I’ve spent too many hours on AI. I notice statistics indicating that more people are interested in data interoperability than in AI. But this is timely. I thought I’d share this item from John Ellis News Items. It’s one of my favorite sources for a quick update on the news.
You may or may not realize that much of the media shouts from Silicon Valley are really religious in nature. Many out there subscribe to a “scientism.” Shunning traditional religion, they espouse radical rationalism fashioning a religion from reason and science.
First, no less a person than the Pope takes on the Silicone Valley religion head on.
When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry’s leading A.I. companies.
As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of A.I., he included Mr. Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
Was this really a discussion?
But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday’s gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that A.I. was fundamentally not human, Mr. Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area’s frenetic A.I. scene, argued that Mr. Olah’s remarks seemed to hint at the opposite.
“They are not in dialogue,” Mr. Nixon said during an interview at A.G.I. House, a San Francisco “hacker house” with deep ties to many of the people who helped create the A.I. technologies discussed in the pope’s encyclical. “Their perspectives are distinct.”
Ah, the news reports drag in another philosophy—humanism.
The difference between the humanist’s view of A.I.’s risks and the technologist’s dream of what it could become is something that has long been discussed in Mr. Nixon’s community. “It is the reason the community exists,” Mr. Nixon said. “It is its underlying purpose.”
I listen to a podcast called Robot or Not, where podcaster and engineer John Siracusa answers listeners’ questions on definitions. In this case, looks like the question is “AI, Human or Not.”
Mr. Nixon, 33, is one of the founders of A.G.I. House, which is named for Silicon Valley’s headlong pursuit of “artificial general intelligence,” a hypothetical machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world’s Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak.
Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.
Even more grandiose that Human or Not, is it God or Not?
Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.
A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. “Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said.
This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.
As a contemplative, my view of God comes from practice and experience, rather than logical argument. If you are on the rational argument side of things, go for it!
