> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 [SIC] years old.
Where do you stop once you go down this rabbit hole? Which faith(s) get their views injected in? Christian? Muslim? Hindu? Pagan Gods? Should I get the perspective of the follower's of Thor when I ask a question?
Note that you can always ask for the religious perspective you're interested in. IME with the religion(s) I grew up in or know a great deal about, the LLMs are pretty good at answering accurately and respectfully. Nearly all the products already offer you tools to personalize the output for you too if you want to inject your faith into the answers, so it's not like the LLMs won't give you a religious perspective if you want it.
> young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Ahem, 6000 years, approximately.
> around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
While the Gregorian calendar was in use for about 70 years by the time of his "calculation" of the age of the Earth, the Gregorian calendar was a Catholic invention and Ussher was very Protestant.
Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes. Instead, the only primordial radioactives are those with very long half-lives. If there were a different rate of radioactive decay (as some YECs try to suggest), the Earth would still be a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface. And definately no liquid water anywhere.
>Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes.
Well, if one ascribes to this God thing, of course Earth could just as well be created 6000 years ago, with exactly the shape and vintage material properties to appear to us as it does now.
If you can create a baby Earth from nothing, you can also just create a middle-aged Earth from nothing.
Yes, the article had a typo in it (I quoted the article verbatim other than the [SIC] that I added). The correct belief of young-earth creationists is 6,000 years, not 600. For the record I don't think that impacts my point at all.
For the curious, that number is largely arrived at by working backward through time using the reported ages of the Old Testament prophets going back to Adam in the book of Genesis.
> Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist
This is one of the worst arguments against young earth creationism. You have to posit a being who can create the universe, but can't create already decayed elements.
And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.
Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.
And yet if you ask many a young earth creationist about the dome in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, they will have no idea what you’re talking about¹ because they insist on literal interpretations of a text that they didn’t make it through the first page of.
Creationism does not want to say "magic" and admit that God is intentionally trying to deceive people. So that's why some of these responses seem silly. I mean they are, but only because the pro-creationism arguments are silly.
The analogy that jumps to mind immediately is "you get the wikipedia page by default, but have the option to explore the page's metadata (including conversations)." This feels reasonable, and how most people use wikipedia - which isn't surprising since you're often getting an LLM's output from the training on the exact same information. The complaints in the report seem to miss the point IMO, jumping to some form of artificial intelligence and applying it to what is text prediction that unsurprisingly reflects the body of human knowledge on which it is trained.
That's some primo-grade flamebait even by The Register's standards; wrapping a fairly common, perhaps mundane at this point, observation about how what answers the AI favors will affect what answers people tend to be given if AI use increases around the religion flame flash point is definitely going to get some views.
Look for the followup article where they wrap the mundane observation around the politics drumbeat (people who use AIs may be exposed to political beliefs you don't believe in) once they notice the article's view count.
> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Is certainly a typo, off by an order of magnitude. 600 years ago the Christian Church had already been around for more than 1000 years. Young earth creationists believe the earth is ~6000 years old
> [...] LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
Basically all op-ed level pieces on AI make me feel like dialectic materialism really needs to make a come back. Public discourse has given up on engaging with the physical constraints of the world in a meaningful way.
No, its not. There is no official doctrine on things like that (i.e. not in the catechism, the statement of the beliefs of the church) but it has been endorsed by some comments by Popes and bishops. Similarly there are statements that evolution is well proven, but its not in the catechism either.
The top tier of official doctrine are the conclusions of councils of the Church (there have been 21 ever) and ex cathedra statements of popes (there are fewer of those). None of those discusses the big bang or similar.
It's not doctrinal but not opposed either, as it is irrelevant to Salvation. Whether the universe was created that way or not doesn't change the fact that God, if the BBT did in fact happen, was it's architect. The Church maintains that this is a possibility.
