Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Golem, the Singularity, and the Turing test

In Jewish folklore there is an entity called the golem, an animated anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter:


While the word "golem" does not appear in the Bible, the concept is embodied in the following scripture which talks about the beast who will rise up out of the earth (a.k.a. the False Prophet):

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
Revelation 13:15 KJV

The concept of the golem is also (perhaps unknowingly) embodied in what Ray Kurzweil calls "the singularity", which is the point in time when machine intelligence surpasses the abilities of human intelligence and becomes self aware [my definition, not Ray's]:


A large part of the funding for artificial intelligence research has come from the military. And if you have been following the NSA spying revelations, you are by now aware that the majority of the hardware, software, and data for the "Total Information Awareness" program is coming from the US, the UK, and Israel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the three nations which are conspiring together to destroy the nations of the Middle East for their mutual benefit. They also happen to be the three nations who believe that they are the inheritors of the promises God made to Abraham, Israel and Judah in the Bible.

Is this all tied together? You bet it is. Once the infrastructure for "Total Information Awareness" is put into place, nearly everything which happens on this planet will be knowable by "the Machine" or golem which is being created. This will give immense power to the people who control it; people who do NOT have the interests of democratic government in mind.

And if the Machine/golem ever becomes self aware, there is no way of predicting what will happen. We already have deviated widely from the Three Laws of Robotics, and in our rush to bring robotics to the battlefield we have opened the door to all sorts of machine "logic" which justify the taking of human life. If the Machine/golem ever starts to control its own programming, it could easily decide that human life is a dangerous infestation which threatens both the Machine/golem and the planet itself. We will at that point truly become useless eaters slated for extinction. Can you spell "Skynet"?

Beyond its potential to destroy human life, the Machine/golem will also have the ability to become a surrogate G-d in the form of an idol which people will be forced to worship. That is what Revelation 13:15 implies. That possibility, coupled with the fact that the Antichrist will so closely imitate the nature and the actions of Jesus, raises an interesting question: how to tell the difference between Christ and Antichrist?

And that question, oddly enough, is similar to the question which is the basis for the so-called Turing test: how can you tell the difference between a human and the Machine/golem?


This now is no longer an idle question, because the beast who will rise up from the earth will force you to worship the Machine/golem or be put to death. If you cannot recognize when this occurs, if you cannot tell the difference between G-d and the Machine, and if you don't understand the importance of not worshipping this idol and not taking the mark of the beast, then you are truly lost.

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