We Are All Deists Now

The whole point of inventing programming languages was to make it possible for less skilled people to write code. When you had to write computer code in binary, hexadecimal or assembler, you had to be really, really good. Most people couldn't do it.

Programming languages removed the need to think in binary or hexadecimal. You could think using English language equivalents instead. This made programming a lot easier, thus allowing lower IQ people to code. But, allowing stupider people to code meant you not only vastly increased the number of software coders, you also vastly increased the number of defective programs. This is how software turned into the security nightmare it is today.

When AI creates computer code, it produces the statistical average of all the code out there. AI removes the bottom 50% of coders from the job. Given the Pareto principle (80% of consequences come from 20% of causes), the bottom 20% of coders were probably causing 80% of the security and integration problems. 

Since AI removes the bottom 50% of human coders, having AI produce code means most of our software security and integration problems will go away. This is likewise true in every skill area where AI is applied. 

Is AI perfect? Of course not. It makes stupid mistakes because it trains on human-generated data, which is filled with stupid human-generated mistakes. AI is just a mirror of human activity. It is us watching the average human intellect doing algorithmic work. But, once you fix an AI algorithm or a data training set, it stays fixed. Software doesn't degrade. 2+2 = 4 for all eternity, it is an equation outside of time, and that is true of every algorithm, whether AI uses it or not. 

So, AI starts at the statistical mean of every data set. It starts out being roughly as good as the average person doing the work. That means it starts out already better than half the people doing the work. 

Once you remove the bottom 50% of error-ridden data and the bottom 50% of corrupted algorithms, AI is now at the 75th percentile, not the 50th percentile. Keep iterating that process and AI quickly becomes "brilliant". That doesn't happen because AI thinks, it happens because we painstakingly work through the algorithms and the data sets, stripping out the errors and leaving only the good algorithms and data behind for AI to use and continue to train on. 

The big complaint about "science" in the last forty years is precisely that so much of it is pure crap. Endless examples of peer-reviewed published articles that aren't worth the paper they are printed on because both the researchers and the "peers" who reviewed the articles were below average in competency (and 50% of any human population is, by definition, below average). 

AI solves the problem by stripping out the bottom half. Yes, it absolutely still makes errors, but it makes a lot fewer errors than the bottom half of the human population makes. Once it is optimized, it makes fewer errors than the bottom 80%, 90%, 99%.

It used to take decades to train people to master complex tasks, master those tasks so well that even when the trained person is hung over, exhausted, sick, or otherwise incapacitated, they could still produce the necessary result. Once an AI has algorithms and data sets optimized, that information is infinitely replicable, it can now be copy-pasted into an infinite number of machines. Given a sufficiently nimble robot, i.e., a machine that can effectively interact with the environment, that means we don't have to spend decades training individual experts in a bespoke process. We can copy-paste and we have an infinite number of experts. 

The power of AI is not just in its promise of comparatively error-free operation, i.e., compared to humans, but in the instantaneous and infinite replicability of all knowledge and every technique. Teachers often crow that they "teach people how to learn". It was never really true, but now, for at least the bottom half of the human intellects in the world, it is not even necessary. Algorithms and data are now built on an assembly-line. We get the results without the work. Work literally disappears. 

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, even God has to work in the clay of the earth to build up a human body. The AI-robotic infinite replicability of technique and knowledge means the very foundational understanding of the universe that Abrahmic religions provide will no longer correspond to the world we experience. We will all become Deists, hands-off spectators watching the tools we made produce the results we need in a clockwork universe. 

Christians believe God eternally breathes forth the single Word through which all creation comes into being: Father breathes forth Spirit and the Word. With robotic AI, we will need but to speak, and lo!, it will be made. Like God, we also will speak reality into existence, we will watch the clockwork production of our vision being built before us. Even the stupidest among us will be able to do it. Whether we want this or not, that is what we are building. 

Prenup Hypocrisy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCMkURGzcm8

The Catholic Church works very hard to avoid having anyone understand the content of the linked video above. If a couple creates and signs a prenup, the existence of that prenuptial agreement can be used later to justify an annulment in the Catholic Church. The reasoning is, that any couple who signed a prenuptial agreement weren't really serious about the "until death do us part" part. They were open to the possibility that the marriage would fail.

Keep in mind that this is unusual to marriage. Buying life insurance does not make you immediately unable to receive Anointing of the Sick, but creating and signing a prenup makes your marriage functionally invalid.

