AI and Tech

The Troubling Truth

After I tragically lost my dad, I was left with many questions. Why do so many of us struggle to find happiness? Why has this struggle progressed from the beginning of humanity to the present day? Why has mental illness skyrocketed in recent years? How did we get to this point? Why has America lost its moral compass? I was overwhelmed with a desire to find the truth. I concluded that one of the major causes of mental illness in America is that we believe that the people in control know what is best for the rest of us. As we have submitted to a divisive political system, our morality and spiritual awareness have eroded. We have accepted a very limited understanding of ourselves. The divisive political system has not been beneficial for our self-esteem.

[mepr-show rules=”779″ unauth=”message”]It has made us believe that the answers to our problems are outside us, and we must behave a certain way to find happiness. In the process, we have neglected our connection with God. Instead of relying on God to guide us towards our life’s purpose, we rely on politicians, media, social media, science, and technology to dictate the quality of our lives. As we have collectively turned away from God, we have lost our ability to discern what is true and what is false. It is impossible to find fulfillment in this way. When did we get so lost? When did we forget a strong connection with God is the only thing that can fulfill our spiritual and emotional needs? When did we stop worshipping God and put our faith in the government, technology, and the media?

When did we become a society that worships these things like idols? Scripture tells us in 1 Corinthians 10:18-22 that if we worship idols long enough, evil will have power over us. It should be no surprise that mental illness is common in present-day America. In a 2020 documentary entitled “The Social Dilemma,” Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, states the following:

There has been a gigantic increase in depression and anxiety in American teenagers, which started around 2011-2013. The number of teenage girls that were admitted to the hospital for cutting themselves, or hurting themselves, that number was stable year over year, and then it began to go way up as social media came to the forefront of society.

Even more disturbing, we see the same pattern with suicide. Generation Z, the kids born after 1996, are the first generation to spend a lot of their time on social media. This generation is much more anxious, fragile, and depressed. They are much less comfortable taking risks. The rate at which they get driver’s licenses is dropping. The number who go out on a date or have any kind of romantic interaction is also declining rapidly. This is a dramatic change from previous generations. It is sad to realize that with every child admitted to the hospital for mental or behavioral illness, there is a family that is traumatized and horrified, thinking, “My god, what is happening to our kids?”

According to the same documentary, the former president of Pinterest, Tim Kendall, once said,

“It is plain as day to me. The social media services are killing people and causing people to kill themselves.”

Tristan Harris, co-founder and CEO of Apture, former design ethicist at Google, and the co-founder for the Center for Humane Technology, said:

When you look around, it looks like the world is going crazy. You have to ask yourself, is this normal? Or have we all fallen into some kind of a spell? I do not know any parent who says, you know, I really want my kids to grow up feeling manipulated by tech designers who manipulate their attention and make it impossible to do their homework and make them constantly compare themselves to unrealistic standards of beauty. Nobody wants that. But that appears to be the foundation of social media technology.

Harris goes on to say:

No one got upset when bicycles were invented. When everyone started riding around on bicycles, I don’t think anyone was thinking, ‘Oh my God, we have just ruined society, bicycles are affecting people, and pulling people away from their kids, and ruining the fabric of democracy, and making people believe they don’t know what is true.’ No one ever said any of that when the bicycle was invented. That is because when something is genuinely a tool, like a bicycle, it will just sit there and wait for you to use it, and when something is not a tool it is demanding things from you. It is seducing you; it is manipulating you; it wants things from you. So, what we have done is moved away from a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation-based technology environment. Social media is not a tool that is just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.

Edward Tufte, professor of statistical evidence, information, and interface design at Yale University, said, “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.”

In an article written by Simon Parkin, he points out that every “like” on Facebook produces dopamine in the human brain. He then explains how big tech uses dopamine to keep us addicted to social media. In the article, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, admitted that the social network started with a mission to distract Americans, not unite us. Parker said, “The thought process was: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” To achieve this goal, Facebook’s architects utilized a “vulnerability in human psychology.” When someone likes or comments on a post or photograph that they have uploaded, dopamine is released into their brain.

Wolfrom Schultz conducted a test that demonstrated how dopamine relates to the reward we receive for an action. He concluded that dopamine is related to desire, ambition, addiction, and sex drive. Social media was intended to be addictive, it has distracted us from our connection with God, and it has devastated the inner wellness of the American population. The time is now for Americans to take responsibility for unplugging from Big Tech, reclaim our minds, and establish a healthy relationship with the God of goodness. We must read and study the Bible to understand how to live with morality and virtue and encourage one another to love the way God created us to love. The United Creed inspires Americans to unplug and Be Golden.

