In the game Deus Ex (2000) you can find a secret room that contains an artificial intelligence you can talk to. The dialogue tries to make connections between religious deities and artificial intelligences. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1glq98/deus_ex2000_a...
Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."
Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
Right before the credits for the relevant ending, the screen reads:
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." -- Voltaire
This game also introduced me to Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, from an optional dialogue with a bartender in a hidden area in the hong kong game map.
We place faith in algorithms and data, much like faith in a higher power, but rarely stop to consider who writes these digital 'scriptures' and what their intentions might be. Are we blindly trusting new 'gods' crafted in server rooms, not realizing that they might be as fallible—or as manipulative—as the human hands that created them?
I have to politely contest the conflation of faith and trust. While I understand that they're used synonymously in a colloquial context, you don't place faith in algorithms, you place trust in them. You KNOW that the algorithm exists, you just don't necessarily know what decisions it'll make or how. Whereas, when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything. And so it makes sense to me that someone's who able to make that leap of faith, a rather apt turn of phrase in this context, is also more able to place trust in something.
> when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything.
I have to politely disagree with this statement. To place faith in something means that you believe it to be true regardless of evidence. If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.
> If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.
Well, I've had theist friends who'd disagree with that, who've said, paraphrased, that "if your faith has no doubt, then it's not faith, it's a dogma." I can't speak to this myself, but I do find their choice to believe despite their doubt more honourable than someone's blind certainty.
In India ISRO top scienntists go to Tirupathi temple befor Every launch of satellites or Mars or moon probe and seek blessings for success.They use AI algorithms in guiding all such probes.
This is one of those "we don't know what we're doing, nor how we could explain it, nor what it means, but it sounds cool" studies. They have no reason to assume the two are in any way related. It's probably another fluke, forgotten in a few weeks time.
I can't read the full text, but the materials has this at the end: "Finally, we examined the impact of God salience on respondents’ propensity to use technologically new and/or innovative products." They find a significant effect ("God salience was associated with greater early adoption attitudes") there, too. Why?
My take is that the effect is the other way around: early adoption attitude explains AI acceptance.
Exactly. I immediately thought of this after reading the article. I find the incentive to use p-hacking or something similar is very hard to avoid given increasingly stronger incentive to publish.
Is it that kind of study where we also realize that thinking about God makes people click more often on ads and be less performant at using microsoft excel?
Which turns out to just be a consequence of "people who are religious are more often old fucks"?
I feel like what was once called magic, then became God and now becomes AI. An all-encompassing term for all things inexplicable and complex and a handy backdoor to give up the burden of decision making and critical thinking. I fear it will soon, like God, become an ultimate, unquestionable instance: "Chatgpt tone me so, so it must be true "
That's not really an accurate history of the concept called magic. Magic was very prevalent during the Christian Middle Ages, long after the concept of God. Magic was "removed" from the world by the process of disenchantment (a translation of Entzauberung, literally "de-magicification" in German.)
I think it’s going to be blind trust for non-tech people. I even read mystic comments about LLMs here on HN where people tried to convey an idea of hidden self-awareness and conscience of these models.
I think humans are just hard-wired to interpret language and conversation as signs of intelligence. The way LLMs actually behave is counterintuitive in a way that violates most people's expectations. You can have a complex, rational conversation with it. Give it commands and have it appear to infer details and anticipate the future.
Also, "AI" has been a part of pop culture and pop science for decades... people have been conditioned by Star Trek and Star Wars and the like to accept that a computer you can "just talk to" is self-aware, and that computers never make mistakes.
It's a bias you even find in discussions about self-driving cars. Computers are perfectly logical, rational, mathematically precise and if they were to be self-aware, would hold to a perfectly mathematically correct and provable model of reality based only on concrete data, without any prejudice or bias. Commander Data can't lie, can't even use contractions. Of course we can trust them to drive our cars, we just can't trust humans.
So we're left with the idea floating around in popular consciousness that whenever AI shows up, we should trust it implicitly.
The one thing computers have never done (until now,) and certainly never been known to do, is make up completely plausible nonsense and gaslight you into accepting it. LLMs can't even do math. This isn't the way "computers" behave.
One doesn't even really have to conflate any of this into religious belief for it to make sense. "LLMs being intelligent" is the model that just already happens to fit everyone's priors. It just happens to be dangerously wrong.
>Of course we can trust them to drive our cars, we just can't trust humans.
