.
For decades, stagnation has been the root cause of our greatest national problems: the loss of the American dream for the normal person and the spiteful, zero-sum thinking which dominates politics.
Artificial intelligence is here to reverse this trend. It is here to give us back our future.
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