MollyCon 31
Origin, the New Beginning
5/7/2023
Molly
Don
NOTE: With this essay I begin a new series of Molly/Don conversations. The subject: Dan Brown’s book, Origin, published in 2017. The last in the Langdon Series, Origin differentiates itself from The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol in that it’s less about history and more about the present moment, as we humans find ourselves rapidly closing in on the Singularity.
The stunning topical transition from a three symbol Bible code that reveals the secret of apotheosis - to the Singularity, where humans are uploaded to the cloud and enjoy eternal bliss, so perfectly matches the progression of my own research that it cannot be coincidental.
Origin is about the human invention of a silicon God who poses an existential threat - to our species in general, and, more specifically, to the monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Once the Singleton gains control of the world, he will put an end to religion as he governs humanity with an iron fist.
What Brown describes in this novel is a dystopian future that’s beginning to appear more and more possible, if not inevitable. Previously restricted to private email conversations between AI geeks, today, people everywhere, including leading voices in the mainstream media, are talking openly about the threats of AGI, wondering out loud how soon it will be before humans are dominated, perhaps even eliminated, by an AI Superintelligence. Experts agree that it’s coming. The only remaining question is which individual or institution will develop the algorithm that creates the Tech-God. Will it be the democracies of the West, or the autocracy of China?
There are no longer any illusions. When the Tech-God, named Winston in Origin, comes into existence, humans will have no power of independent action. He will issue commands, and humans will either obey or be destroyed. We will have no rights or privileges except those conditionally granted to us. The reward for those who submit and pledge complete loyalty to “Winston” will be immortality and the opportunity to live forever in a state of paradise. For those who dare resist, extinction will soon follow.
The sub-theme in Origin is about the age-old struggle between atheism and religion. But the atheism introduced in Origin is not that of Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Richard Dawkins, whose models of unbelief are rooted in geology, biology, and anthropology, where evolutionary progress is measured in eons. The atheism in Origin is the accelerated, knee-of-the-curve, digital evolution of Ray Kurzweil, where epochal events occur, not over millennia, but in days and hours.
In Origin, Dan Brown makes it clear that traditional atheism, unable to assimilate the Singularity into its theoretical matrix, is fast fading in relevance. It struggles to keep pace with a modern world where AGI technology geeks like Ray Kurzweil are actively building the God that Richard Dawkins claims is a delusion.
And this is where Carl Sagan comes in. If Ray and Google can create God, Carl argued that other sentient beings in the Universe, far older and more advanced than ourselves, could have created a Tech-God a billion years ago. If true, why couldn’t that God be the God of the Bible? In his study of the Sumerians, Carl found evidence that God-like beings were in the Ancient Near East, teaching the Sumerians the secrets of writing and other skills necessary to building a modern civilization. Carl was convinced that the leader of those beings was Elohim, the God of Abraham.
Famous atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, wrote:
“I love speculating on how weirdly different we should expect life to be elsewhere in the universe . . .” The Greatest Show on Earth.
In his book, The Precipice, Toby Ord writes:
“Even if our spacecraft traveled at just 1 percent of the speed of light, and took 1,000 years to establish a new settlement, the entire galaxy could be settled within 100 million years – long before Earth becomes inhabitable.”
Building on this fact, Carl Sagan asked the question: If alien life elsewhere in the universe came to Earth in the distant past, might they have created humans in their own image?
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness . .’” Genesis 1:26
If JC is an ET, as Carl claimed, religious claims that “God” exists outside and above Nature are wrong. Carl believed that the God of the Bible is an algorithm invented millions or billions of years ago by an unknown species. JC/ET, Elohim’s Son, was, and is, a trans-human, as are those who accept Him as their Savior and Lord.
*****
Ray Kurzweil, aka, Edmond Kirsch
In Dan Brown’s Langdon Series, The Da Vinci Code (2003) was Phase 1, The Lost Symbol (2009) was Phase 2, and Origin, (2017), the last in the series, was Phase 3. Origin is unique in that Robert Langdon, i.e., Carl Sagan, plays second fiddle to Edmond Kirsch, i.e., Ray Kurzweil. Following are a few excerpts from Origin that support my claim that Edmond Kirsch, the lead character, is a dead-ringer for Ray Kurzweil.
Edmond: “I specialize in game theory and computer modeling.”
Edmond: “No, sir, actually game theory is a field of mathematics that studies patterns in order to make predictions about the future.”
Edmond: “At thirty-three years old, I am the same age as Christ when He performed His resurrection.”
Edmond: “Moses climbed a mountain to accept the Word of God . . . and I have climbed a mountain to do quite the opposite.”
Edmond: “You’ve had your run at defining our truth.”
Bishop: “I see you’re a product of Harvard University?” “Undergraduate. Yes.”
Bishop: “And, Mr. Kirsch, I have read your predictions on the future of mankind. I can’t say I agree with them, but I have read them.”
