AI, the Bible, and our Future
1.1 Welcome to the World of Artificial Intelligence
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Last Updated: 04-Nov-24
Introduction to Dominion
Artificial Intelligence. The attempt of mankind to make intelligent machines. But for what?
What is the reason that humans strive for technological progress which inevitably ends in the “creation” of an artificial super intelligence—a God?
Where is the line between a tool and a man-made God?
This blog is not supposed to simply reproduce facts you can look up for yourself on the internet, but instead to bring them into the context of the Bible and the one and only true God, Yahweh.
Let us begin by exploring what AI even is and how it started.
Let us begin "in the beginning"... Genesis.
Genesis 1:28-3028 God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that creeps on the earth." 29 Then God said, "Behold, I have given to you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has the fruit of the tree yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that creeps on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.
This is the initial command for dominion over creation with which most of us should be familiar. It is, in fact, the starting place for our study on artificial intelligence. Before we look into the history of research on artificial intelligence, we should first establish what having dominion over the earth actually means and how it applies to our modern world.
1. Dominion over the earth is given by God.It is not something we just have because we are inhabitants of the earth. Since the beginning, we humans have been designed and blessed by God to steward His creation—a responsibility which we can only fulfill as we think and act in harmony with God’s law.
Takeaway question
In Genesis 2:15, God shows us very clearly what dominion should look like:
Genesis 2:1515 Then Yahweh God took the man and set him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
To "cultivate" is to nourish and develop a resource to the point of its highest potential.
To "keep it" means to protect and attend to a resource for the preservation of its highest potential.
Matthew 25:14-302. Dominion is given for the Glory of God.PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
14 “For it is just like a man about to go on a journey, who called his own slaves and handed over his possessions to them. 15 And to one he gave five talents, to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own ability; and he went on his journey. 16 Immediately the one who had received the five talents went and traded with them, and gained five more talents. 17 In the same manner the one who had received the two talents gained two more. 18 But he who received the one talent went away, and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. 19 “Now after a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. 20 And the one who had received the five talents came up and brought five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed five talents over to me. See, I have gained five more talents. 21 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ 22 “Also the one who had received the two talents came up and said, ‘Master, you handed two talents over to me. See, I have gained two more talents.’ 23 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ 24 “And the one also who had received the one talent came up and said, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed. 25 And I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours.’ 26 “But his master answered and said to him, ‘You wicked, lazy slave, you knew that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I scattered no seed. 27 Therefore, you ought to have put my money in the bank, and on my arrival I would have received my money back with interest. 28 Therefore take away the talent from him, and give it to the one who has the ten talents.’ 29 “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. 30 And throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
When I was in Oklahoma, I visited a small zoo which was owned and operated by Christians. In the background, they played worship music. Around the exhibits, they posted signs with verses and “fun facts” acknowledging God as the Creator of all the different animals. When I went through this zoo, I was just amazed and overwhelmed by the beauty of God's creation.
Those zoo-keepers have exercised their dominion over animals for the glory of God!
Jeremiah 9:23-2423 Thus says Yahweh, “Let not a wise man boast in his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast in his might; let not a rich man boast in his riches, 24 but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am Yahweh who shows lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares Yahweh.
Unfortunately, humans do not always use what God has given them for His glory, but for their own instead.
God has given us humans wisdom and understanding to observe the world and get to know our Creator and His wonderful creation. However, we now live in a time where humans boast in their own intelligence, exalting themselves above the Creator and defining truth for themselves in their willfull ignorance (Romans 1:25, 2 Peter 3:5).
In recent years, one multinational food and beverage company has been accused of exploiting local water resources in developing nations for its own profit. This company has allegedly extracted groundwater to bottle and sell, even in areas suffering from drought, while local residents struggle to access clean drinking water. Rather than stewarding these water resources sustainably and equitably for the benefit of all, this corporation has used its immense power and wealth to take what it wants, draining aquifers and leaving communities high and dry. This company has abused its 'might' (money, influence and technical capabilities).
We need never look very far to see those who boast in their wealth and influence. Certain celebrities, business tycoons, and even some religious leaders are known for their sprawling mansions, private jets, luxury cars, and designer clothes. Mere possessions become their identity. The acquisition of new things, more things, and finer things becomes a life-consuming purpose of its own that is often paraded for the world to see through television, social media, and publicized events.