...And just where do you think those computers came from, sparky?
Back to square one.
If you can't trust the humans in the chain, trusting the system as a whole is the act of a fool. You've abandoned rationality, and comfortably ensconced yourself in the plush comfort of irrationality and ignorance, setting yourself up to get rolled by the real master's in the house, who'll be the ones who make, run, and operate the machine. Double points for not even realizing the only one pulling the wool over your eyes is yourself.
You're trusting something that half the time needs effing cross-checking by a squishy bit due to bored programmers misusing computing primitives in ways in which their integrity and soundness is undermined by their physical implementation.
There's a metric ship-ton of research papers produced every year. Set your prior on which ones you read. This research paper /could/ be high quality, but given the sheer amount of incredible BS that has been published using very similar methods I am setting my prior accordingly. Feel free to try and replicate it yourself, or wait for someone else to do it if you set yours differently.
There's insufficient contempt for psychology and sociology academics who pretend this incredible witch-doctory screw-up with so many BS un-retracted papers fitting a curve to noise and booking a ted talk hasn't happened and everything is ok. Huge kudos to these ~270 authors [1,2] who took it on and got data. They found some good research that reproduced too, just a lot less than you'd expect, like or be remotely comfortable with.
Entirely separate from the truth value or consequences of religious belief:
I think this paper makes sense. If you think of the God concept as a kind of externalized decision-making system that enables “cognitive work” that is beyond human capabilities - or the perception of human capabilities- then acceptance of AI is a similar phenomenon.
On a similar note, I haven’t done the research myself, but I have a solid feeling that the contemplation of an infinite, eternal, etc. God-concept (as opposed to more localized polytheistic concepts) can be tied to developments in mathematics throughout history.
An abstract God concept that is infinite, endless, etc. encourages humans to understand and justify/argue against such an entity, in the process forcing them to think in more abstract ways, which in a basic sense is what mathematics is. This is more-or-less the history of intellectual thought in the Western world since Christianity until fairly recently. (Dominated by God-adjacent topics.)
A question I might ask in researching this would be: why does it seem like mathematical development really accelerated in Europe after Europe had been thoroughly christianized? Throroughly here not meaning recent, but “sunk into the psyche over centuries.”
Where did I say that ancient Greek mathematics wasn't sophisticated? In addition to that, a sizable portion of ancient Greek thinkers would not really be considered "polytheistic" in the traditional sense and their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. is largely the source of such ideas in early Christianity and Islam.
> It was not until the fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian theology with Christianity that the concepts of strict omnipotence, omniscience, or benevolence became commonplace.
I doubt that Platon thought was like 'their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. '. Also Renaissance was very less Christian as the Middle Age. Newton e.g. was less Christian than you assume.
My intuition was the same, but they are doing this the way you should: Pre-registered, sufficient N for small effect sizes, comparative across countries. I'm not so sure it does not replicate.
attention-grabbing headline combining a hype topic and a controversial topic... published in PNAS... and it's about priming... doesn't inspire confidence.
Remember, 60% of these kind of experiments (sociological) don't replicate. I don't know anything about this one in particular, but the odds are against it.
... and people downmod me when I say i see no difference between LLM enthusiasm and a religion ...
Edit: interesting that the article doesn't seem to be visible on the first 4 pages of the front page to me any more. This is why it's bad to have most social networking based in the US and censored according to their morals...
This makes intuitive sense to me (not that that means anything). Adherents to a traditional God Hypothesis would be predisposed to believe that humans need advice and guidance from a mysterious force beyond themselves and that such forces exist.
A recent related development I find interesting is the rise in apparent AI/LLM Apologetics. Nearly every discussion thread about LLMs I read lately includes numerous posters attributing abilities to these models which are far beyond anything documented or demonstrated.
Looks like the article is behind a paywall, so I only read the abstract, but it looks that there is a significant flaw in this study. There are really many really various religions out there, and the results _might_ depend heavily on the choice of religion. As a thought experiment, consider a fictional example religion where A.I. is treated as a god, compared to the religions of the Dune universe (where A.I. is a taboo).
The argument seems to be: Belief in God implies a belief in the fallibility of humans, which leads to a reduced reliance on humans and therefore increased willingness to accept AI recommendations.
Most of the logic in that argument checks out. I just don't understand the last step in the logic. How do decreased reliance on humans lead to increased willingness to accept AI?