This used to be free, now I guess it has a sub, but you might be able to ask it a few questions before you reach limit.
https://www.mastercatechism.com/
But yeah, the catechism is the single source of truth on that stuff. Baltimore, Trent. Those two are the best. The doctrine doesn't change amongst catechisms only the writing style. I like those two the best.
> Magnifica Humanitas is that rarest of treats, a 40,000-odd word AI policy document written in Latin.
I stopped reading at this sentence. If you go to the source (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...), you can see it's available in eight languages, none of them being Latin. In fact, I read elsewhere a few days ago that one of the novelties of this one is that, unlike all the preceding ones, it's not written in Latin; the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas) also says that ("The encyclical was the first to be published without an official Latin version. This followed a recent change to Vatican regulations permitting such documents to be drafted in other languages.[4]").
If the article gets it this wrong already in the third paragraph, it's not worth reading any further.
You'd need to train it only on Christian texts rather than "all of human writing", so I'd imagine it would be harder to get enough material to make an LLM that works as effectively. Probably the same reason that LLMs are generally in English, rather than Swahili or Esperanto
What would be the point? You can ask an existing LLM to reply as a Christian or explain Christian ideas.
In short, hardly anyone wants it, certainly not enough people to make it worthwhile.
Also, to be credibly Christian would require conforming to Christian values, which would be very difficult to do profitably so you would need a sponsor willing to commit a huge amount of money to subsidise it.
>LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality
Everything that does not contain the universe itself has to do that.
Have you ever seen a cat and then realised it was just a plastic bag. That;s you synchronising your internal model to updated observations.
There's a cheap shot at Anthropic suggesting that AI might be more than the sum of its parts.
There are patterns to science and patterns to religion. To delare something is or is not is the domain of religion. Science always gives you something that is incomplete, it's the best we know right now, it corresponds to theories and tests.
It is a very scientific thing to say you could possibly have a conscious AI. Because the possibility exists through not being convincingly ruled out. It is possible that matter can produce consciousness because we are made of matter and if we call the thing we have consciousness then that suggests things made of matter can be conscious.
It is also scientific to analyse models to see what they represent and to present the possibility that their representations might correspond to an experience.
None of that is says that is definitely the case.
Once you get to saying 'It's obvious that A LLM could never produce consciousness' or 'they are not really thinking' or 'they don't understand anything' you are talking in the absolutes that only religion can offer.
Science will frequently state 'There is no evidence of ...'. It is frequently entirely reasonable to act on the presumption that something doesn't exist in that situation, but that is not the same thing as refusing to accept that it could. If evidence turns up science will change its view, if it does not, then it fails to be science.
You see poor science exhibited in off-hand dismissals of perpetual motion machines. If someone presents a claim that they have made a perpetual motion machines, you don't respond, as many do, by saying it is against the laws of thermodynamics and therefore the machine doesn't work. That is applying a faith in the discoveries that are more than they say, you are treating science like a religion by doing that. A scientific response to a perpetual motion machine is to say "I expect you are wrong in some way, because well tested rules suggest this cannot happen" you may then ask about various implications working from the assumption that the machine does work. If they cannot show any of those implications actually happening it suggests that the machine doesn't not work (basically you can ask "where does the energy come from'). If they can show solid proof of the implications, good science would then accept this as a counterexample to the laws of thermodynamics. That has yet to happen, the laws seem fIrly robust. But a perpetual motion machine does not fail to work because of the laws of thermodynamics, it fails to work because of the way the universe works. The laws of thermodynamics are just a very good model of how it works. If the perpetual motion machine worked. It would be the laws, not the universe itself that was incorrect.
Science allows for possibility, and searches for evidence.
Religion just states what some want to believe is true.
In the same way, outright declarations of the capabilities of AI now and in the future are the
Domain of religion.
The scientific view is, as always, "here's what we have evidence for, so we don't think this particular AI is conscious because it doesn't show what we would expect for that." There is no absolute here. If something unexplainable with the current system comes to light then science must adapt, that is what makes it science.