Let us now also look at two examples from the Bible: King David and King Ahab.
King David:1 Samuel 17:3737 And David said, “Yahweh, who delivered me from the hand of the lion and from the hand of the bear, He will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.” And Saul said to David, “Go, and may Yahweh be with you.”
Before he ever became a well-known war hero or the beloved king of Israel, King David was already an excellent example of someone who used the power (dominion) God gave him for the glory of God. With the same might God gave him to kill the lion and the bear threatening his sheep, David eventually kills the giant Goliath. As David prepared to face this enemy, he clearly stated that it would be God Who will deliver him. David gave all the glory to God!
1 Chronicles 16:1-2.4.71 And they brought in the ark of God and placed it inside the tent which David had pitched for it, and they brought burnt offerings and peace offerings near before God. 2 Then David [...] blessed the people in the name of Yahweh. [...] 4 And he made some of the Levites ministers before the ark of Yahweh, even to bring remembrance and to thank and praise Yahweh, the God of Israel [...] 7 Then on that day David first assigned Asaph and his relatives to give thanks to Yahweh.
For 20 years, the Ark of the Covenant was in the house of Abinadab (1 Samuel 7:1-2). However, during David's reign over Israel, he used his position as king to bring it back to Jerusalem. Not only did he bring it back, but he also followed God's instructions exactly on how it should be moved. He guided the people of Israel to praise and glorify the one and only true God. When David exercised his dominion in this way, Israel was able to flourish as a nation.
I highly recommend reading the song of thanksgiving in 1 Chronicles 16:8-36!
King Ahab:1 Kings 16:30-33
30 And Ahab the son of Omri did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh more than all who were before him. 31 Now it happened, as though it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians as a wife, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. 32 So he erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal which he built in Samaria. 33 Ahab also made the Asherah. Thus Ahab did more to provoke Yahweh, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him.
For most of his life, King Ahab used his dominion over Israel to lead the nation into idolatry. His actions were the opposite of King David's. Ahab's reign was marked by murder, disobedience, and ignoring his responsibilities as the king of Israel.
Responsibility over Technology
How does all of that now apply to our modern world?
First of all, tools are never evil in and of themselves. The first time in human history that a tool was created and used is in Genesis 3:7 and Genesis 3:21:
Genesis 3:7.217 And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
21 Then Yahweh God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them.
In Genesis 4, we can then see how humanity has already established the basis of invention and innovation:
Genesis 4:2.17.20-222 [...] Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a cultivator of the ground.
17 [...] Then Cain [...] built a city and called the name of the city Enoch, after the name of his son.
20 [...] Jabal [...] was the father of those who live in tents and have livestock.
21 [...] Jubal [...] was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.
22 [...] Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron [...].
Now, the only difference between our modern world and that of our ancestors is the amount of tools that we have and the effectiveness of those tools to reduce the need for humans to use their own body.
That probably sounds really abstract, so let us use the practical example of planting and harvesting potatoes:
After the fall in Genesis 3, farmers relied solely on manual labor, using basic tools like hoes or shovels to till the soil for planting. Harvesting involved arduous tasks like hand-pulling crops or using simple harvesting knives.
At the time of Job (Job 1:14), farmers used animal-powered implements like plows and harrows, alleviating some of the physical burden. Seeding and harvesting were still predominantly manual tasks, but the yield potential increased significantly.
During the Industrial Revolution, tractors and early mechanical harvesters revolutionized agriculture. Human effort shifted from direct labor to operating machinery, dramatically enhancing efficiency and productivity in planting, cultivating, and reaping crops.
With the advent of machine learning, we witness the rise of highly automated and technologically advanced systems. Precision planters and GPS-guided harvesters minimize human intervention, while sensors, drones, and machine learning algorithms optimize decisions on planting schedules, crop management, and harvesting times. Human involvement transitions from being the farmer to building the machines by which the land is farmed and to oversee their autonomous operations.
And here we are, back to Artificial Intelligence.
AI is already everywhere. There is hardly any area that does not include machine learning on some level, whether it be for farming (in the example above), for video recommendation, or in research. It is everywhere.
This brings up important questions: Can artificial intelligence be used responsibly? What does that look like? To where will the ongoing advancements of AI lead us? To answer these questions, we need to look at its source and history. Additionally, it is important to look at how AI is implemented into our world and the impact it has on our lives.
