We keep hearing and reading stories about how your “smart” phone and your “smart” TV–beware the word “smart”!–spy on you for this or that government agency or private corporation. They see what you do and hear what you say.
And there are other headlines, scattered all over the Internet, about spy technology that can be placed in your furniture, light bulbs, food, clothing–even sprayed onto your skin without your knowledge. I have no way of knowing how much of this is true.
Now all this information, collected by “smart” devices, is way too much for any number of human beings to store and process: your head would explode. So they pass it on, instead, to a bigger computer and design Al Gore Rhythms to govern how the big computer handles the information. At no point is there an actual mind involved–just this misleadingly named “Artificial Intelligence” that simulates some of the operation of a mind without having any consciousness of what it’s doing–let alone anything we might call a “thought.” There is no intelligence in Artificial Intelligence.
We saw earlier this month how Facebook’s Al Gore Rhythm decided, on the Fourth of July, that our Declaration of Independence was “hate speech.” That was mindless. The computer had no ability to take into account the historical context of the document, or to weigh the intent of its content against the current Political Correctness value of its language. Humans eventually had to override their own computer’s brainless simulation of a decision.
The point is, computers and their Al Gore Rhythms are bloody stupid–and so are those who put their trust in them. Just like those who put their trust in idols: see Psalm 135: 15-18 (“They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them”).
Our idols today are fancier, but they’re still just idols.