Russell Moore
When the living speech pronounces, the ambitions of the possible “master of the universe” are exposed.
It was a long and adventure of George Washington to Elon Musk, and we may deserve to ask if it has something to do with Jesus.
For many years, some of us have warned that the technological platforms of this moment would take us to the point of the constitutional crisis. However, most of us meant that this would take place, thanks to the erosion of social capital and the building in polarization through social networks.
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Few of us have planned for the crisis happening as it has: with Elon Musk, the richest guy in the global and a small organization of workers in their 20s with an almost unilateral veto right over the proper budget and the law followed through the U. S. Congress.
Of course, there are constitutional, social, economic and economic and economic implications at this time, implications that will undoubtedly have repercussions in the decades and perhaps even centuries. But what happens if there are also theological reasons and effects?
Nicholas Carr was one of the early Paul Reveres warning of what digital technology would do to human attention spans. He writes in his new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart about what the most techno-utopian, “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley barons of industry have told us all along: that behind their project was not just a way to make money (although it’s certainly that) but also a particular view of human nature.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s statements, for example, would speak of the social network as a “graph”—which is, Carr notes, “a term of art borrowed from the mathematical discipline of network theory.”
“Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a conception of society as a technological formula with a design analogous to that of the Internet,” Carr writes. “Just as the network is a network of networks, so society, in the technocrat’s brain, is a network of communities. “
Carr argues that Zuckerberg had long maintained a mechanistic vision of society “, observing that” one of the curiosities of the beginning of the XXI numbers in people.
The mechanistic vision of society is frequent, almost unanimous, although it manifests itself in another bureaucracy, among the architects of the commercial complex of social networks, synthetic intelligence, virtual reality. For example, the OpenI CEO, Sam Altman, created an interruption last week when he advised that the type of generative synthetic intelligence that sees in the change will boost the adjustments “required for the social contract, given the strength of what we expect from This technology, “pointing out” the entire design of society itself will be in a position for some degree of debate and reconfiguration. “
This mechanistic view is not only of society, of wonderful writing, but of the human person. For years, comedians have laughed at “scary” tech venture capital that, for example, would seek blood transfusions to more young donors to maintain their own young people and vitality. People would sign the strip as technology leader Ray Kurzweil, who would talk about offloading his to an automatic cloud to live forever. Few have paid enough attention to such figures to hear the terrifying echoes of Genesis 3 in Kurzweil’s answer to the question of whether God exists: “Not yet. “
In the past few weeks, my colleague Kara Bettis Carvalho examined tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s claims in the Netflix documentary Don’t Die that he could engineer his body to escape mortality. Once again, few seem to hear the reverberations of Genesis 3: “You shall not surely die” (v. 4, ESV throughout).
All this is easy to attribute to other “terrifying” people with marginal positions and an endless cash supply. But this ideology now dwells not only a complete technological ecosystem, which we are all intertwined, but it is also the engine of the resolution to know if young people in Africa obtain the budget assigned to save them from famine or AIDS, and if the controls Constitutional and force sales among the equivalent branches die before our eyes.
And this is what leads us to God.
Several years ago, Elon Musk told Axios journalists Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei that humans “must merge with machines to triumph over the ‘existential risk’ of synthetic intelligence. “When he got to what it means for our sense of truth, Musk said we have to ask ourselves if truth is real. “We’re the maximum maximum probably in a simulation,” he said, noting that the probability that we’re not living in a simulated global is only one or billions. Participation is transparent: in the other aspect of the veil of the universe that surrounds us is a cosmic musk.
Seeing humanity and the rest of the “real” global through the metaphor of the device has consequences. Seeing humanity and the rest of the global through the metaphor of knowledge is even more dangerous. Once the universe is interpreted through a master mechanistic grid, which counts the quantifiable and measurable, the end result is a lack of respect for the sacredness of a human nature that cannot be understood that way. And once all boundaries were arbitrary and “analog,” why would we avoid the boundaries of criteria and traditions and legislation and constitutional orders, the things that make up a society?
In the end, the “cold” ghost of dominion and the “hot” eruption of chaos oppose each other, but two facets of the same horror. The state of the brain that sees humanity and society as knowledge to be naturally manipulated provides the way to be the force that sees no constraint on appetite and libido. Elon Musk named one of his young people “x Æ A-12” (before having to remove the Arabic figures for the smart law of the Californian law), a “name” recalling a QR code or serial number, while entering the young people with several women. Why did loyalty matter if the global is only knowledge?What are the consequences if the global is a simulation that can be restarted?
“God” is a challenge in this vision of reality. After all, the word God can make summary and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God plays with the cube with the universe” implied an imuseral structure, a logic, the living God of Abraham, Isaac and “God” of Jacob. Spine will never summon a user to a trial seat. The words that God or faith can be used as substitutes for the same type of self -despection of technological ideology and all their successors demand.
Jesus, on the other hand, is not rejected without problems. Once understood, not as a theoretical avatar that gives authority to a confident ideology, but for the genuine words he has spoken, the genuine gospel he delivered, the ambitions of the “Master of the Universe. “
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov said he wanted Jesus silenced because the Jesus of the Bible didn’t “understand” human nature: that what people really want is the filling of appetites and the spectacles of distraction. Against the Inquisitor’s diatribe, though, Jesus, as with Pilate, simply stands there, with a look that pierces through all the manipulations of a mechanistic view of the universe.
The virtual vision of humanity cannot correspond to the vision of James Madison and the editors of the US constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have presented an edition of “You have to break some eggs to make tortillas”, whatever the value of the eggs Genuine at the moment. But behind this utopia there is a theology, and theology can cooperate in almost everything. Christianity can be co -opted through a virtual utopia, but only through the silence of Jesus.
However, Jesus is not silenced without problems. The universe is not a simulation. It is created and maintained not through a set of rules but through a word. And this word is not an abstraction to be decoded even as a person, who “has flesh and dwells among us” (John 1:14).
A million other babels are found in the ruins of history, and they a million other Nimrods, all of whom would take the limits of mortality and duty to create simulations of themselves and their rule. They are not all gone and cannot be restarted.
Technological technologies have inherited the earth for now. It is not your fault. It is ours. We believe what they told us about ourselves: that in the end we are only knowledge and algorithms to be decoded, the appetites to be appeased. And therefore, we seek programmers and encoders of our simulation, what past past generations would have called “gods. “
In his inaugural sermon in Nazareth, Jesus read the Roll of Isaiah the Prophet, telling the “good news to the poor” that comes with “the year of the favor of the Lord” (Isaiah 61: 1–2; Luke 4: 18 –19 ). This same prophetic electronic book has taught us to pray: “Oh Lord our God, other gentlemen in addition to you, we have reigned over us, but your call we have memory” (Isaiah 26:13).
After all the promises of the tech-bros are gone, Jesus abides.
When the word living speaks, the ambitions of the possible “master of the universe” are established.
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