Let us look at...
The History of Artificial Intelligence
It all started in the mid 1900s with three major developments:
Neurology: Advancing research in neurology showed that the brain is made up of billions of neurons that fire electric signals for communication.
Age of Computation: In 1941, Konrad Zuse built the Z3, the first electromechanical, programmable, fully automatic, digital computer. The age of computation began. Additionally, Alan Turing proposed his theoretical frameworks for computing, artificial intelligence, and the well-known Turing Test.
AI Research: In 1956, the field of "artificial intelligence research" was founded as an academic discipline at Dartmouth College.
Out of these advancements, a new view emerged known as the computational theory of mind or computationalism. This theory assumes that the human brain, cognitive functions, and consciousness are a mere form of computation, which automatically presupposes a deterministic worldview that denies God.
In a deterministic world, the human brain would be based solely on electrical signals and could, therefore, be recreated or simulated. There would no longer be a free will, which directly contradicts the Word of God!
Genesis 2:77 Then Yahweh God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and so the man became a living being.
This verse clearly shows that we as humans are more than just a material body. God himself breathed life into us. We were made of dust from the ground, which could theoretically be used by us to recreate the material part of a human. However, God is still the One Who gives us life to become a living being!
You can read more about that topic in my blog post 2.1 Threefold Human Nature – Body, Spirit, Soul!
Joshua 24:1515 If it is evil in your sight to serve Yahweh, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh.”
So often we see that verse on signs you can put in your home, but have you ever thought about the implications it has? If there would be no free will, Joshua would not have challenged the Israelites to make a decision for themselves. A decision can only be made if you have a free will.
Deuteronomy 30:1919 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your seed,
If Joshua's challenge to the Israelites is not convincing enough for you, consider what God speaks to the people in this passage, urging them to choose life. Here again, the nation Israel has two options. They have a free will.
Genesis 1:2727 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
God created us in His image, including our free will!
One last verse to make you think. How could you fall away if there is no free will?
Hebrews 6:4-6Neural Networks4 For in the case of those once having been enlightened and having tasted of the heavenly gift and having become partakers of the Holy Spirit, 5 and having tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, 6 and having fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.
After AI was established as an official research field, many projects emerged that showed promising capabilities of such artificial systems. In this book, though, we will only look at the Neural Network approach for AI—the goal to create an artificial brain that works as our biological brain through neurons that can fire and connections between those neurons.
From 1957-1962, Frank Rosenblatt did a lot of influential research on building so-called "Perceptron machines," which could be described as the most basic form of a neural network. Those perceptrons represent a single logical unit. We will get to the perceptron in the next post!
A group of researchers at Stanford Research Institute, led by Charles Rosen and Alfred Brain, built two neural networks that were able to classify symbols on army maps and recognize hand-printed characters on Fortran coding sheets. They were mainly funded by the U.S. Army.
For the next 20 years, attempts to create more complex neural networks failed. The breakthrough came in 1982 with the use of the backpropagation algorithm to train deep neural networks (neural networks that have a multitude of layers).
Natural Language Processing (NLP)Going back to 1967, we have the first chatbot showcasing the potential of natural language processing: ELIZA.
This chatbot was a computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum. The program was split into two parts: analyzing the input sentences and generating the response. In the input sentences, the program looked for key words which were connected to a set of decomposition rules. Those decomposition rules were then associated with reassembly rules, which produced the response which was then displayed on the screen.
I will let Joseph Weizenbaum explain it himself in his article from Communications of the ACM Volume 9, January 1966:
While this is not the place to discuss these functions in all their detail (or even to reveal their full power and generality), it is important to the understanding of the operation of ELIZA to describe them in some detail. Consider the sentence "I am very unhappy these days".
Suppose a foreigner with only a limited knowledge of English but with a very good ear heard that sentence spoken but understood only the first two words "I am".
