For years now, in my articles, I have speculated that the "image of the
beast", described in the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, might
be directly related to computer technology, artificial intelligence and
robotics. The more I read about the current developments in these various
areas, the more I become convinced that what the Apostle John may have seen
in his vision is some type of cybernetic entity which will
"miraculously" be
brought to life; or at the very least, it will be some type of large
computer monitor, which will work in conjunction with advanced artificial
intelligence. Revelation tells us:

"And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles
which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that
dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had
the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the
image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause
that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed."
Revelation 13:14-15, KJV

Naturally, such ideas are not limited to the realm of Bible-believing
Christians. Some very serious-minded individuals, including scientists and
writers alike, have contemplated these very same possibilities for decades,
as we see by the following news article.


The Coming Superbrain

By JOHN MARKOFF - NYT

May 23, 2009


Mountain View, Calif. -- It's summertime and the Terminator is back. A
sci-fi movie thrill ride, "Terminator Salvation" comes complete with a
malevolent artificial intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project
that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant --
perhaps a bit like athlete's foot -- to be dispatched forthwith.

The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously
from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks
goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial F
for Frankenstein." A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it
foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously
acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over
financial, transportation and military systems.

Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers
and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious
attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as
a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation
search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around
in the world. A.I.'s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the
question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously,
perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how
quickly.

The concept of ultrasmart computers -- machines with "greater than human
intelligence" -- was dubbed "The Singularity" in a 1993 paper by the
computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that
the acceleration of technological progress had led to "the edge of change
comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." This thesis has long struck
a chord here in Silicon Valley.

Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human
functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear,
respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the
Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and
superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers
and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead
to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

The idea is not just the province of science fiction authors; a generation
of computer hackers, engineers and programmers have come to believe deeply
in the idea of exponential technological change as explained by Gordon
Moore, a co-founder of the chip maker Intel.

In 1965, Dr. Moore first described the repeated doubling of the number
transistors on silicon chips with each new technology generation, which led
to an acceleration in the power of computing. Since then "Moore's Law" --
which is not a law of physics, but rather a description of the rate of
industrial change -- has come to personify an industry that lives on
Internet time, where the Next Big Thing is always just around the corner.

Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took
the idea one step further in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near: When
Humans Transcend Biology." He sought to expand Moore's Law to encompass more
than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great
precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in
2045.

In Dr. Kurzweil's telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert
with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not
only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological
invention, with unpredictable consequences.

Profiled in the documentary "Transcendent Man," which had its premier last
month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due
later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the
concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a
school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal -- to
"assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand
and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and
apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges."

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil
envisions "uploading," or the idea that the contents of our brain and
thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment,
making a form of immortality possible -- within his lifetime.

That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed
technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the
Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion.

The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity
as "the Rapture of the nerds." Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine,
notes, "People who predict a very utopian future always predict that it is
going to happen before they die."

However, Mr. Kelly himself has not refrained from speculating on where
communications and computing technology is heading. He is at work on his own
book, "The Technium," forecasting the emergence of a global brain -- the
idea that the planet's interconnected computers might someday act in a
coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn't certain
about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.

Others who have observed the increasing power of computing technology are
even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and
venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in
Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves
with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent
machines.

Mr. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, still believes that. "I wasn't
saying we would be supplanted by something," he said. "I think a
catastrophe
is more likely."

Moreover, there is a hot debate here over whether such machines might be the
"machines of loving grace," of the Richard Brautigan poem, or something far
darker, of the "Terminator" ilk.

"I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects
as becoming the dominant political question of the century," said Hugo de
Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a
book, "The Artilect War," that argues that the debate is likely to end in
global war.

Concerned about the same potential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S.
Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea
of "friendly artificial intelligence," an engineering discipline that would
seek to ensure that future machines would remain our servants or equals
rather than our masters.

Nevertheless, this generation of humans, at least, is perhaps unlikely to
need to rush to the barricades. The artificial-intelligence industry has
advanced in fits and starts over the past half-century, since the term
"artificial intelligence" was coined by the Stanford University computer
scientist John McCarthy in 1956. In 1964, when Mr. McCarthy established the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the researchers informed their
Pentagon backers that the construction of an artificially intelligent
machine would take about a decade. Two decades later, in 1984, that original
optimism hit a rough patch, leading to the collapse of a crop of A.I.
start-up companies in Silicon Valley, a time known as "the A.I. winter."

Such reversals have led the veteran Silicon Valley technology forecaster
Paul Saffo to proclaim: "never mistake a clear view for a short distance."

Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland's deeply held consensus about
exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley's digerati would
be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the
singularity.

"Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before
the 'great dawn,' " said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. "Life's
not fair."


Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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