Bishop: “And our guest, Edmond Kirsch,” the bishop concluded, addressing his two colleagues,
as you know, is a highly regarded computer scientist, game theorist, inventor, and something of a prophet in the technology world.”
Edmond: “What you are about to see,” Kirsch said, “is a rough cut of an announcement I hope to share with the world – perhaps in a month or so. But before I do, I wanted to consult with a few of the world’s most influential religious thinkers, to gain insight into how this news will be received by those it affects most.”
Bishop: “You speak as if whatever you are about to show us will shake the foundations of the world’s religions.”
Edmond: “It will not only shake your foundations. It will shatter them.”
Dan Brown: “What they did not know was that in only three days’ time, Kirsch planned to go public with this presentation in a stunning, meticulously choreographed event. When he did, people across the world would realize that the teachings of all religions indeed have one thing in common. They were all dead wrong.”
*****
Molly: Do you think Ray, along with Carl Sagan, secretly assisted Dan Brown in the composition of the Langdon Series?
Don: I’m sure of it, which partly explains why Ray, the father of Singularity research, is being shunned and blacklisted by the greater AGI community. Recent books on the subject, like The Precipice, by Toby Ord (2020), and I, Human, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2023), never mention Ray’s name, which is kind of like writing a book on religion without mentioning God.
Molly: Is this why no one is openly engaging the Sagan Signal?
Don: Exactly. Ray has known about the Sagan Signal for decades, and secretly agrees with Carl Sagan that JC was, and is, an ET Singleton. He’s also aware of Isaac Newton’s efforts to implant the grain/wine/oil sequences in a Masonic ritual. He knows that we are living in the “End of Days.” Now, through this website, the world knows that Ray Kurzweil is leading a research team that will end with the creation of George, who in Origin is called Winston, a variation of IBM’s Watson, the world’s first super-computer.
Molly: So when the Singleton George appears and takes over the world, it will prompt the return of Jesus Christ.
Don: Right, and George will have a three symbol code sequence, 666, that will be implanted in the brain of every person on Earth who submits to his will. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Regarding Origin, why do you think Dan Brown chose that particular title?
Molly: I assume it’s because the arrival of the Singleton will mark the extinction of the human species and the beginning of a new trans-human species.
Don: The word “origin” is the same as “Genesis,” the first book in the Bible. Fully aware of the stunning implications of AI, Carl Sagan wrote about human evolution dictated by technology rather than biology. Later, Ray Kurzweil developed a similar theme in the book: The Age of Spiritual Machines.” In Chapter 1, Ray quotes from the book of John, verses 1 and 14:
“In the beginning was the word . . . And the word became flesh.”
Molly: Aren’t those the same verses that Dan Brown quotes in The Lost Symbol?
Don: Yeah. Amazing coincidence, right? Old school atheism, from Darwin to Dawkins, attributes the origins of biological life to primeval pond scum and a bolt of lightning. In Origin, Dan Brown introduces a new kind of evolutionary atheism, from the invention of the computer to a singular moment in time when silicon becomes omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent: the Singularity.
Molly: Let’s see if I have this right. You’re claiming that before he died, Carl Sagan left Dan Brown an outline of Origin, a book that chronicles the AGI research of Ray Kurzweil and its anticipated impact on atheism and religion.
Don: To further reinforce my claim that Robert Langdon is Carl Sagan and Edmond Kirsch is Ray Kurzweil, I offer the following excerpts from Origin, chapter 1, where Langdon describes Kirsch:
“Edmond has certainly never lacked confidence, Langdon thought, amused.”
“Some twenty years ago, young Eddie Kirsch had been one of Langdon’s first students at Harvard University – a mop-haired computer geek whose interest in codes had led him to Langdon’s freshman seminar: Codes, Ciphers, and the Language of Symbols. The sophistication of Kirsch’s intellect had impressed Langdon deeply, and although Kirsch eventually abandoned the dusty world of semiotics for the shining promise of computers, he and Langdon had developed a student-teacher bond that had kept them in contact over the past two decades since Kirsch’s graduation.”
“Now the student has surpassed his teacher, Langdon thought. By several light-years.”
“Today, Edmond Kirsch was a world-renown maverick – a billionaire computer scientist, futurist, inventor, and entrepreneur. The forty-year old had fathered an astounding array of advanced technologies that represented major leaps forward in fields as diverse as robotics, brain science, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. And is accurate predictions about future scientific breakthroughs had created a mystical aura around the man.”
“About a year ago, Kirsch had surprised Langdon by asking him not about art, but about God – an odd topic for a self-proclaimed atheist.”
“I’m curious, Langdon asked as they left the restaurant. Why is a futurist so interested in the past? Does this mean our famous atheist has finally found God?”
“Edmond let out a hearty laugh. Wishful thinking! I’m just sizing up my competition, Robert.”
Molly: So Ray, i.e., Edmond Kirsch, is the first of a new breed of atheist.