The Future if Technology

My wife and I are living proof that technology has the power to unite people of different cultures. In August of 2016, we matched online and never looked back. We married in 2019. My wife and I would have never met if it wasn’t for technology. Attending church online during the pandemic inspired us to commit our lives to Christ. The greatest contribution of the information age is that the word of God is more easily available. It is also important to recognize that the enemy has a long history of using tools to distract us from our compass of joy, our connection with God. Tech advancements are happening faster and faster in the present day. This rapid rise in tech has produced a time starved generation. We sacrifice our health and safety in exchange for cheap entertainment. We accept awful nutrition into our bodies because it is fast food, and we buy healthy pre-prepped meals at the supermarket because we don’t have time to cook. We risk our safety every time we check our phones while we are driving. Worst of all, we neglect our connection with God. Some people are even having conversations about interfacing the human body to the Internet. Consider the words of Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. At a World Economic Forum event on May 13, 2019, he said, “What the fourth industrial revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.”

The Future of Humanity

Artificial intelligence (AI) has received considerable research and funding. AI promises to make our lives easier by doing much of our thinking for us. The promise of AI is that it will create a race of superhumans that will have fully integrated AI, unbelievable physical abilities, and immortality. But we must also consider the massive risks of AI. Machines that do our thinking for us can be a great thing for humanity. But what happens when AI becomes smarter than humans? Google’s head of technology research, Ray Kurzweil, envisions a day when you will go to a store, and you will have the lens of your eye removed and replaced with a liquid that is packed with cameras, a communications device, and other electronics.

You will be able to see in the dark with infrared vision, and you will even be connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This sounds awesome! However, we must understand that with this comes constant supervision by those in power. Humanity is moving towards something known as “the singularity.” Kurzweil explains in his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006) that artificial intelligence will become so advanced that it will become smarter than humans and evolve at an exponential rate. Scientists used to think AI was decades away from achieving the singularity. However, the recent explosions in AI development suggest that the singularity could in fact be imminent. We don’t know what will happen after the singularity. The singularity is a term that expresses a condition beyond our comprehension.

The term “singularity” is related to the physics of a black hole. The center of a black hole is called the singularity; it is characterized by infinite density and gravitational power. Space and time collapse at the singularity. The singularity cannot be explored using our current understanding of physics. To fully understand the nature of the singularity is to know the unknowable mind of God. There are three levels of artificial intelligence, beginning with artificial narrow intelligence. This is what we’re experiencing in the public sphere right now.

Everything you do online utilizes narrow artificial intelligence. When Apple Music offers a musical selection, or when Amazon suggests a product for you, this is artificial intelligence at its most basic level. Siri and Alexa are also great examples of artificial narrow intelligence, level one AI. Level one AI is broadening into Artificial General Intelligence, or level two AI. This is where machines think like humans. We’re not quite there yet, but every advancement in narrow intelligence is drawing us closer to the general intelligence level of AI.

An indication of how close we are to general AI is when Google’s artificial intelligence beat the champion of the world’s most complicated boardgame on January 27, 2016. The third level of AI is the most troubling: Artificial Super Intelligence. This is where machines can become billions of times smarter than humans. At this point, AI will develop its own agendas. There are tremendous risks associated to this level of AI. Some people think that machines may achieve immortality or cause the extinction of humanity. We don’t know what will happen once machines achieve this level of intelligence.

The World Economic Forum includes participants like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have made dramatic warnings concerning AI. I admire Elon Musk’s argument that AI development must be restrained. Musk started his own AI company because he recognizes his competitors are developing AI for nefarious purposes. Musk appears to be committed to developing a profitable AI that will be an ally to humanity. The development of AI will greatly improve business, economics, physics, chemistry, and medicine. There will likely be unbelievable breakthroughs and solutions to major problems.

Unfortunately, AI will cost the economy an unbelievable number of jobs. For example, ride-sharing drivers, restaurant waiters, maybe even police officers could lose their jobs to AI robots. We must understand where we are on the fast-paced journey towards the singularity. Every day, more and more artificially intelligent machines are making decisions for humans. AI is becoming a black box, meaning it has advanced to writing its own algorithms, and humans do not understand them. We don’t know how these artificially intelligent machines are coming to the conclusions that they’re coming to. That puts humanity in a compromised position.

The European Union is already drafting legislation that gives citizens the right to demand that an artificially intelligent computer explain its solutions to a human. However, will AI continue to obey our commands when it becomes smarter than we are? There is no way we can control advanced AI once it has been unleashed. The solution to this problem is for us to summon the Holy Spirit and Be Golden. All over the planet, there are engineers and scientists working on technologies with little or no oversight. This problem is only going to get worse.

I believe that we can co-exist with AI if we make morality a priority in American culture. The United Creed ’s Be Golden campaign’s mission is to be the vehicle that restores morality in American culture. [/mepr-show]