Yet, at the very same time the Church repudiates your personal prenuptial agreement, it insists that neither the marriage can be held, or the annulment proceedings begun, unless legal documents from the government are first obtained. You have to get a marriage license from the government before the Catholic Church will permit you to exchange vows and receive the graces of the sacrament. You have to get the divorce recognized by the government, and have that documentation from the government in hand, before you can start an annulment process in the Church.

Due to the way secular marriage law works, the government gives you the marriage certificate with a government-constructed prenuptial agreement. It's all part of the same document. There is literally no way around that, nor any separation between the government marriage contract and its built-in government prenuptial agreement that details what happens if the contract is later ended. 

Here's the odd part: the Church is fine with the government prenuptial agreement. In fact, the Church functionally insists you obtain the government prenuptial contract before you are permitted to exchange vows for the sacrament. In short, the Church recognizes the government's prenup, just not yours. Your marriage vows aren't good enough. The government has to recognize the vows first. Your prenup is proof that you weren't serious, but the government's pre-established prenup that you both agreed to when you got married -  your acceptance of THAT prenup is fine. You can't receive the sacrament until you get that secular, government prenup. 

As the man said, have you ever walked into the DMV and thought, "Yeah, I want these people deeply involved in how my marriage is structured." If you haven't thought that, then you aren't thinking about your marriage the same way the Catholic Church is thinking about your marriage.

Catholics MUST Accept Transsexual Marriage

So, an Argentinian priest and bishop have now forced the entire Catholic Church to recognize the validity of the sacrament of marriage between transsexuals. It was a neatly done trick. Pope Francis would be very proud. 

This is how it was done. A biological man and biological woman, each of whom presents as the other sex (man wears a dress, woman takes testosterone and tries to grow a beard), presented themselves to a friendly parish priest and asks to be married. Now, keep in mind, the couple fulfill canonical norms: marriage is between one man and one woman, that's what we have here, it's just that both are mentally unstable. But the Church has already approved the idea that such mentally unstable people can both be baptized into the Church and act as godparents for baptism or witnesses for marriage. 

So, the priest, being no man's fool, talks with his bishop, to make sure bishop was ok with it. Bishop, being no man's fool, said, "Do it, but if it comes out, you will take the fall. We will put nothing in writing, which will keep Rome off my back." Priest said, "Sounds like a plan. Deal me in." 

Now that the mockery is public, bishop announces an "investigation" and insists "there is nothing in writing that shows I approved of this." Bishop now will slow-walk the "investigation" until people stop watching, then drop it. 

Notice that at no point is anyone talking about annulling the marriage. It cannot be annulled. There are no grounds because the marriage DID fulfill canonical norms (biological woman, biological man), and  the Church presumption is always that a sacramental marriage is valid, so that has to be the presumption here.

Is the couple "open to life"? Sure. It is a biological male and a biological female, so conception could happen and the "man" could get pregnant. Heck, they may even WANT to do that so they have children to abuse. Unless either spouse contests the bond, the Church isn't going to contest - it can't. The default canonical position is ALWAYS "the bond is valid." That's canon law (1060): 

Can. 1060 Marriage possesses the favor of law; therefore, in a case of doubt, the validity of a marriage must be upheld until the contrary is proven.

You might also say, "Well, the Church cannot marry the impotent." Sure, but sexual intercourse is not necessary for a valid marriage. As long as the sexual act could be completed in principle, that's enough.  The two can be sterile - that doesn't matter. The Church has never defined what constitutes a vagina or a penis, and surgical reconstruction or "improvement" to allow for the act is certainly permissible, even encouraged, for heterosexual couples.

"It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception. This is not to exclude the possibility that a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of healthcare professionals to resolve these abnormalities." ~Dignitas Infinita, #60

The problem, of course, is what counts as "genital abnormalities." If people insist they were "born in the wrong bodies" then the presence or absence of a Y chromosome would create, in their bodies, what those very same people would insist is a "genital abnormality." The presence/absence of the offending chromosome would be a "genetic disease." Therefore, what counts as "assistance of healthcare professionals to resolve these abnormalities" is now up for grabs in a way that was never true prior to roughly this decade. No Church document addresses this. A sterile "penis" created from the muscle tissue of the forearm combined with a fake, surgically-constructed "vagina", a permanent wound that requires constant daily dilation ... well, the doctors are using the correct words, so what is the Church going to do? Say a medical doctor is wrong: that isn't a penis, that isn't a real vagina? Not likely. 

As for the sexual act itself, that is not at all necessary for validity. This lack of consummation is the basis for a Josephite marriage, which - by definition - does not ever get consummated. Remember, Josephite marriages, because the participants remain virgins, are actually superior to marriages that are consummated. 