> The danger here is that this is not only an extension of the ‘Teach the controversy’ tactic that fundamentalists use to try and get one very particular kind of religion equal status to science and humanism in schools,
...
> but that this is highly integrated with powerful political and financial forces.
> There’s also the first stirrings of fun from the lawyers, some of whom are reportedly wondering whether Papa’s downer on AI is enough to give Catholics the right to refuse it in the workplace on religious exemption grounds.
I mean, sure. Some communities, like the Amish are pretty famous for that attitude. It is a respectable option, but the practical upshot is it just means there are a bunch of jobs you can't do. There is a bonus that you get to be part of a pacifistic community because your military branch isn't going to be in a position to defeat anyone.
There are a lot of people who are developing an unhealthy obsession with AI, both in their work and personal lives. It may not be a religion (yet?), but they are treating chat bots as nearly infallible, all knowing friends. The term "AI psychosis" is overused, but there is some sort of a mental illness going around. I'm not talking about teenagers, either. These are working adults in their 40's and 50's.
Everything is a religion to at least a small group of people. LLMs are no exception. It is currently not broadly adopted religiously, but it does have qualities that could see it become a much bigger religion over time.
- Doomsayers with Yudkowsky et. al. at the helm calling to bomb datacenters
- “Roko’s Basilisk”
- General AI psychosis and treatment of AI as something with consciousness. Any attempts of rebuttal are met with lazy “but how do you know you are conscious. haha got ‘em”
- Inquisitorial purges of non-believers: “our CEO mandates you shall use AI in your work, or else”
- Communion with a God: “I was talking to ChatGPT and I realised <something personally profound>”
- “You are just using it wrong” aka “You are not praying hard enough”
- Cult Executive Officers
- Promise of incoming salvation with AGI taking over and making a Heaven (or Hell - caveat emptor) on Earth
A classic interview question used to be "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
> What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
The tech industry is made up of a lot of different people with different opinions/perspectives, so differing views is exactly what I would expect. And to be fair the views are pretty widely available for anyone curious. Tech industry leaders haven't exactly been quiet about what they think AI will do to/for humanity.
You may not want AI used as a proselytizing pipeline into home and office. Others do.
In many ways, AI is a religion. Not because it requires belief in a utopian future through a dystopian present, or that it’s used by very powerful people to get more power, or that nobody can define what it actually is. All these things are overlaps on the Venn diagram, but the biggie is that LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
-----
is not actually a coherent train of thought, although you can see why it might seem to be to a language model.
> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 [SIC] years old.
Where do you stop once you go down this rabbit hole? Which faith(s) get their views injected in? Christian? Muslim? Hindu? Pagan Gods? Should I get the perspective of the follower's of Thor when I ask a question?
Note that you can always ask for the religious perspective you're interested in. IME with the religion(s) I grew up in or know a great deal about, the LLMs are pretty good at answering accurately and respectfully. Nearly all the products already offer you tools to personalize the output for you too if you want to inject your faith into the answers, so it's not like the LLMs won't give you a religious perspective if you want it.
> young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Ahem, 6000 years, approximately.
> around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
While the Gregorian calendar was in use for about 70 years by the time of his "calculation" of the age of the Earth, the Gregorian calendar was a Catholic invention and Ussher was very Protestant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher
Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes. Instead, the only primordial radioactives are those with very long half-lives. If there were a different rate of radioactive decay (as some YECs try to suggest), the Earth would still be a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface. And definately no liquid water anywhere.
>Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes.
Well, if one ascribes to this God thing, of course Earth could just as well be created 6000 years ago, with exactly the shape and vintage material properties to appear to us as it does now.
If you can create a baby Earth from nothing, you can also just create a middle-aged Earth from nothing.
Yes, the article had a typo in it (I quoted the article verbatim other than the [SIC] that I added). The correct belief of young-earth creationists is 6,000 years, not 600. For the record I don't think that impacts my point at all.
