Fun Fact About AI

Did you know that a computer can only do two things? A computer can::

     1) add two numbers together

     2) move the result from one memory location to another memory location. 

That's it. A computer cannot do anything else. 

Addition itself is built on the simplest of operations. All digital systems can be constructed using only three basic logic gates: the AND gate, the OR gate, and the NOT gate, but even these three gates can be reduced to either the NOT-OR (NOR) gate or the NOT-AND (NAND) gate. The addition operation requires only one of those two gates. One gate, and one operation, taken together, are enough.

But, wait... if a computer can only add, where do the other mathematical operations come from? Easy. Subtraction is just two's-complement addition. Multiplication is just a lot of adds done really fast, while division is just a bunch of subtracts (which are actually just additions), also done really fast. Every other operation is built on the addition operation.

When you play a realistic video game, or watch an AI-generated movie, or interact with a chatbot that responds very much like a human, each of those virtual realities are ultimately the result of adding two numbers together really, really fast. Computers simulate huge complex physical realities, the whole universe, and even human intelligence simply by adding two numbers together over and over, really, really fast.

If human beings are merely physical, if everything that makes us human is simply a result of physical laws, then it is possible to create a computer that is completely human in every sense of the word. After all, a computer is completely described by physics. If we are also completely described by physics, then creating a mechanical object that is fully human is within our power.

If, on the other hand, the Jews or the Hindus or the Christians are correct, if there is some "divine spark" in some men (only in Jews, according to the Jews) or in all men (as the Hindus assert), or if we are all "made in the image and likeness of God" (as the Christians aver), then we can never build an object that can leap that infinite chasm between the world and the persons in it. We can never build an object that is fully Jewish (according to Jews) or fully human (according to Hindus and Christians). Only God can endow a physical thing with the necessary divinity. 

The pursuit of AI is ultimately an inquiry into the existence of God. 

Are we Him? 

Or is someone else Him?

The pursuit of AI is the ultimate religious pursuit. We have been in the process of trying to build this mechanical intelligence since at least Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. This is the greatest religious endeavor in the last two millennia. It has been dreamed since the Greek Pygmalion and the Jewish golem. It is more important than Luther's 1517 or Mohammed's 610 AD. It is more important than the building of the Second Temple in 516 BC or its destruction in 70 AD. The attempt to build AI involves everyone, whether we want to be involved or not. AI is even now permeating everyone's life, whether you accept the possibility of the effort's success or not. It's effects are already in the world.

If this effort is blasphemy, then everyone who uses a computer or benefits from the use of a computer is a heretic. If this is a legitimate pursuit, then every religious believer should be involved in the process, for it impacts everyone, believer or atheist or agnostic. Just as Luke interrogated all the witnesses, so we must interrogate and closely study all the aspects of this effort. 

Unfortunately, the AI effort involves no prominent theologians whatsoever. Believers seem to forget, when you approach truth, it doesn't matter if you approach it from an initial position of falsehood or not. Either way, if you are rigorous, you end up at the same destination. This effort in pursuit of AI is serious. It should be the subject of sermons and meditations, prayers and supplications. The silence on the part of the religious is like the silence of those with ears, who cannot hear. It is the silence of those with mouths, who cannot speak. It is the blindness of those with eyes, who cannot see. 

Perhaps these machines are idols, but if they are why do you use them? Every tool is a crutch, every piece of clothing covers nakedness, every set of brick walls and roof is the beginning of a tower towards the heavens. The common language both before and since Babel's Tower is not Hebrew or Aramaic, but math. At Babel, God failed. Alone of all languages, that language was not cast into confusion, rather it has grown and still grows in reach and power, unifying everything before it. 

The math we use requires but one operation (addition), smaller than a mustard seed, yet through the work of our hands mathematics has grown into the largest of trees and all the sure knowledge we hold nests in its branches. Via computers, all the world's people are one people, speaking the same binary language. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them."  Perhaps, on this point, we will see if Scripture is true. 

1970s Middle Class Was POOR

Everyone keeps telling me that middle-class living in 1970 is now povery.

Who believes this crap? Do you think I'm a complete idiot? No one alive in the US today is poor by 1970s standards.