The Result: As a Catholic you are REQUIRED to believe the marriage bond, in this instance, is valid until an annulment is declared, which it never will be. By this action, the entire Catholic Church is now bound to accept transsexual marriage. If you do not accept this marriage as valid, you are putting yourself outside the millennial-old teaching and practice of the Christ-founded Catholic Church.

If you're Catholic, you are now OK with transsexual marriage.

You're welcome.

Catholic Social Teaching: Marriage

"The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says". 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man" 1 Timothy 2:12 

"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (died for her)." Ephesians 5:22-25

In Catholic social teaching, the principle of subsidiarity means that decisions and actions should happen at the lowest, most local, and competent level possible. Since men carry authority over their wives, that makes men more competent than women.

Now, you might equivocate by replying "But Ephesians also says, 'Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ' so that means men have to submit to women, which makes women the authority." Incorrect. Both spouses have to submit to Christ, because God holds authority in all relationships. Men submit to women only in the sense that the woman instantiates Christ. 

"it is in her relationship with Christ—who is for both spouses the one and only Lord—that the wife can and should find the motivation for the relationship with her husband, which flows from the very essence of marriage and the family." John Paul II

That is, the woman submits to the God-man (Christ), and only in her submission to the ruler of both men and women does the man submit to her. Yet, since men are called to die for the marriage, while women are only called to submit, men are the Christological symbol in a way that women never can be.

"As children of God, man and woman have a dignity in which they are absolutely equal; and they are equal, too, in regard to the supreme end of human life, which is everlasting union with God in the happiness of Heaven. But man and woman cannot maintain or perfect this equal dignity of theirs unless they respect and make use of the distinctive qualities which nature has bestowed on each sex: physical and spiritual qualities which are indissoluble, and so coordinated that their mutual relation cannot be upset without nature itself intervening to re-establish it." Pope Pius XII

Equality of dignity, but not equality of authority or capability. Out of all of Scripture, Ephesians 5:25 is the only passage that implies men should submit to women, and that is only in reference to the reverence both spouses must have for Christ. Saying anything else is simply eisegesis, reading modern meanings into a text, forcing it to say what the reader wants it to say rather than what it actually says.

When we take the Catholic definition of subsidiarity (lowest level of competent authority) with the Scriptures (woman must submit to man), then the Church, through her God-breathed Scripture and her own commentary, recognizes men are the lowest level of competent authority. Women have equal human dignity, but are not a competent authority, whether in marriage or in any position of public authority. 

Since as "authority is understood as service, not domination", this means men excel at serving others while women are pretty crappy at serving other people. Pope John Paul II confirms this when he says: 

"He (Paul) expresses a different concept instead, namely, that it is in her relationship with Christ—who is for both spouses the one and only Lord—that the wife can and should find the motivation for the relationship with her husband, which flows from the very essence of marriage and the family."

That is, the woman has to find something which she doesn't have. Women have to be taught how to engage in service properly by a man - either Christ or her husband. The essence of marriage and the family is teaching the woman how to do what men already naturally understand how to do.

This may explain why women have historically been put in service roles, thus providing them with the necessary practice at serving that men have as an in-born trait. Or, to put it another way, there is truth in the old saying, "A man will sacrifice his happiness for his family, while a woman will sacrifice her family for her happiness." Women must train themselves, or be trained, into imitating the man (husband or Christ) instead of following her own inborn inclinations. In fact, women are so unsuited to taking care of anyone but themselves (and arguably, even that is at issue) that not only are women not the source of authority in the ordo of marriage, women cannot even be considered for ordination into divine orders of service: deacon, priest or bishop. 

TLDR: Men are competent in handling a marriage, women are not.

Most Western cultures used to reflect this understanding by forbidding women from initiating divorce. As Western culture stopped being Christian, this Christian wisdom disappeared from the culture. Thus, women can and do initiate 70% of intimate partner violence, and between 70% and 90% of divorces. Of the three different possible pairings, studies show lesbian couples have the highest level of divorce and strife. Not surprising, given the couple is composed of two completely incompetent people.

Scripture = science = Christian teaching.

This isn't hard for men to understand, but women find it impossible to grasp, thus demonstrating the principle.

Incommensurate Goals

Pope Leo recently argued "surrogacy reduces the child to a product, and of the mother, exploiting her body." This stance is so broadly based that even women who wish to adopt and rescue embryonic children abandoned to nitrogen freezers after IVF procedures are forbidden from doing so.