For the curious, that number is largely arrived at by working backward through time using the reported ages of the Old Testament prophets going back to Adam in the book of Genesis.
> Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist
This is one of the worst arguments against young earth creationism. You have to posit a being who can create the universe, but can't create already decayed elements.
And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.
Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.
And yet if you ask many a young earth creationist about the dome in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, they will have no idea what you’re talking about¹ because they insist on literal interpretations of a text that they didn’t make it through the first page of.
⸻
1. Based on firsthand experience.
>Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.
Not such a good argument either. They're way ahead of you: "The lord moves in mysterious ways" and all that.
Creationism does not want to say "magic" and admit that God is intentionally trying to deceive people. So that's why some of these responses seem silly. I mean they are, but only because the pro-creationism arguments are silly.
-4004 earth not found?
You ignored the "[SIC]" notation in order to pretend you are correcting the person you responded to.
You're "Well, ackshually..."ing, without even adding a correction. Yay.
The analogy that jumps to mind immediately is "you get the wikipedia page by default, but have the option to explore the page's metadata (including conversations)." This feels reasonable, and how most people use wikipedia - which isn't surprising since you're often getting an LLM's output from the training on the exact same information. The complaints in the report seem to miss the point IMO, jumping to some form of artificial intelligence and applying it to what is text prediction that unsurprisingly reflects the body of human knowledge on which it is trained.
So many different races and religions that it's best to stick to good old secularism.
Secularism can mean a wide range of beliefs. A secularist might be a communist of fascist or a libertarian or a socialist or.....
How does race come into it at all? Religion is about belief and most religions welcome people of any race.
That's some primo-grade flamebait even by The Register's standards; wrapping a fairly common, perhaps mundane at this point, observation about how what answers the AI favors will affect what answers people tend to be given if AI use increases around the religion flame flash point is definitely going to get some views.
Look for the followup article where they wrap the mundane observation around the politics drumbeat (people who use AIs may be exposed to political beliefs you don't believe in) once they notice the article's view count.
> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Is certainly a typo, off by an order of magnitude. 600 years ago the Christian Church had already been around for more than 1000 years. Young earth creationists believe the earth is ~6000 years old
Thanks for clarifying. I know they're nuts but the earth being 600 years when Jesus was around 2000 years ago didn't make any sense.
>> didn't make any sense.
only because of your lack of FAITH </s>
I think this is the core argument:
> [...] LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
Basically all op-ed level pieces on AI make me feel like dialectic materialism really needs to make a come back. Public discourse has given up on engaging with the physical constraints of the world in a meaningful way.
Surprised if the Pope really cares about some Fair & Balanced coverage of Young Earth creationism. Isn’t the Big Bang official Catholic doctrine?
> Isn’t the Big Bang official Catholic doctrine?
No, its not. There is no official doctrine on things like that (i.e. not in the catechism, the statement of the beliefs of the church) but it has been endorsed by some comments by Popes and bishops. Similarly there are statements that evolution is well proven, but its not in the catechism either.
The top tier of official doctrine are the conclusions of councils of the Church (there have been 21 ever) and ex cathedra statements of popes (there are fewer of those). None of those discusses the big bang or similar.
Young Earth Creationism is a purely Protestant belief. Although I'm aware of only one Hindu-ish faith that believes in YEC - the Brahma Kumaris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma_Kumaris
Disclaimer: my first girlfriend got us both involved in that faith.
No there are Jewish sects who claim to know how old the earth is.
(It is considered tradition in my country to ridicule and insult people's most closely held beliefs but they always get a pass for historical reasons)
It's not doctrinal but not opposed either, as it is irrelevant to Salvation. Whether the universe was created that way or not doesn't change the fact that God, if the BBT did in fact happen, was it's architect. The Church maintains that this is a possibility.