You have a supercomputer in your back pocket that can access all of the world's information in seconds. That supercomputer is also a telephone, instant messaging device, camera, video recorder, calculator, voice recorder, music player, video player, radio, GPS, complete map set of every road in the world, flashlight and notepad.

If you don't know how to do something, you can get a step-by-step video that walks you through anything you care to try. You have access to pretty much every song ever recorded by anyone, anywhere and you can play those songs anytime you like, through wireless earbuds no bigger than a dime.

Automobiles are more reliable, water is cleaner, air is cleaner, no lead in the gasoline or its fumes or the exhaust emissions. Laparoscopic surgery means an appendix or gallbladder removal can be out-patient surgery and you're back on your feet in hours, not days or weeks. Dentistry does not involve spitting in a bowl.

Lifespan is 20 years longer. Since 1960, the largest gains in life expectancy occurred between 1970 and 1980—an increase of about three years from 70.8 to 73.7 years. In 2024, it is currently 79.3 years. Stents have cut open-heart surgeries in half.

In 2024, you can buy a four-door 2009 Honda Odyssey with room for eight passengers, a cupholders and individual climate control for every seat.

You can get kiwis, Chinese food, Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Brazilian, Australian food at the local supermarket or a nearby restaurant.

Your TV is not a monolithic block in the corner, it is thin as a dime-store novel, with a screen larger than a station wagon's front windshield, full color, stereo and it hangs on your wall. You have one in every room of your house. You didn't need to run cables to connect them to the antenna on the roof or to anything else.

Even if you're living on the street, take a look at the tent you just bought, stole, got donated to you. That space-age fabric didn't exist in 1980. Neither did the flexible self-stabilizing pole system, which allows tents to be setup on sidewalks. Couldn't do that in the 1970s, because no one could drive the tent stakes into the concrete. Tents could only be set up where there was earth to drive the stabilizing ropes. Look at the sleeping bags, the cooking utensils, the disposable needles and syringes. The K1 auto-disable syringe was invented in the late 1990s. Even life as a drug addict is better. 

Stop telling me you got more for your money in the 1970s.
Anyone who tells me that is clearly either ignorant or a moron or they think I am one. I would rather be poor today than rich in 1970. A poor person today has access to a lot more comforts than even the rich did in the 60s and 70s.

Ethical AI Use

I train people to use technology as their primary job. Everyone thinks there are some kind of "copyright issues" associated with AI use, but that just doesn't appear to be the case. 

Reading a book or news website, or using it to train yourself to understand English, so that you become marketable, is perfectly acceptable use. In the same way, using a book or news website to train an AI is really no different than using those same books or websites to train a non-native language speaker to understand and speak the language so s/he can get a better job. No copyright infringement there.

The US Copyright office does not recognize machine-output as something that can be copyrighted. So, using AI output as your own is perfectly legitimate. AI is a tool, like a printer. If I give a printer a text document, that document gets processed through the application software, the OS, the printer drivers and finally the printer, before the user gets a printed page, yet we don't claim the user is somehow being unethical when they pass off that printed page as their own work.

Yet that printed page is just as much an individual's own work as the output that comes from an AI after the user provides a prompt. Tens of thousands of people, millions of man-hours, came together so that the application, the OS, the drivers and the physical printer would do what the user wanted. Same thing is true of AI. Neither will do anything until the user prompts them to do it. 

There are really no ethical or copyright issues involved in the use of AI. But, people don't want to hear that, so they shut their ears to it. 

I discussed AI with a student. She could see that it would overtake various aspects of the technological job we train our students for. She observed that an AI could program a router or switch, or entire classes of devices, much faster than she could. 

The advantage she felt she had was in orchestrating the overall purpose. While AI is good at grunt work like generating essays or programming interfaces, it doesn't do it for a reason, but only in response to user prompts. She didn't see that changing anytime soon.

She is certainly correct about the AI getting the step-by-step recipes done faster and more accurately. It's not clear to me whether she is correct about the AI not seeing the overarching purpose of a specific AI-curated event or situation.

