THE WORSHIP OF ELECTRONS...

  Modern man is an electric man, a man whose life and dreams are tied to flowing electrons.

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It might be wondered why this, a theological article on the Bible begins with an extensive quote from Plato.  This will become apparent as the article progresses.

Plato describes the city of Atlantis:

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For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them;

Socrates then describes their gradual downfall and decadence: 

but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted

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too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts;

Outwardly all seemed fine during this decaying period: 

but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power. Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things

This passage from the dialog Critias speaks of this city as fact.  Of course "enlightened" historians generally consider this account as fictitious, despite compelling evidence presented by Graham Hancock and others.

What this passage from Critias speaks of is of a highly advanced and technical society.  This civilization gradually became arrogant and more warlike, bent on control of the world.  At some point, it was judged by Zeus and destroyed in one night, being plunged into the ocean.  Will this be the fate of our modern smug society?

It is amazing how modern man, who views himself as the most advanced culture that has ever existed on Earth is on such flimsy ground.  All of the most vital technology of man is based on the discovery of how electrons can flow from a negative to a positive pole.  As most know, electricity and magnetism are related such as it is called electromagnetic tharge.  Where there is electricity there is a magnetic field created.

The End Of Flowing Electrons - Our Electrical Grid

The electrical grid is what keeps our society functioning.  Apart from the well publicized threats that a powerful EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) could pose (although there is not unanimity on what would be affected), artificial intelligence, which, of course, is based on electrical power, has now attained a new position in society - a religion.  This is a fascinating development since AI is based on a computer (designed by man) and software (designed by man).

Probably, the most impressive assessments of a massive EMP over the United States are an executive report titled, Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, issued in 2004, High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) and High Power Microwave (HPM) Devices:Threat Assessments issued to congress in 2008 and Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack Critical National Infrastructures also issued in 2008 and a good summary put out by the Heritage Foundation titled, EMP Attacks—What the U.S. Must Do Now produced in 2010.

"...the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software" 
Anthony Levandowski, Way Of The Future Church


A moderate blast of E3 reportedly could directly affect up to 70 percent of the U.S. power grid...The equipment used in the transmission grid is costly, specially produced, and has to be ordered from overseas before replacement in the U.S. Those with the expertise to replace transformers and capacitors are likely to be overwhelmed if much of our infrastructure is damaged, only delaying the replacement of equipment that generally takes two years to be manufactured and delivered.

The Worship of An AI

Anthony Levandowski

As is typical with man that does not worship Jesus, he will worship himself, whether in a direct form or, some work of his own creation, as for instance, in ancient times, a statue or idol.  In an article published in Wired magazine, titled Inside The First Church Of Artificial Intelligence, Anthony Levandowski, an electrical engineer who did important work in self-driving cars, speaks concerning this new church of which he is dean or leader.  Michelle Le (the writer of the article) writes: 

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

Not realizing that the real God is not just smarter than humans, but his intelligence is of different kind than that of man.  Coming from the field of programming, he thinks in terms to quantizing everything including deity,

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.  "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." 

Man has not changed much in 3,000 years.  He still likes to worship the work of his own hands.  It is an indirect way of worship himself, after all, he created it.  It does not matter the modern day materials used.  Whether it was the wood and metal of old or, silicon, titanium and written bits of zeros and ones stored in some electrical magnetic medium of the new, it is the same idolatrous principle.

Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, "Ah! I am warm; I see the fire."  From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, "Save me! You are my god!"  (Isaiah 44:16-17)

What is fascinating is that it is so obvious to see what is happening to those who have eyes to see.  There is no reason to think that this artificial general intelligence will any better in its ethics and outlook than sinful man.  In a recent excellent article published by Thomas T. Hills, titled, Should We Worry About Computer Algorithms' "Mental Health"?, he writes,

This all sounds ludicrous until we realize that our algorithms are increasingly being made in our own image. As we’ve learned more about our own brains, we’ve enlisted that knowledge to create algorithmic versions of ourselves. These algorithms control the speeds of driverless cars, identify targets for autonomous military drones, compute our susceptibility to commercial and political advertising, find our soulmates in online dating services, and evaluate our insurance and credit risks. Algorithms are becoming the near-sentient backdrop of our lives.

Ridiculous sounding?  Not at all! It makes perfect sense.  Man himself, despite his science and technology, has not been able to fully comprehend or control the most mysterious part of himself - his mind.  His own subconscious prejudices and hatreds are still in him.  How then can he prevent them from being written into the implied ethics of his software?  Hills continues:

The most popular algorithms currently being put into the workforce are deep learning algorithms. These algorithms mirror the architecture of human brains by building complex representations of information. They learn to understand environments by experiencing them, identify what seems to matter, and figure out what predicts what. Being like our brains, these algorithms are increasingly at risk of mental-health problems.

 The Limitations of Software

This algorithmic death spiral is hidden in nesting dolls of black boxes: black-box algorithms that

hide their processing in high-dimensional thoughts that we can’t access are further hidden in black boxes of proprietary ownership. This has prompted some places, such as New York City, to propose laws enforcing the monitoring of fairness in algorithms used by municipal services. But if we can’t detect bias in ourselves, why would we expect to detect it in our algorithms? 

