The Naked Truth of A.I.

The Naked Truth of A.I.

Douglas Hawes

Copyright © 2020 by Douglas Hawes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Cover Artwork by Jon Stark and Clara Velasquez

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Problem

Echoes from History

Defining Who We Are

Developing Perspective

The Balance

Foundations

AI: The New Wave of Tech

The Singularity

The Answer

Reflections

1

The Problem

What is the world going to be like for our children, when they have become adults? Have you ever pondered that question? Of course, you have, we all have, but have you considered that it is a rather new phenomenon: to not have a sense of how much everything will change within the span of fifty years; and it has not always been this way?

In the not too distant past, people expected the world to be pretty much the same for their children as it was for them; the world simply did not change that much from one generation to the next. You see this in how the advice of elders used to be highly esteemed and considered very valuable, because the experience of elders prepared children well in what to expect, but it is not that way for today.

The expectation for this day and age is that the world will be very different for our children, and we are not sure what to expect. In fact, trends today change so quickly, and unexpectedly, that even the experts hesitate to predict with any degree of certainty what the world is going to be like in fifty years. Children, it seems, are now more in tune with the expectation of the future then the elderly, and the elderly are considered well out of touch. Changes have always occurred throughout history, and they will often come in burst: but it still takes some time for societies to absorb those changes. Over the past century, the dynamics have changed though; the rate of change is much higher than what society can effectively assimilate and absorb.

For example, I can remember my grandfather, though he died when I was very young, had a stagecoach company to transport people from Winnipeg to Calgary in Canada. It was not for a vacation adventure, but that is how people had to get around before there were cars. I had cousins living on a farm without running water or electricity, and my parents grew up without the influence of television. The amount of change in the world that has occurred within the span of my own lifetime is astronomical.

Technology developed at a relatively slow pace throughout the ages, until just up to modern times, where it has exploded. This tremendous expansion of technology is not because man has suddenly become more intelligent; but rather the means of being able to transfer and store knowledge and information has developed and changed the dynamics, by making this knowledge more accessible.

For ages, knowledge and experience are passed on from the sage to the apprentice through personal contact and relationship. The lives of people in the past were encumbered with much toil and labor, just in providing basic needs of food and shelter, where invention and innovation was focused on the immediate demand for survival. In that struggle, however, much was learned about life and its purpose, as we see by looking at ancient text such as the book of Job, considered by many scholars to predate even Moses. Job was esteemed in his day for his depth of perception about life, but his knowledge and wisdom are tied to the common experience and related in those terms. The knowledge they had of life was not less insightful because their technology was primitive, but rather they saw simple things in a deeper way, and the purpose perceived truly profound. We are still able to learn from his experience, even currently in our own modern life experiences.

Knowledge was passed along through common experience, from what they knew of the birds and the beast, and the elements; which they knew more intimately from the experience they had with them. They were keenly in tune with these creatures, and they would notice their behavior when there was, for example, a change in weather or, a quiet before a storm. We find that still in aboriginal cultures, where much of their knowledge and experience is through their intimate relationship with nature.

The technology of today is a very different beast, and far surpasses what most people understand of it. Technology is routinely utilized today to perform tasks that unburden us of the traditional duties; like preparing for food and shelter, but as a result, we fail to learn to do many of these things for ourselves. It’s like with GPS; it reliably takes us to our destination, but when we get there, we have no idea how we got there, and we would have great difficulty in trying to get back to where we came from without it.

For children who have been brought up in this new age of technology, it seems to have become a second nature in their perspective, and it is affecting their general view on life. They have, it seems, an expectation for life to run like a flow chart, where solutions are found in reprograming. Much of their experience in life can now be related to video games, and that influence carries over into other areas of their lives. If one invests time playing a game, the influence of that time spent continues long after they have finished playing. Exactly what kind of influence will vary from individual to the next, but whatever we spend time on casts its shadow on us as well.

We see much confusion today in areas like gender identity, where biology is no longer the determining factor, rather, gender is something that one can choose, or decide as a matter of preference. It is as though the standards for dealing with and facing reality are being altered, like a video game; where you pick and choose the character you want to play. That works in a game, but there are valid reasons for whom and what we are, and it is our responsibility to discover what they are, and to live up to it. It creates a problem for us when our perception of reality becomes based solely on our feelings and opinions, which can be easily changed and manipulated, rather than something absolute, and does not change, which gives us a foundation for our feelings and opinions.