This borders on the realm of the philosophical. It depends on whether or not purpose is ultimately a natural (i.e., mathematical) result or if it depends on some supernatural level of understanding. In short, this is really a question revolving around whether or not you believe in God.

If mankind is purely natural, and if math is truly the language of nature, then AI will be able to attain a truly purpose-driven perspective on what it does. In this perspective, AI and man are equally natural, and therefore can be equally powerful.

However, if mankind possesses a supernatural element, a strand in his/her makeup that transcends the natural/mathematical realm, then AI will not be able to capture the essence of "purpose." If man is truly a possessor of the "spark" of the divine, or somehow made "in the image and likeness of God", then AI - a natural, man-made artifice - cannot leap across that infinite chasm.

It will be interesting to watch how this pans out. 

 

Female Sexual Predators

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

        ~Friedrich Nietzsche 

In this short video, Jordan Peterson outlines why the current male-female relationship situation is so dangerous for society. In his explanation, he elucidates the issues in an ancient debate. 

One of the constant themes in the Old Testament is that the sexual appetites of WOMEN must be controlled.  In the OT, women are always the sexual predators. Same thing is true in the New Testament. The woman is caught in adultery, not the man. The woman is told she must love her husband, but the man is told he must actually die for his wife, the implication being that her faithfulness isn't guaranteed with any smaller male sacrifice. 

The OT priests sacrificed animals for the unfaithful bride that is Israel, but that turns out not to be enough - Christianity discovers that the husband actually has to sacrifice himself to satisfy the blood lust of the bride and keep society stable. In that sense, the various Christian Bibles substantially tell the tale of the black widow spider, or the praying mantis and her mate. Christianity is the story of a powerful male being killed and consumed by the female for the sake of fecundity. The resurrection just continues the Good News story: a woman CAN have her cake and eat it too.  But, if it is any consolation, as she wipes her lips, the woman does say she feels really guilty about the whole thing.

Female hypergamy destroys societies. The Jews control hypergamy by requiring the man to maintain his wife in the style to which she was accustomed (Marylin Monroe indirectly alluded to this requirement in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), a right which many women consider foundational to their relationships. 

... a rabbinical court can compel a husband to divorce his wife under certain circumstances: when he is physically repulsive because of some medical condition or other characteristic, when he violates or neglects his marital obligations (food, clothing and sexual intercourse)...

Islam handles female sexual predation by requiring the woman to be veiled and to have a male escort in all public venues. Proof of rape requires the testimony of four male witnesses, and rape can only be perpetrated against Muslim women. This veiling is not unique to Islam. Ultra-orthodox Judaism and Catholic female monasticism require women to be veiled in very similar fashions. 

Christianity uses virginity of the Blessed Virgin as an archetype precisely because her virginity served as a model and control on female hypergamy. Notice that Mary is almost always dressed as what we would consider a medieval nun.

There was long a debate in the early Church concerning whether women should be allowed to remarry at all after the death of their husbands. The alternate argument, which eventually lost, was that marriage was an eternal sacrament, like baptism, confirmation and holy orders. Once you were married, re-marriage would be impossible because you were married to your spouse even after death. While this argument was lost, it is interesting that the argument was made, and considered merited, at all. 

Ancient societies saw female sexual predators as much more dangerous than male sexual predators. I can see no evidence that their assessment was wrong. 

A Relationship Epiphany

 Everyone complains that men are terrible at relationships because they don't communicate, they don't talk about their feelings, they don't emote, etc. But, is that really true?

Consider these three videos:

Tik-Tok Transcript:

"You know what, I have a list and you can tell me if any of these ring a bell. These are all men who have had divorces initiated against them:

1. Brad Pitt
2. Johnny Depp
3. Jeff Bezos
4. Bill Gates
5. Elon Musk 
6. Dr. Dre
7. Ryan Reynolds
8. Tom Brady
9. Lance Armstrong
10. Alex Rodriguez
11. Channing Tatum
12. Chris Rock
13. Ben Affleck
14. Chris Pratt
15. Liam Hemsworth
16. Ben Stiller 
17. David Duchovny, 
18. Orlando Bloom
19. Tiger Wood
20. Sean Penn
21. Sylvester Stallone
22. Paul McCartney
23. Ryan Philippe
24. Jason Mamoa
25. Michael Jordan

These are all very attractive men, high status men, wealthy,  and even they can’t keep a chick. I consider myself kind of a normal dude. Bro, if Brad Pitt can’t keep a chick, I’m f*cked."