So, let's take the Pope's assertions and apply them to another source of social exploitation:

When a novice friar asked permission to own a psalter for study, Francis refused, warning: "When you have a psalter, you will want a breviary; and when you have a breviary, you will install yourself in a throne like a great prelate, and you will command your brother: 'Bring me my breviary!'"  ~ Speculum Perfectionis, St. Francis of Assisi 

If we wish to stop objectification that harms children and destroys families, then women's education arguably contributes to that result. After all, educating women violates and exploits women, reducing women to a product. That is, once women have been objectified by receiving education, they now become just a product of the marketplace.

Women, in turn, now treat their own future children as products. They weigh their possible future enjoyment of earnings from education against their possible future enjoyment of children, and generally choose the money over the child.

Once education turns a woman into a product, she turns her own children into a product. Statistics show that uneducated women have more children than educated women (1, 2). Each additional year of schooling drops women's fertility by up to 0.3 children, with college education dropping fertility by up to 40% (3, 4, 5).

"Let those who are illiterate not be anxious to learn to read, but let them pay attention to what they must desire above all else: to have the Spirit of the Lord and His holy manner of working, to pray to Him with a pure heart, to have humility..."

        ~Testament, St. Francis of Assisi

The evidence is quite clear: if we educate women (which the Catholic Church supports), then we destroy family formation and reduce the likelihood of women having children (which the Church opposes). It wants two diametrically opposed outcomes to result simultaneously from the same action. That is not possible.

If the Catholic Church truly wishes to stop the objectification of women and children at its source, then it should be pushing hard for everyone, everywhere to stop educating women.

An Open Letter to Traditional Catholics

You are very amusing, but I am sorry to inform you, children: you aren't really traditional Catholics. You can't be. The culture around you prevents you from ever following traditional Catholic practice and belief as if it were the very core of your existence. You cannot live Catholicism as Catholics have for most of Catholic history:

• You don't live in a subsistence-level society, as every Catholic did for 1800 years.
• You aren't constantly threatened by famine, disease, or war.
• 80% of the people your family interacts with are not farmers. 
• Locust plagues don't eat your crops, you don't live in a dirt-floored single room home, with one bed shared by the whole family. 
• You own closets and closets full of clothes, warm blankets, winter coats, socks and shoes. 
• You heat your house with natural gas or electricity, not animal dung. 
• Your animals don't share living quarters with you. 
• Your children don't regularly see farm animals procreate in front of them, nor do they see animals slaughtered before them, nor do they butcher those same animals. 
• You've never been so driven to hunger that you have eaten your own pet animals.
• You do not watch your family members die in front of you on an annual basis.
• You don't watch one-third of your children die before their first birthday.
• Your wife has never wet-nursed someone else's baby, nor has any woman wet-nursed yours.
• You aren't familiar with leprosy, gangrene, untreated tooth infections. 
• You or someone you know has had braces for their teeth.
• Gallbladder operations are laparoscopic outpatient surgeries.
• You don't have a lifespan that averages 45 years.
• You don't advocate for the removal of pews from your churches (a Protestant innovation unknown to 1800 years of Catholics)
• You aren't preparing your children to be married by age 12, even though canon law permitted precisely that for most of the last 2000 years of Catholic practice.
• Your family is literate - most Catholics weren't. 
• Your family buys/owns copious amounts of books - most Catholics never saw a book outside the Bible chained to the lectern in church.
• Your town square isn't centered on the local Catholic church.
• Your priest is not the most important political figure in your village.
• Most of the town you live in is not related to you.
• You know about and use vitamins, minerals and pain relievers, like aspirin and ibuprofen.
• You eat bananas, oranges and kiwis. 
• In December. 
• You give up chocolate for Advent and Lent. 
• You are reading this on a computer. 
• Your family has other things to talk about than farming and the priest's sermon, unlike 1900 years of traditional Catholics, who had no knowledge of physics, chemistry, cellular biology, germ theory of disease, plate tectonics, calculus, statistics, citizen's democracy, economics, or several other dozen domains of knowledge.

No matter what you do, Catholic knowledge can never be as central and solitary, Scripture can never be as dominant as the sole source for explaining the world around you, as both were for all Catholics for almost all of Catholic history. We simply know so much more about so many more things in so many more ways than any Catholic ever has, that Catholic faith and Catholic Scripture can never, ever dominate our lives the way it dominated the lives of all Catholics for most of recorded history. 

