“Belief in salvation was once the province of religion,” Brooke Gladstone said on air last Saturday, “but computer science has transferred faith to the god in the machine.”
“The idea is that we’ll possibly be able to upload our minds to some sort of computational substrate,” her guest hissed, “so that our minds will be able to exist there after we die.”
The episode featured Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine. Honestly, the book is a history of transhumanist ideas...She casually went over brain implants, digital immortality, and sincere speculation that the Internet is becoming a self-aware global brain. Gladstone seemed unconcerned. The two women’s only worry was that advanced artificial intelligence won’t be sufficiently liberal.
After describing her successive conversions from fundamentalist Calvinism to Kurzweilian transhumanism to her current headspace in agnostic philosophy, O’Gieblyn ended the interview with a shrug:
“I think it’s interesting we for centuries have hypothesized this form of higher intelligence that we call ‘God,’ and now we’re building a form of intelligence that it’s possible will surpass us at some point in the near future. There’s a reason why these theological metaphors are emerging at the moment that they are.”
No mention of the totalizing schemes articulated at the World Economic Forum by Klaus Schwab, Parag Khanna, or Kai-Fu Lee. Basically, Gladstone and O’Gieblyn ignored Big Tech’s role in spreading this global techno-religion altogether.
So far as I can tell, NPR’s sole purpose is to lull smug liberals to sleep, where they dream of being rebellious intellectuals....
If that AI system was used to determine job placement, steer criminal investigations, or justify demographic engineering, half the country would be sent to gulags to sew rainbow flags for the rest.
Were that to happen, NPR would probably call it “digital justice.” WarRoom