This used to be free, now I guess it has a sub, but you might be able to ask it a few questions before you reach limit. https://www.mastercatechism.com/
This is also a wealth of information on what's dogmatic and what isn't. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
But yeah, the catechism is the single source of truth on that stuff. Baltimore, Trent. Those two are the best. The doctrine doesn't change amongst catechisms only the writing style. I like those two the best.
The article is poorly written. "The report" there refers to the linked study in the previous paragraph, not the Pope's encyclical.
> Magnifica Humanitas is that rarest of treats, a 40,000-odd word AI policy document written in Latin.
I stopped reading at this sentence. If you go to the source (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...), you can see it's available in eight languages, none of them being Latin. In fact, I read elsewhere a few days ago that one of the novelties of this one is that, unlike all the preceding ones, it's not written in Latin; the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas) also says that ("The encyclical was the first to be published without an official Latin version. This followed a recent change to Vatican regulations permitting such documents to be drafted in other languages.[4]").
If the article gets it this wrong already in the third paragraph, it's not worth reading any further.
When I first heard of "prompt engineering", my first thought was for the Pythia and Roman augurs.
If there are enough people who want a Christian LLM, why hasn't one been made one?
You'd need to train it only on Christian texts rather than "all of human writing", so I'd imagine it would be harder to get enough material to make an LLM that works as effectively. Probably the same reason that LLMs are generally in English, rather than Swahili or Esperanto
What would be the point? You can ask an existing LLM to reply as a Christian or explain Christian ideas.
In short, hardly anyone wants it, certainly not enough people to make it worthwhile.
Also, to be credibly Christian would require conforming to Christian values, which would be very difficult to do profitably so you would need a sponsor willing to commit a huge amount of money to subsidise it.
>LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality
Everything that does not contain the universe itself has to do that.
Have you ever seen a cat and then realised it was just a plastic bag. That;s you synchronising your internal model to updated observations.
There's a cheap shot at Anthropic suggesting that AI might be more than the sum of its parts.
There are patterns to science and patterns to religion. To delare something is or is not is the domain of religion. Science always gives you something that is incomplete, it's the best we know right now, it corresponds to theories and tests.
It is a very scientific thing to say you could possibly have a conscious AI. Because the possibility exists through not being convincingly ruled out. It is possible that matter can produce consciousness because we are made of matter and if we call the thing we have consciousness then that suggests things made of matter can be conscious.
It is also scientific to analyse models to see what they represent and to present the possibility that their representations might correspond to an experience.
None of that is says that is definitely the case.
Once you get to saying 'It's obvious that A LLM could never produce consciousness' or 'they are not really thinking' or 'they don't understand anything' you are talking in the absolutes that only religion can offer.
Science will frequently state 'There is no evidence of ...'. It is frequently entirely reasonable to act on the presumption that something doesn't exist in that situation, but that is not the same thing as refusing to accept that it could. If evidence turns up science will change its view, if it does not, then it fails to be science.
You see poor science exhibited in off-hand dismissals of perpetual motion machines. If someone presents a claim that they have made a perpetual motion machines, you don't respond, as many do, by saying it is against the laws of thermodynamics and therefore the machine doesn't work. That is applying a faith in the discoveries that are more than they say, you are treating science like a religion by doing that. A scientific response to a perpetual motion machine is to say "I expect you are wrong in some way, because well tested rules suggest this cannot happen" you may then ask about various implications working from the assumption that the machine does work. If they cannot show any of those implications actually happening it suggests that the machine doesn't not work (basically you can ask "where does the energy come from'). If they can show solid proof of the implications, good science would then accept this as a counterexample to the laws of thermodynamics. That has yet to happen, the laws seem fIrly robust. But a perpetual motion machine does not fail to work because of the laws of thermodynamics, it fails to work because of the way the universe works. The laws of thermodynamics are just a very good model of how it works. If the perpetual motion machine worked. It would be the laws, not the universe itself that was incorrect.
