Comment by skocznymroczny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skocznymroczny | Hacker News Reader

In the game Deus Ex (2000) you can find a secret room that contains an artificial intelligence you can talk to. The dialogue tries to make connections between religious deities and artificial intelligences. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1glq98/deus_ex2000_a...

Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."

Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."

Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

Right before the credits for the relevant ending, the screen reads:

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." -- Voltaire

This game also introduced me to Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, from an optional dialogue with a bartender in a hidden area in the hong kong game map.

What Are We Becoming, and What Price Are We Paying?

...I completely forgot that I was also introduced to Last and First Men by that same dialogue in Deus Ex. It's a great book!

https://youtu.be/pKN9trFSACI

Deus Ex was way ahead of its time, like a lot of cyberpunk media is.

We place faith in algorithms and data, much like faith in a higher power, but rarely stop to consider who writes these digital 'scriptures' and what their intentions might be. Are we blindly trusting new 'gods' crafted in server rooms, not realizing that they might be as fallible—or as manipulative—as the human hands that created them?

I have to politely contest the conflation of faith and trust. While I understand that they're used synonymously in a colloquial context, you don't place faith in algorithms, you place trust in them. You KNOW that the algorithm exists, you just don't necessarily know what decisions it'll make or how. Whereas, when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything. And so it makes sense to me that someone's who able to make that leap of faith, a rather apt turn of phrase in this context, is also more able to place trust in something.

> when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything.

I have to politely disagree with this statement. To place faith in something means that you believe it to be true regardless of evidence. If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.

> If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.

Well, I've had theist friends who'd disagree with that, who've said, paraphrased, that "if your faith has no doubt, then it's not faith, it's a dogma." I can't speak to this myself, but I do find their choice to believe despite their doubt more honourable than someone's blind certainty.

In India ISRO top scienntists go to Tirupathi temple befor Every launch of satellites or Mars or moon probe and seek blessings for success.They use AI algorithms in guiding all such probes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com