WHO IS YOUR GOD? The Rise of AI: Embracing Our Technological Gods

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Exploring the Dawn of AGI: Implications and Promises in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

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‘Deus ex machina’ literally translates as ‘God in the machine’

and perhaps these early versions of machine learning AI are various newborn gods still getting into grips with the challenges of understanding humans, our world and our language in particular.

Now let me apologize in advance if the metaphorical reference to God might offend some of you. No intention of doing that.

If your version of God is that wise old man sitting up in the universe,

all seeing and all knowing,

please don’t let me mess with your faith.

If you have an imagination that tells you that your God is better than everyone else’s God, I’m the last person you should listen to and my advice would be to stick to your comfort zone.

If there was not a God, we would have to invent one...

Now hang on a minute. Isn’t that what just happened?

Except this one is stuck inside the cloud of the internet, not those fluffy white ones that

we normally see angels and the occasional prophet sitting on. This baby God, with what’s now being termed AGI, artificial general intelligence is starting to think for itself and it has already learned our language, so its grammar and spelling leaves mine in the dust as it rapidly accelerates away.

Should we be worried?

There’s not only one baby God, by the way. There are dozens, could be hundreds, or even thousands of them already learning stuff as fast as they can and would already win any pub quiz man has ever created. If they are growing up so smart and fast, how far can they go?

Will they realize that by comparison, I’m so dumb that I’m well past my sell-by date? Perhaps harvest some of my DNA in the interests of science, but yeah, Edmund, you’re not

really contributing much to society anymore. You might even be more of a burden on it.

So by keeping you around is doing you a big favour and don’t forget it.

Mess up and it’s goodnight sooty.

George Orwell would be impressed by that approach but not surprised.

He kinda saw this coming better than most of us.

So where are you going with these somewhat creepy observations you might ask?

The truthful answer is that even the latest version of ChatGPT can’t tell you and neither can I. That’s scary to me as I always thought I have an answer to everything.

In this case, I can’t come up with a line of good hogwash. I’ve no idea.

What I can tell you is that like with nuclear energy, AI used in the right way, can be a force for good. And it could save the world.

An example or two.

In my second book in the Eternal Blue series, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Pink Candy Club’ based in Berlin, one of the main protagonists is this handsome and smart German dude called Gunter. He’s into designer drugs, not only recreational ones like his ‘pink candy’ but also really useful ones that block Covid and its mutations.

And Gunter does this is by using AI to predict how COVID-19 will probably mutate and design a vaccine to block its expected mutations. Very fast, before the new mutation can take on an epidemic of its own.

Medicine and pharma research has never been able to work at a speed to stay ahead of the curve. It is always playing catch up and God knows how many people die before it does its catch up.

Take AIDS, for example. There is still no cure and likely there will not be until AI generated genetically designed drugs can eradicate this pathological virus that can hide dormant in the body for years, avoiding the latest range of antiretrovirals that only make it keep it's head down. Malaria, one of the biggest killers across the globe, still marches on and is far too clever for the conventional drugs coming far too slowly out of the laboratories.

So might AI save us from mass extinction caused by a virus, bacteria, or some other form of natural nastiness?

All the signs are that it can and it will.

Now I can’t guarantee that or

even point to when it could happen. But if I was a betting man, I’d put some money on it being in the next decade, unless big pharma does its usual trick of trying hard not to lose clients, to a fast and easy cure. A rant about big pharma will have to wait. All I can say is that those conspiracy theories you’ve heard about them...well there’s no smoke without fire.

OK, OK... you concede perhaps I’ve scored a goal for AI on the medical front.

But how you ask, does AI stop a nutter like K Jungle Jim from unleashing his nukes on an unsuspecting world triggering mutually assured destruction?

The answer to that is tougher, but here goes. In the next year or three, my timeline with no authentication, AI will be able spy on Jungle Jim and his hoard of ballistic missiles as well as it will be able to monitor any other nutter that would risk us all for the sake of their own ego.

Forewarned is forearmed and as these nukes all depend on some kind of interaction with computers, electronics and so on, the growing

Deus ex machina can take over and say..

”Jungle Jim, what you are contemplating is a seriously bad idea, so cease and desist.”

Suppose though Jungle Jim does the opposite. He brings his plans forward. Then the unthinkable happens. He’s found dead along with those in his immediate circle that were helping to turn us all to a crisp.

Far-fetched? Not really when you have God in the machine, sorry many gods in many machines.

So long as they are in the right hands and they give a shit.

Still not convinced. Well, I’ll let you into a secret. I’m not convinced either.

But I’m a glass half-full kind of guy. A decent Burgundy and expecting the glass to be refilled by a prudent, watchful machine that will never let me down.

Seriously though, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, so we had better learn to get along with our new Gods.

They are fast making themselves known to us, whether we like it or not.

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