Dear Globalists, AI Won’t Defeat Christianity
This year’s meeting of liberal elites in Davos, Switzerland, was supposed to be banal.
You can always tell when meetings like this aren’t supposed to make headlines because their organizers telegraph it. In this case, the agenda was “A Spirit of Dialogue.” The message was clear: This was supposed to be a meeting at which everyone talked about talking without actually saying anything of importance — the kind of event you hold when everything worth saying might undermine your dream of a world order.
Instead, they ended up talking about Greenland.
That, of course, is what made the headlines — that and Steve Bessent’s description of Gavin Newsom as “Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken.” (READ MORE: Gavin Newsom’s ‘Self-Puffery’ Gets Him in Trouble With David Axelrod)
Meanwhile, the scheduled slate of speeches continued, including such boring titles as “Governments as Economic Super Actors,” “How Robust Is Private Credit?” and “Science as a Growth Engine.” No one could have blamed you if you had skipped Yuval Noah Harari’s “An Honest Conversation on AI and Humanity” in favor of listening to Emmanuel Macron deliver his special address in aviator sunglasses.
But, if you had found yourself in that conference room with Harari — a man who has acted as one of Klaus Schwab’s top advisers and the philosophical mind behind many of his globalist proposals — you would have been forced to face the ugly reality of the technological world we live in.
You would have been told that artificial intelligence can already think better than you and that its command of language is superior to yours (never mind that it abuses certain grammatical and structural tools of the English language). “If thinking really means putting words and other language tokens in order, then AI can already think much better than many, many humans,” Harari said. “AI can certainly come up with a sentence like, ‘AI thinks, therefore I am.’”
If it’s true that AI can write essays and work out complex problems faster and better than we can, it seems only natural to assume that it would eventually take over everything in our society that has to do with words. “If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system. If books are just combinations of words, then AI will take over books. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion,” Harari asserted. (READ MORE: Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ May Actually Hinder the Gaza Peace Plan)
That last bit may sound like hyperbole, except that Harari, a graduate of Oxford University and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knows exactly what he’s doing. If a computer can order “language tokens” in a comprehensible way, if it can control words, then it is perfectly positioned to wage war on the Word who is God.
Suddenly, the mask of the banal slips away from the revolution — and it’s the oldest revolution in the book.
Look, it’s true that AI can write college essays better than the average college student or, with a substantial amount of hand holding, write code for an app. It’s also the case that, at this point, AI is involved in much of our content creation and communication online. You can even make the argument (and Harari does), that computers will come to influence writing, thought, and ideas. But this isn’t science fiction. The AI apocalypse isn’t on the horizon.
We haven’t developed a digital agent capable of independent thought (and there’s a good chance we never will). All we’ve done is create an imperfect tool — one that depends on our continued engagement. To propose that a tool could replace God, who created the universe with the thunderous echo of a single word, is preposterous.
The fact is, there’s a tendency among technological commentators — regardless of whether they sell themselves as optimists, pessimists, or realists — to inflate AI’s potential. Telling the public it’s some kind of mastermind capable of controlling our minds gets clicks. But it isn’t honest.
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