I'm a religious person myself, and my argument would be to not trust AI all that much. It is a creation by fallible human beings trained on fallible human data.
> I'm a religious person myself, and my argument would be to not trust AI all that much. It is a creation by fallible human beings trained on fallible human data.
Good point. How is A.I. different (in this respect, and possibly in some other ones, too) from a really huge, partially pseudo-random spreadsheet?
We need to remember, though, that we live in a relatively small bubble where A.I. is perceived as (more or less) what it is. For a layman, both an A.I. and a huge spreadsheet may be similarly beyond comprehension.
I will always remember talking to a very nice old lady (it could have been about 25 years ago), who told me that computers can read people's minds. She saw someone type a few characters on a computer and suddenly a whole page appeared. Since she had a mental model of a typewriter (which has no memory), the logical conclusion of text appearing without a person physically typing it was that the machine read his mind. In fact, that made perfect sense!
We often have no idea how weird (from our POV) the people's mental models of computers are.
Yeah, you make a good point. It reminds me of that Arthur C. Clarke quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I guess if you see AI as something magical, it could easily start occupying a religious or God-like space in your psyche.
You don't need to read the article, just search online a little. It probably took you longer to write that post for me to find this: https://osf.io/fdh4m
They assess belief in god in different ways. Details are found within the 8 preregistered study PDF documents.
Different religions is potentially interesting; though now I'm also wondering if this is cultural "God salience" or serious "God salience" (the way the British do Easter and Christmas even though mostly not taking it seriously).
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"""Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the reduced reliance on humans is driven by a heightened feeling of smallness when God is salient"""
I'd expect this to be less true for pantheons.
"""followed by a recognition of human fallibility."""
In pantheons, I'd expect this to vary by the nature of the god/goddess in question; Greek revivalism probably has different answers when considering Athena vs. Dionysus.
"""Study 5 addresses the similarity in mysteriousness between God and AI as an alternative, but unsupported, explanation."""
Yeah, that feels plausible.
"X and Y are mysterious, perhaps they're the same?" seems common for any {X, Y} — AI, consciousness, quantum mechanics, god, evolution, prime numbers, art, …
"when God is salient" presumably means the participants both believed in God and it played an important/active part in their daily life.
> Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient
But presumably the instruction meant more to those who had a belief in god. Perhaps not though - It's a shame the article isn't available so we can see whether its thinking about god increases acceptance of AI or just being distracted because you've been told to think about something else does.
This matches my prejudices. Namely that 'thinking about god' is similar to the Eliza effect, ie., a kind of projection of consciousness onto the world.
Animals solve 'the problem of other minds' by assuming that everything is like them, ie., conscious. And then walking back from this presumption upon evidence to the contrary.
This kinda mild 'default schizophrenia' is something I've always been allergic to. (I imagine my defaults are lower than most, which no doubt runs the risk of under-valuing the actually conscious).
Nevertheless, it's one of the things that makes me most concerned about the hype around AI: I see nothing more in it than a nascent secular religion. Born "from the ground up", as all religions are, by immediate experience 'of the divine'. Ie., of that impulse to analogise the world to one's own mind.
You're starting to sound a little like Terry yourself towards the end there. How do you see a religion in enthusiasm around AI, and worse nothing else at all?
I think you're stretching the word religion very far from its meaning. No one is deriving any meaning or analogy to the world from AI beyond the answers to technical questions. Certainly no one attributes moral authority to AI?
The hype is about its applied value, not some new insight into the world.
Well not recently, but isn't Kurzweil all about a hypothetical future superhuman intelligence? That's an interesting thought experiment but that's not what the current AI hype is about. LLM's by themselves are many things, but they're not intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence.
Combined with well designed software LLM's can be used to create intelligent agents, but that's still not what Kurzweil envisions.
Reaction: Could we get similar acceptance increases by having the subjects think about newspaper astrology column, Magic 8 Balls, and other "coin flip" decision-making strategies?
An ASI (artificial superintelligence) would indeed be quite similar to a god. An ASI wouldn't be omnipotent like the Christian god, but still much more powerful than any human. The Greek or Hindu gods aren't omnipotent either.
It looks like it's paywalled, so I'm wondering what exactly "thinking about God" means in the context of this study? Were study participants told to think about God? Was there any test to determine whether they were in fact actually thinking about God (e.g. by providing an intelligible response to a theological question)?
Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."
Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."