"Carl Jung once suggested that in every sane man hides a lunatic. As our algorithms become more like ourselves, it is getting easier to hide." 
 Thomas T. Hills 


In case it appears that there are only a few programmers and thinkers that feel this way, more will be cited.  In the September 26, 2017 edition of the New Atlantic an article titled, The Coming Software Apocalypse by Jame Somers was published.    Comparing the older electromechanical systems with their modern software equivalents it states:

“When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. She became known for her report on the Therac-25, a radiation-therapy machine that killed six patients because of a software error. “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations; a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

What about the software equivalent of these systems?

Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

There is also the problem of "spaghetti code" in programmer's jargon:

...“spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around, what’s already there; eventually the code becomes impossible to follow, let alone to test exhaustively for flaws.

There are proposed solutions to the ever-increasing-complexity of software such as TLA+ and Esterel which, although effective and being implemented are still not being implemented in millions of existing programs.  Yet, even if these protocols were implemented exhaustively, they would still not deal with the inherent prejudices and social outlooks of the creators of sophisticated general intelligence programs being worked on.

If indeed man is making a God in his own image in the form of an AI, it will bear all his flaws, both logical, emotional and spiritual.

They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand.  No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say, "Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?"  Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, "Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?  (Isaiah 44:18-20)

Their  knowledge may be great in computer science.  They may be intellectually brilliant, wonderfully creative, but spiritually, when they deny the Lordship of Jesus, they are spiritually blind.  This is what Isaiah is speaking about.

"They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."


Impact Events
All this mighty AI will come to an end if a big space rock comes hurdling towards the earth of the size great enough to cause great destruction.  Our civilization is very interconnected, with many interdependent parts.  Even if some of mankind survives, they will not be living the way we do now.  They will have to revert to a former age where they knew how to plant and live from the earth in a very direct way.  The estimates NASA gives of when such an event might happen is merely an educated guess.  Such an object could be approaching earth from a place where observer telescopes might not see it in time.  In an January 10, 2013 article published in Forbes Magazine titled, We Probably Wouldn't Even See A Doomsday Asteroid Until It Was Too Late, Eric Kain, the reporter asked NASA what are the chances that a large asteroid could be spotted before it hit the Earth.  The response was:

"With so many of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero," NASA informs us. We would see nothing at all until suddenly, just as the impact occurred, we noticed a "flash of light and the shaking of the ground as it hit." Then poof.

Seismic Events, Tsnamis 

In an article titled, Volcanic ‘super-eruption’ could send humanity back to the Stone Age, experts warn it states:

New research has found that we have been lucky that one of the apocalyptic events has not taken place during our time on the planet and suggested the average time between the cataclysmic events is much less than previously thought. Experts now believe the time interval to be only slightly longer than the age of civilisation, dating from the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. Scientists have shown that super-eruptions, which can blanket an entire continent with volcanic ash and alter climate on a global scale, are capable of returning humanity to a pre-civilization state. According to geological records, the two most recent super-eruptions occurred between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Previous estimates made in 2004 suggested that super-eruptions occurred on average every 45,000 to 714,000 years and posed no immediate threat. The recalculation, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, was based on a statistical analysis of a large database of past volcanic eruptions. It produces a revised range of 5,200 to 48,000 years with a ‘best guess’ average of 17,000 years.

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Of course the geologists say that his is only an estimate that it might be much longer before anything erupts.  So it is an estimate, which means it could happen sooner or later, in other words at any time.

The ring of fire is not even being mentioned.  It also poses an unpredictable danger.  Along the Pacific ocean there is a ring of volcanos which are also closely aligned to fault lines between major tectonic plates.  Any of these underwater earthquake could cause a tsunami that could hit all countries with Pacific coastlines.

The God Who Controls The Heavens & Earth
Humans like routine.  They begin to feel comfortable in it.  Soon, the begin to assume that the next day will be like the day before.  At least when it comes to the way the earth behaves.  Many do not realize that the natural laws of motion are nothing more than the way God has chosen to make things happen at the present.  So it is natural that men should speak as Peter warned they would:

Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.  They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."  But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.  But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.           (II Peter 3:3-6)

And with all of these humbling possibilities, many cling to this godlike AI to guide them and show them the way.  As Mr. Levandowski states:

"With the internet as its nervous system, the world’s connected cell phones and sensors as its sense organs, and data centers as its brain, the ‘whatever’ will hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times. The only rational word to describe that ‘whatever’, thinks Levandowski, is ‘god’—and the only way to influence a deity is through prayer and worship. 

“Part of it being smarter than us means it will decide how it evolves, but at least we can decide how we act around it,” he says. “I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, ‘Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.’”"

“There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam...but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.” 

Compare to the majesty and wonder of the God of the Bible: 

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?

Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?
Who can fathom the Spirit of the Lord,
or instruct the Lord as his counselor?
Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him,
and who taught him the right way?
Who was it that taught him knowledge,
or showed him the path of understanding?
Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket;
they are regarded as dust on the scales;
he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.
Lebanon is not sufficient for altar fires,
nor its animals enough for burnt offerings.
Before him all the nations are as nothing;
they are regarded by him as worthless
and less than nothing.
With whom, then, will you compare God?
To what image will you liken him?
As for an idol, a metalworker casts it,
and a goldsmith overlays it with gold
and fashions silver chains for it.
A person too poor to present such an offering
selects wood that will not rot;
they look for a skilled worker
to set up an idol that will not topple.
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.
“To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.
(Isaiah 40:12-26)