#633

Machines, Musk, And The Antichrist

So Many Predictions

I grew up watching sci-fi movies from the 1950s and I also read comic books like so many young boys in my generation. Of course there were a great deal of robots both good and evil, mostly evil. However there were some robots that stood out to me and they were the nice ones, the helpful ones, the protective ones. I suppose at the top of my list growing up was Robby the Robot, from the movie Forbidden Planet. He would show up in so many movies and on television he was actually inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. And he was sold as a prop for over 5 million dollars. I’d say this expensive prop had quite a run as an actor. But it was what he stood for is why I bring him up. You see, people have fantasized about robots playing a role in our everyday lives and now, the reality of having them in our homes just got closer to reality with the man we can’t seem to decide to love or loathe, Elon Musk. He recently hosted what he called the “We Robot” event where he rolled out what he wants us to think is the future. We learn more about this from an article from theblaze.com:

It’s been clear for a while that mass robotics are coming — and nothing short of a catastrophe will make them go away. But it took Elon Musk, the man Peter Thiel once called the greatest salesman in the world, to penetrate the collective consciousness with last week’s “We Robot” event, which unveiled the Robovan, the Cybertaxi, and the Optimus bot, instantly familiar to anyone who has spent even a few seconds watching "Star Wars" content with droids in it.

Who Controls The Tech?

The article is titled Elon Musk, Big Tech, and the woke left: A modern battle for spiritual authority and it makes some good points about this robotic technology and who decides how it will be used:

The advent of the mass-market humanoid robot — explicitly designed not just to do what you want but to be what you want, taking on any number of roles filled for all of human history by, you know, humans — has predictably touched off a fresh bout of feverish conflict between acceleration-happy tech optimists and tech pessimists desperate to at least pump the brakes.

The author, James Poulus gives us some perspective on who he thinks is in charge:

And it’s true — Big Tech is dominated by the cult of wokeness, intersectionality, DEI, ESG, perv pride, and so forth, and what makes Big Tech big is its deep and intimate relationship with the federal government, especially the intelligence community, which has also cast its lot with the cult and its rituals.

As in most struggles for who controls the future there are the inevitable camps surrounding the Artificial Intelligence (AI) movement and that AI in machines, in this case robots. Will they be man’s ultimate servants and helpers or man’s replacement? Are we looking at all those Terminator movies becoming reality? The, as Poulus believes cult of wokeness, says one thing about their intentions, but believes another:

Ostensibly, what they want is to prevent the eradication of human life by out-of-control machines. In reality, they are increasingly apt to openly support the reduction of human beings to compliant freaks coercively on-boarded into the social credit regime of the ultimate in micro-management, a planetary woke supercomputer.

A Better World

This event by Musk roles out a world where tech serves man. But the article goes on to say that Christians were not anywhere to be seen in these developing technologies to add the needed spiritual component:

At the same time, the unfortunate reality is that the woke left managed to get its act together way before anyone else in organizing an attempt at aligning tech with spiritual authority. One might have thought even one generation ago that America’s many millions of healthy Christians, with their thick community ties and robust commercial activities, would have united around ensuring that technology did not develop and dominate American life in ways that directly, consistently undercut the authority of church life — by manufacturing experiences and dreams that promised paradise on Earth in exchange for complete spiritual submission to the technologization of all things, from the planet down to the molecules in your body.

The Church stayed neutral and now it is faced with a new religion to contend with:

Alas, America’s Christians did not do this, and so the cult of the woke left — increasingly a formal religion with well-developed liturgical language, ritual performance, and rites of sacrifice — rushed into the spiritual vacuum.

In short, the spiritual element in all this tech is left up to people who don’t see mankind as the creation of a loving God who gave His creation the job of subduing the creation and maintaining it. They see man as just another animal is the ever evolving process of evolution. And if machines take over, well it just means that humans lost so another life form can take over. Poulos then makes my point this way:

The plausible reasons for making that devil’s bargain are clear enough. But so, of course, are the objections. As one columnist put it: “I cannot understand why conservatives venerate a man who is destroying the way of life they want to preserve. This AI/robots stuff will take your jobs, your freedom, your humanity.”

Alarm Bells Should Be Going Off

But they aren’t. I for one am looking at how rapidly technology is determining and looking at my Bible to see that this man as god movement as not only happening before but predicted to happen again. From one tower of Babel to another the loop of men replacing God is looking like it will find its completion with, yes, the rise of the one-world government and the Antichrist. According to Poulus, it is entirely possible because believers aren’t involved:

And so we find ourselves caught in a political realignment where Christian spiritual authority over the otherwise free development of technology in America is almost entirely absent from the debate — a debate taking place at an unprecedented inflection point for the United States, one where the nature of our form of government and indeed the nature of our very being is at stake. Not good!

He then makes my allusion to the end times figure of malevolence:

Some might see in various prominent tech figures the first stirrings of an Antichrist personality with the ambitions to match. I am much more inclined to focus our attention on the harder case of the technologist with the very best intentions being reshaped by the virtual and digital world he has created into a person who believes he has no alternative but to smash the church of Christ and the sacred human form so that the new and “improved” god of the Borg, and the neo-church to match, can take “us” to the next level of super-galactic consciousness.

How Should We Respond?

Poulus may be right about how the Church should respond, although she is definitely behind the eight ball on this:

What can prevent that dismaying scenario? One Christian technologist, riffing off of the marketing of Optimus for those seeking an emotional support relationship, recently posted the makings of an answer. “Teacher, babysitter and friend?! Can we use them as soldiers? This is one of the key patterns of the [cyborg] theocracy,” he observed. “They take weapons and use them to hijack human spiritual relationships. The solution is obvious.”

Not obvious to you? Well let’s allow the author to connect the dots for us. Trust me when I tell you, it really is that obvious:

If you’ve made it this far, it should be obvious. Those who hope to lose the woke theocracy without losing their humanity, too, in body and soul, can trust neither political conservatism nor post-political technocracy. For structural salvation in the digital age, there is only one institution in real life capable of re-establishing spiritual authority without imposing a theocracy — inspiring us, not coercing us, to ensure our tech is developed and used in ways that preserve our way of life, form of government, and sacred human being. The time has come for Americans of all stripes to rediscover what church is all about: providing an inimitable foundation of rock, not of sand.

Simple, right? In theory it is. In practice there are going to be bumps in the proverbial road. We have to make sure we don’t become so reliant on technology that we can’t live without it. When we are literally addicted to the newest this or that we show that what we are being warned about is upon us. Yes, these advances can make life easier for us, but we have to remind ourselves over and over again that we need to be building our house on the rock. Only then can we withstand the coming storm of a soul-sucking mechanical revolution.