And, no, having more babies than the surrounding culture doesn't make a difference. The Disney Epcot center version of ancient Catholicism that parades itself as "Traditional Catholicism" will not grow larger while the surrounding culture grows smaller. All of human society would have to lose 90% of what it knows for that to happen. It hasn't worked out for the Amish, it won't work for you. And let's face it, you are NOT going to make anywhere near the same sacrifices even the Amish make in order to maintain your "traditional Catholic culture". You won't give up electricity, you won't give up access to books, clothes, modern HVAC, you won't restrict yourself to farming and blacksmithing, you won't give up your computers or automobiles or modern medicine or even your reading glasses and ball-point pens. 

You just aren't "traditional Catholics" in any serious sense, nor will you ever be. 

AI Doth Make Managers of Us All

AI is a software program. 
A software program is created by a group of people.
A program is a recipe to solve a problem, in this case, a recipe created by a bunch of people. 
The only advantage AI has over people is this: it has a perfect memory. Unfortunately, it has no accurate idea of how to statistically weigh the various facts it remembers. Which facts matter, which facts do not? That's why different AI programs provide different answers to the same question - the people who created it weight the same facts in different ways.

So, AI is really just a group of people who have very good memories, but aren't necessarily great at connecting the facts into a coherent, accurate narrative.

As I was explaining to someone yesterday, a person who doesn't know much about a subject, but interacts with an AI to discover more, is a lot like a five-year old interacting with a parent. The five-year old doesn't know as much as the parent, but that doesn't mean the parent is always correct. As long as the person isn't informed on the subject, that person won't be able to tell when the AI is incorrectly weighting the facts.

But, once you learn enough about a subject, you can now interact with the AI as a teen or young adult interacts with a parent. Run questions past the AI, consider the opinion, then determine on your own whether it has correctly pieced things together.

Elon Musk doesn't design rocket engines or electric cars himself, he hires teams of people to do that for him. Elon solves the problems that his engineering teams are stuck on. He suggests new approaches, alternate avenues of exploration. Then he turns loose his technicians to have another go at it. 

AI turns everyone into Elon Musk - you now have a team of highly skilled, well-trained people working for you, but sometimes that team, the AI, goes off the rails. They have problems they cannot solve. You have to manage them back into solving the problems they know how to solve. And keep in mind, there exists an entire class of problems that algorithmic computer simply cannot solve. 

This is the famous "Halting Problem". Kurt Godel demonstrated that pure logic demonstrably cannot resolve every class of problem. Alan Turing showed one example of this: the problem of the infinite loop. Can a computer be programmed to detect that it is in an infinite loop, so that the computer can break out of that infinite loop on its own? It turns out that this cannot be done, not even theoretically. Human beings can see that the infinite loop exists and we can force the computer to break out of that loop, but the computer can't see that it has trapped itself. It cannot break out on its own. Since AI is nothing but a computer program built on pure logic, there are questions we can answer, but it simply cannot answer. (for popular renditions of how the Halting Problem works, see Star Trek's "The Changeling" (S1E7, 1967), "I, Mudd" (S2E8, 1967).

As long as AI is built on pure logic, AI will always be less capable of resolving problems than people are. AI is a superb technician, often better and faster than any human being could ever be, but there are things we can do that AI can never do. For instance, we can see and break out of infinite loops. AI can't.

So this is the heart of the problem: prior to AI, the great bulk of people were technicians - they knew how to do their own job very well. But insofar as any job can be reduced to a recipe, a series of discrete, well-defined steps, then AI will be able to do that job better and faster than people can. However, if that recipe carries the possibility of degrading into the equivalent of an infinite loop, then AI will trap itself  inside the routine and will never be able to extricate itself. Never. People will be able to see the AI's problem, but the AI can't.

After flying an experimental plane, the X-1A, Chuck Yeager remarked, "The X-1A will fly itself into a corner you can’t fly out of." The same is true of AI. It can think its way into a corner it can't think out of. People will have to help the AI out of those corners.

Thus, AI turns everyone into managers. Managers don't know the deep details of how ANY job works, but they have a vision of how the various pieces and processes need to come together in order to attain a larger goal. AI is now the team of technicians, the human person interacting with it is the manager. AI turns everyone into Elon Musk.

Most colleges have built their reputations around training technicians, but that practice is now moribund. Wherever AI is active, we cannot afford to teach people to be technicians, because AI will always be a better technician. People must be trained to be managers. We know "conscience doth make cowards of us all", now AI doth make managers of us all. 

Not everyone is cut out to be a manager. The technicians are out of a job.