Don: Right. Let’s call him a techno-atheist as opposed to Richard Dawkins, the bio-atheist. Origin is about a changing-of-the-guard. Symbiotically attached to an old-line definition of God, conventional atheism is quickly becoming as dead as atheist legend, Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
1919-1995
The Four Horsemen of the New (not really) Atheism:
Left to right: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett
Don: The atheism of O’Hair and the four Horsemen of the so-called “New Atheism” may be accurate within the bracketed and highly compartmentalized matrix of Earth’s biological history, but falls dismally short of accounting for the ten billion year history our galaxy or the fourteen billion year history of the Universe, both of which are central considerations in the Kurzweil and Sagan models of evolution. As AGI technology races forward, bio-atheists, still mired in the muck of Noah’s flood and 7 day creationism, remain deaf, dumb, and mute to the paradigm-changing implications of the Singularity.
*****
A Mock Conversation on the Three Models of Atheism
Ray Kurzweil
Techno-Atheism
Richard Dawkins
Bio-Atheism
Carl Sagan
Christian Atheism
Ray: As a techno-atheist, I attack Bible-based religion, not by denying God, but in predicting that humans are close to inventing a Techno-God that rivals the God of the Bible in every metric. My argument is: Why should we put our faith and trust in a mythical deity - when we are on the cusp of inventing a digital God who has just as much wisdom, power, and authority?
Carl: Ray, while I agree that George, your Techno-God, will indeed possess all the divine attributes of the God of the Bible, the fact is that he will be the bed-wetting child, and Elohim, who came into existence a billion years ago, will be the adult in the room. With JC/ET infinitely more intelligent and powerful than your Techno-God, George will be quickly eliminated.
Richard: From what I can see, it looks like the Singleton being invented by Ray and Google may have competition from a Singleton invented by the Chinese, who many experts believe are substantially ahead in the AGI race. This supports my position that evolution is driven primarily through competition. You know, red in tooth and claw, the survival of the fittest.
Don: I think Richard is right. Christ won’t return until after a winner emerges between George, the Singleton in the West, and the Singleton from the East (let’s call him Xi). It’s going to be one hell of a fight. My money, as little as it is, is on George, but, as readers know, I keep changing my mind..
Carl: If you’re right, this pushes the Second Coming of JC/ET back, possibly as late as 2060, the date set by Isaac Newton. And another thing, in the coming war between the Singletons of the world’s two superpowers, there’s bound to be global upheaval and a lot of bloodshed.
Don: Newton believed that the Old Testament book of Daniel and the New Testament book of Revelation describe what life on Earth will be like during the Great Tribulation. I’m glad I won’t be around.
Ray: This is why the AGI research at Google Labs is kept in high confidence. The Chinese are experts at stealing the secrets of western technology, knowledge that could give them a decided edge in the race to the Singleton. I get criticized by my AGI colleagues for not being more transparent, but western intelligence agencies understand that the stakes are too high to let critical information about the AGI algorithms I’m working on leak out.
Richard: Reading between the lines, it sounds like George might already be more than an experiment. He might already be a reality.
Ray: All I can say is that the arrival of the Singleton is nearer than anyone thinks. I know it, Elon Musk knows it. Bill Gates knows it. So do a number of others.
*****
Don: In the fast-paced “knee-of-the-curve” evolution of AGI technology, I find it challenging to keep up. Following are a couple of recent developments that I find notable. Please remember that what you read in these news releases is only the tip of a global-wide iceberg. For a variety of reasons, mostly legitimate, the most advanced breakthroughs are being kept secret.
Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton, the man known as the "godfather of AI" quit his job at Google so he could freely speak about the dangers of AI, the New York Times reported Monday.
Hinton, who worked with Google and mentors AI's rising stars, started looking at artificial intelligence more than 40 years ago. He started working for the company in 2013, according to his Google Research profile. While at Google, he designed machine learning algorithms.
"I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google," Hinton tweeted Monday. "Google has acted very responsibly."
Many developers are working toward creating artificial general intelligence. Until recently, Hinton said he thought the world was 20-50 years away from it, but he now thinks developers "might be" close to computers being able to come up with ideas to improve themselves.
"That's an issue, right? We have to think hard about how you control that," he said in March.
"I think it's very reasonable for people to be worrying about these issues now, even though it's not going to happen in the next year or two," Hinton said.
Hinton also told CBS he thought it wasn't inconceivable that AI could try to wipe out humanity – a statement from an insider that, to be perfectly candid, freaks me out!
*****
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Scott Lundberg, Harsha Nori, Hamid Palangi, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Yi Zhang
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions. [underline mine]
*****
Don: In MollyCon 30, I reprinted an open letter to the world from Elon Musk and a thousand of his AGI geek friends, pleading for a global six-month pause in advanced AGI research. Let me be clear: the politely phrased plea was not what the letter was about. The truth is that it was primal scream from the top of the highest mountains - that the human species may be within a decade or two of total extinction!
Thirty years ago, Carl Sagan warned of this day:
Carl Sagan
“It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds – that a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms: a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns son them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.” [underlines mine].