World Economic Forum (WEF) member and professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, said in a few years, A.I. could “correct religions” by rewriting the Bible.
During a live recording of the show “It’s Not That Simple,” held May 19 in Lisbon, Portugal, Harari told journalist Pedro Pinto that A.I. is the first technology ever to create new ideas.
As such, unlike previous printing and broadcasting technologies which are incapable of determining whether the Bible is “good or bad,” A.I. possesses the power to “correct” religious beliefs.
“You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the mind. They cannot create a new idea,” he said.
“Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century, the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it. But it did not create a single new page. It had no ideas of its own about the Bible – is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?
“A.I. can create new ideas,” Harari said. “[It] can even write a new Bible. Throughout history, religions dreamed about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity.
“Every religion claims, our book – all the other books of the other religions, humans wrote them, but our book—no, no, no, no, no, it came from some superhuman intelligence.
“In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct. Just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an A.I. That could be a reality in a few years.”
Okay – but surely nobody would fall for that. Who’d look to an A.I. chatbot for the answers to ultimate questions about God, morality, and life after death? Well, it turns out there’s a market – unfortunately.
Last week it was reported that hundreds of ‘believers’ attended a church service generated by ChatGPT and preached by an avatar of a “bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar.”
More than 300 people packed into St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth on Friday morning to attend the “experimental Lutheran church service” that was almost entirely generated by the chatbot.
The 40-minute service included a sermon, prayers, and music – 98% of which originated from the machine.
So, A.I. is not just replacing humanity, it’s now replacing the work of the Holy Spirit. Of course, the only churches that’ll be excited about this are those churches that God long ago abandoned. And A.I. services may just work as a good marker of those Godless gatherings that would rather be ruled by technology than the God they’re pretending to serve.
Harari has long dreamed of such a world ruled by technological decree. During a 2018 presentation at the annual WEF meet titled, Will the Future Be Human? Harari claimed that within a decade or two, algorithms could be used to determine if teenagers are homosexuals “in denial.”
“When I was 21, I finally realized that I was gay after living several years in denial,” he said. “This is not exceptional. A lot of gay men live in denial for many years. They don’t know something very important about themselves.
“Now, imagine a situation in 10 or 21 years, when an algorithm can tell any teenager exactly where he or she is on the gay-straight spectrum.”
And what room is there for fallible man to disagree with the decrees of what the world deems a “superhuman” and supposedly unbiased intelligence? Beware the path we pave is not a one-way street to technological tyranny.