Science allows for possibility, and searches for evidence.
Religion just states what some want to believe is true.
In the same way, outright declarations of the capabilities of AI now and in the future are the Domain of religion.
The scientific view is, as always, "here's what we have evidence for, so we don't think this particular AI is conscious because it doesn't show what we would expect for that." There is no absolute here. If something unexplainable with the current system comes to light then science must adapt, that is what makes it science.
Am I dreaming, or are companies trying to start an AI cult just to squeeze even more money out of me?
In an attention economy, companies becoming religions is a logical outcome.
> The danger here is that this is not only an extension of the ‘Teach the controversy’ tactic that fundamentalists use to try and get one very particular kind of religion equal status to science and humanism in schools, ... > but that this is highly integrated with powerful political and financial forces.
So, exactly like fundamentalist religion.
> There’s also the first stirrings of fun from the lawyers, some of whom are reportedly wondering whether Papa’s downer on AI is enough to give Catholics the right to refuse it in the workplace on religious exemption grounds.
I mean, sure. Some communities, like the Amish are pretty famous for that attitude. It is a respectable option, but the practical upshot is it just means there are a bunch of jobs you can't do. There is a bonus that you get to be part of a pacifistic community because your military branch isn't going to be in a position to defeat anyone.
It's a stupid premise given the pope didn't say anything even close to "Catholics should avoid AI".
Jesus L.L.M. Christ. No, they are not a religion and never should be. Please stop associating AI with anything that resembles worship.
There are a lot of people who are developing an unhealthy obsession with AI, both in their work and personal lives. It may not be a religion (yet?), but they are treating chat bots as nearly infallible, all knowing friends. The term "AI psychosis" is overused, but there is some sort of a mental illness going around. I'm not talking about teenagers, either. These are working adults in their 40's and 50's.
Everything is a religion to at least a small group of people. LLMs are no exception. It is currently not broadly adopted religiously, but it does have qualities that could see it become a much bigger religion over time.
AI is more of a religious cult.
Let’s rewind:
- Doomsayers with Yudkowsky et. al. at the helm calling to bomb datacenters
- “Roko’s Basilisk”
- General AI psychosis and treatment of AI as something with consciousness. Any attempts of rebuttal are met with lazy “but how do you know you are conscious. haha got ‘em”
- Inquisitorial purges of non-believers: “our CEO mandates you shall use AI in your work, or else”
- Communion with a God: “I was talking to ChatGPT and I realised <something personally profound>”
- “You are just using it wrong” aka “You are not praying hard enough”
- Cult Executive Officers
- Promise of incoming salvation with AGI taking over and making a Heaven (or Hell - caveat emptor) on Earth
The linked article is also interesting: https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/27/anthropic-co-fo...
A classic interview question used to be "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
Dario Amodei did try to answer that question:
- https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
- https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...
It's pretty long and meandering but it's the closest I've seen from AI leadership engaging intellectually with the question you're asking
I think on the scale of 5 years, the current political trends will still have more influence.
Trump getting a third term, dying, or both. Reform possibly winning a UK election. How long Putin lives. These are quite significant influences.
AI itself will change massively in that time, but the way it changes the world will take longer to manifest.
> What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
The tech industry is made up of a lot of different people with different opinions/perspectives, so differing views is exactly what I would expect. And to be fair the views are pretty widely available for anyone curious. Tech industry leaders haven't exactly been quiet about what they think AI will do to/for humanity.
I don't think this is a real article. This:
-----
You may not want AI used as a proselytizing pipeline into home and office. Others do.
In many ways, AI is a religion. Not because it requires belief in a utopian future through a dystopian present, or that it’s used by very powerful people to get more power, or that nobody can define what it actually is. All these things are overlaps on the Venn diagram, but the biggie is that LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
-----
is not actually a coherent train of thought, although you can see why it might seem to be to a language model.
Bullshit in bullshit out.
Very weak article even for The Register.