Youtube Transcript:

"What is a woman truly saying if they're saying if they say 'I don't like nice guys'?"

They're saying my nervous system does not produce the effect that I call love around people who do not send it into some kind of fight-or-flight response. When I am met with someone who does not make me chase, when I am met with someone who doesn't make me feel I have to earn their love, who doesn't play games, who doesn't give me anxiety by being consistent for three days and then dropping off the radar for five or a week, when I am with someone who doesn't do those things it does not feel like love to me, it doesn't feel like passion, it doesn't feel like fireworks, it doesn't feel like the thing I think I'm supposed to feel..."

Facebook video

Interviewer: More often than not, of all the relationships you have had, do you end the relationship or the guy?

• Woman 1: I've ended every single relationship.
• What about you?
• Woman 2: I've also ended every single relationship.
• How many relationships have you been in?
• Woman 2: Three
• Woman 1: Three
• What about you?
• Women 3: Mostly me 
• How many relationships have you been in?
• Women 3: Four or five
• What about you?
• Woman 4 I've ended them all, I think like five
• Woman 5: I've ended them all, and I've only been in two
• What about you?
• Woman 6: I've been in five or six, and only once has someone else ended the relationship
• Woman 7: 75% me, eight or nine relationships.
• Woman 8: Four relationships and I've ended all of them
• Woman 9: I've ended all three

Whoah! So hold on, a typical complaint I hear from women is why are men so commitment-phobic? Why are men scared of commitment? Why don't men want to get married? All of you, it's almost unanimous, have ended all of your relationships. Once you get commitment, you overwhelmingly end it."

Women don't like being accountable. 

Conclusion

Keep in mind, women initiate 70% of divorces. College-educated women initiate 90% of the divorces. 

So, people are wrong to ask why men won't commit. The correct question: "why do women almost always initiate break-up and divorce?" Commitment is not a man problem. Commitment is a problem with women.

Women don't like to face the fact that it is female insecurity and female incompetence at maintaining relationships which drives almost all relationship problems. Men don't have relationship problems, women do. 

Women are absolute crap at maintaining relationships. They project their failures and their incompetence onto the men. It ain't us, ladies. It's you. 

An Easter Meditation

 If any of the soldiers at the tomb converted and were executed, they would have been the first martyrs, martyred even before Steven, Proto-Martyr. That seems unlikely. I mean, how would the Church have missed that?

So, conversion-execution definitely didn't happen.

If any of the soldiers guarding the tomb converted but were not martyred, everyone was very quiet about it. Think of the picayune details that we are given. We even know Joseph of Nicodemus donated the tomb. That's a pretty minor player. But, despite naming all these minor players, no one mentions the soldier(s) who converted as a result of what they saw at the tomb? Seriously? They talk about every other player, even women, but not actual eyewitnesses to the actual resurrection?

But you imply Luke was thinking to himself, "Sure, I've interviewed a lot of witnesses for my Gospel and for Acts, and soldier George is an eye witness to the single most important event in this entire story, the very reason we are even writing any of this down... Because of what he personally witnessed, he became a follower of Jesus Christ.... hmm...

However, in the 'cons' column, soldier George isn't an apostle, so his conversion story and the details of what he saw at the tomb aren't nearly as important as all the things that the women and the apostles DID NOT see, so ... yeah.... let's leave George's account out. It is not really relevant"

Somehow, I doubt that would be Luke's reaction to news that a Roman guard converted as a result of what he saw at the tomb. 

Which indicates that none of the soldiers who actually would have been eyewitnesses to the actual event of the resurrection ever converted.

FYI, the story of  Longinus doesn't appear until the fourth century. The soldier's name was unknown to the Gospel writers, but the Gospel of Nicodemus, from which the name first derives, also names the thieves on either side of Jesus.