Wishing to appear interested, perhaps even sympathetic, he may reply "How long have you been very unhappy these days?" What he must have done is to apply a kind of template to the original sentence, one part of which matched the two words "I am" and the remainder isolated the words "very unhappy these days". He must also have a reassembly kit specifically associated with that template, one that specifies that any sentence of the form "I am BLAH" can be transformed to "How long have you been BLAH", independently of the meaning of BLAH. A somewhat more complicated example is given by the sentence "It seems that you hate me". Here the foreigner understands only the words "you" and "me"; i.e., he applies a template that decomposes the sentence into the four parts:
(1) It seems that (2) you (3) hate (4) me
of which only the second and fourth parts are understood. The reassembly rule might then be "What makes you think I hate you"; ie., it might throw away the first component, translate the two known words ("you" to "I" and "me" to "you") and tack on a stock phrase (What makes you think) to the front of the reconstruction.
Joseph Weizenbaum. 1966. ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Commun. ACM 9, 1 (Jan. 1966), 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1145/365153.365168
Weizenbaum had designed multiple scripts for ELIZA to interact with people, the most famous of these scripts being a simulation of a psychotherapist.
When Weizenbaum allowed his secretary to try conversing with ELIZA, he was astonished by how quickly and intensely she formed an emotional connection with the program. Despite knowing it was merely a computer program, she attributed human-like qualities to it. At one point, the secretary asked Weizenbaum to leave the room while she continued her interaction with ELIZA. On another occasion, when Weizenbaum proposed retrieving transcripts of conversations held with ELIZA overnight, he was met with accusations that he intended to invade the privacy of others, indicating that people had discussed personal matters with ELIZA as if it were a real person in whom they could confide. While Weizenbaum was aware of the emotional bonds people can form with inanimate objects like musical instruments or vehicles, he was unprepared for the extent to which a simple computer program could distort the thinking of ordinary individuals into a delusional state of perceiving the program as a sentient being. This realization brought into sharp focus the profound implications of the relationship between humans and computers, prompting Weizenbaum to dedicate further research to this area. (Paraphrased from Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason. W.H. Freeman and Company.)
See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Though it could fool many humans at that time into thinking that the machine was someone, ELIZA wasn't even actual AI. The program Weizenbaum wrote was a deterministic program, unlike neural networks which are probabilistic. The difference between deterministic and probabilistic is ranging from exclusively predictable to entirely unpredictable, respectively.
Large Language Models (LLM)The transition from chat-programs like ELIZA to further advanced artificial intelligence that you can converse with about any topic changed with the development of Large Language Models (LLM's) based on the Transformer architecture.
This transformer architecture is a specific type of neural network. The key innovation in transformers is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to weigh the importance of different parts of the input when processing each element. This enables LLMs to capture long-range dependencies and contextual relationships more effectively, unlike some earlier neural network designs that only processed inputs sequentially (meaning that in each processing step it only consideres the previous words). With the attention layer, the neural network can understand long-range dependencies by looking at the complete input sequence at once and finding relevant connections between words or elements, regardless of their position. Consider the example input: "The animal didn't cross the street because the traffic light was red." Because of the attention mechanism, the LLM can understand the connection between "the animal", "the traffic light", and "red" even though they are separated by several words, allowing it to generate more coherent and contextually relevant outputs.
This new architecture introduced by Vaswani et al. in 2017 from Google Research marked a breakthrough in language processing.
And here we are now, in the midst of a renewed AI boom sparked by the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022. While the development of large language models like ChatGPT has been going on for years, the impressive capabilities of ChatGPT in leveraging massive datasets and using advanced techniques like the attention layer has captured public imagination, attracted media attention, and renewed worldwide interest in the potential of AI systems.
The success of ChatGPT and other recent LLM's has reignited discussions and research efforts around the ambitious goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that can match or exceed human-level intelligence across a wide range of tasks – and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) – AI systems that exceed human intelligence and abilities in every area; the last invention of humanity...
If you find all of that to be very interesting, consider subscribing to my blog so you will never miss the next post or news about the blog!
Next week, we will talk about the Perceptron, the beginning of all Neural Networks!
Sources & Further Reading:
- While Nestlé extracts millions of litres from their land, residents have no drinking water
- The History of Artificial Intelligence
- The Computational Theory of Mind
- Joseph Weizenbaum. 1966. ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Commun. ACM 9, 1 (Jan. 1966), 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1145/365153.365168
- Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason. W.H. Freeman and Company.
- Vaswani, et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. arXiv:1706.03762
Some ideas and information for this blog post were generated with the help of Claude-3-Sonnet and Claude-3-Opus, AI assistants developed by Anthropic. While Claude offered valuable suggestions and explanations, the content presented here is the author's own work.