The Black Gate¶
Rod Dreher writes in The American Conservative:
I hope Christians will read the Kahneman-Harari interview closely. This is the future. If you are not part of a church community that is consciously resisting this vision, then your children, or at best your children’s children, will be lost to the faith. There is no thought more corrupting to the human soul than the Serpent’s promise in Eden: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Here‘s the thing itself. Among much thought-provoking material:
[Hariri:] … generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory. […] But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.
[…] And when you look at it more and more, for most of the
tasks that humans are needed for, what is required is just
intelligence, and a very particular type of intelligence,
because we are undergoing, for thousands of years, a process of
specialization, which makes it easier to replace us. To build a
robot that could function effectively as a hunter-gatherer is
extremely complex. You need to know so many different things.
But to build a self-driving car, or to build a “Watson-bot” that
can diagnose disease better than my doctor, this is relatively
easy. […] And this is where we have to take seriously, the
possibility that even though computers will still be far behind
humans in many different things, as far as the tasks that the
system needs from us are concerned, most of the time computers
will be able to do better than us. And again, I don’t want to
give a prediction, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, but what you
do see is it’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf, that, yes, you
cry wolf once, twice, three times, and maybe people say yes, 50
years ago, they already predicted that computers will replace
humans, and it didn’t happen. But the thing is that with every
generation, it is becoming closer, and predictions such as these
fuel the process.
There’s been a wave of excellent writing on such themes just
recently —
both
of
these
are especially worth a look (and maybe
this
too).