In many ways, technology has indeed changed our reality, or at least our perception of it. Reality has natural limits within our time and space, but in many ways, technology has been able to liberate us from those boundaries. Travel for example used to be restricted to a very small and local area for almost everyone, and at best you might hear stories from those who traveled abroad. Today people routinely travel across continents, and we have even witnessed as they travelled to the moon and back. Communication also at its finest, throughout history was primarily restricted to print and personal contact, where one first had to take time to write down one’s thoughts, and then wait for an extended period for it to reach the intended recipient, and then wait again before one heard back. Now we communicate anywhere, anytime, and get a response almost instantly, and this gives the sense of things moving faster.

All these technological advances have rapidly appeared in society, and we have both embraced and celebrated them; however, we are not yet fully aware of the impact and change it has brought into our world. Is life really moving at a faster pace today, because it seems like it? Obviously, we are aware that it has brought change, but are we clear as to what it all means or how to effectively accommodate for it? In other words, there are many unintended consequences that accompany these changes, and I’m sure as time goes on, they will become more obvious, but isn’t it something we should be thinking about now?

What can we do about it? We need the technology to function in this modern world, and those who don’t embrace it tend to be left behind. To function well in this modern age we need to use the tools that have been developed, but we also need to realize that we have to take measures to adapt to the changes, and to also count the cost in order to keep perspective of the effects it is having in our lives. Even though technology has brought much change into our world, the fundamental purpose of our life has not changed, and it’s that purpose which we need to keep in mind.

Throughout millennial, generations have had to accept and work with the limitations of their environment; however, those boundaries and limitations are being reduced as we create machines to overcome them. We are now developing a new feature of virtual reality, where even the barriers of physical laws are removed, where we enter worlds which are like a novel of our imagination, where we create reality for our experience and entertainment.

When video games were first created, they were developed by graduate students at MIT who were funded by the Pentagon and were used as a tool by the military to prepare soldiers for the battlefield. It was discovered in the First World War that there would be some soldiers, who after basic training, when they were on the actual battlefield in the heat of the fight and were face to face with a real person looking at them from the end of their barrel, something in their conscience prevented them from going through with it and pulling the trigger.

The military realized that they could use these video games as a tool to desensitize the solder and train him to pull the trigger without thinking about it, without having to deal with a conscience. It worked very well, and soldiers were able to develop the skills of warfare before they ever got to the battlefield. However, after they returned from war, many of them where haunted with PTS, or posttraumatic syndrome, the unintended consequence. The tools for training were very effective and successful; in fact, you might argue too successful. They were latter to develop video games to treat those who suffered from PTS, by recreating the conditions which caused it in a virtual reality setting. They were well-trained to complete the mission, but then they had difficulty in facing reality afterward, but by recreating it in virtual reality, they were able to somewhat treat the PTS.

It seems that facing reality in itself is having less importance, at least in some aspects of modern culture. We encourage our children that they can become anything they want, but sometimes we fail to prepare them for the failures in life. It is easy to have unrealistic expectations if we are not learning to temper our aspirations with reality. On the other hand, we don’t want to squelch the flame of hope and faith. At one time they thought it impossible to go to the moon, until we landed there; but it was done by taking measured steps of what we knew and understood. It was unrealistic to go to the moon until we spent a great deal of effort to develop the means to which to get there.

The military is now using video games as a tool for recruitment, by allowing free downloads of the games. When young people play the war games they become well versed in the tactics of war, as well as the equipment and hardware that are used in the battlefield. The children who play the games are being conditioned in ways where they are prepared for military training programs, and recruitment becomes a follow up.

We can believe whatever we want about our purpose in life, but eventually we must deal with reality. At the same time though, the reality of the future is a variable, because as far as we know, we don’t know for sure what it will be, and what we put faith in has a lot to do with how we perceive that future. If one learns to budget and manage finances well, then the chances of a prosperous financial future is more likely than if one did nothing to promote it. Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom arm us in making the best decisions in life, and for the most part, those things come to us from experience.

However, everyday experience is changing. Although there have been revolutions which brought great changes in the past, what is quietly seeping into our lives is hardly being noticed. It is unlike anything we have known before, or anything we could really compare it to from the past. We live in a sea of information that is swarming around us, but that information is not just flowing in from natural processes, but it is artificially produced and manipulated.

Take for example the news media, there is an enormous amount of newsworthy material out there, but what we usually get hit with in mainstream media is a very narrow range of highly focused coverage that has been selectively chosen by the editors to manipulate the audience. The executors of the news decide for us if they want to make a big deal out of something or if they want to minimize it, and we are simply fed by this stream of information. There is nothing new about people trying to influence others through media, but to be able to at the massive scales of today is new.

For many, the news is whatever they pick up on social media as their sole source of current events. We are all swimming in this great sea of information, and even if we are not paying attention, it is affecting