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Comment by GaggiX | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, Saudi Arabia seems to believe so much in the future of AI according to the report, I would have imagined that such a religious country would not believe in it much, artificial intelligence kinda feels like an affront to God (I am not religious but that is what I would imagine).

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Saudi Arabia believes in anything that looks like a great investment when you consider only as much as you can fit on 10 presentation slides...

did you come up with this comment out of your GPTbrain?

First of all, even with all the recent hoopla, "AI" is nothing like what I'd consider intelligent despite the name. Machines have been able to out-compute humans for a long time, but when I interpret Genesis's verse about mankind being made in God's image, I think part of it is reasoning abilities that other creatures lack (and that AI may never be able to fully replicate/comprehend in the way we understand the world), as well as concepts like emotion/empathy and the ability to enjoy people/things/experiences. Islam accepts the same verse in Genesis that Judaism & Christianity do. As someone who has been reading Asimov from an early age and who keeps an eye out for Skynet, I'm not too concerned about them taking over anytime soon, although as a software developer, I certainly believe in the possibility that a complex buggy super-calculator may wrongfully decide to launch nuclear missiles. :)

The core figures involved with AI all seem to be worried that they're actually building Physical Gods[0], so perhaps Saudi Arabia is in the race to make sure our manmade gods are suitably Quranic[1].

More likely they are just throwing money around in an attempt to make the physical embodiment of the Middle East's oil-fueled, centuries-long democratic backslide look modern and progressive. MBS loves to chuck money at flashy tech (and also Fox News).

[0] Roco's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager with a computer program that doesn't exist yet.

[1] As interpreted by the most intolerant Wahhabist

Arabian cultures have a deep sense of geometry, math. That could be the key to human level A.I. observing the patterns in bigdata and biohacking models of the brain and the social information sphere.

Well most of the Islamic age progress was mostly done by Persians and Turkic folks rather than Arabs, out of which none of the scholars were based in Saudi Arabia of all places.

On the other hand, Arabs were extremely good at racial name calling (calling Persians Ajami, and calling chess evil and shit).

They’re big fans until you ask it to criticize a holy book.

If you're interested in some theological debate, I actually asked a question on Islam SE on this 11 years ago: https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/2320/is-it-haram-t...

Take note the Islam SE community mostly comes from Stack Overflow and is somewhat biased towards tech. But it was a decent discussion with some solid citations.

tldr: Imitation of humans and other living creatures is not okay, but nothing wrong with imitation of intelligence.

Very interesting, thank you

how else will you run a country where the majority are slave labor ruled by a very, very rich minority.

Exactly as it's been run until now? Having access to cheap human labor negates the urgency to adopt AI into the workforce.

i was implying ai will be used as a mechanism for control.

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