Tuesday, October 3, 2017
New Religion Worships ‘Divine Supercomputer’
“Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.” Psalms 115:4 (The Israel Bible™)
(Shutterstock)
A high-tech millionaire has founded a new religion based on the belief that artificial intelligence will surpass man, and proclaims that in the future, man will worship a divine supercomputer. But a rabbi who is an expert in the interface between religion and technology compared the new high-tech religion to old-school idolatry.
Anthony Levandowski, the key engineer behind much of the technology used by the multi-billion dollar self-driving car industry, filed paperwork in California two years ago creating a new religious organization called Way of the Future. According to Wired, Levandowski is currently between projects and is using his time to pursue his religion more seriously. Way of the Future is dedicated to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”
Anthony Levandowski (LinkedIn)
Rabbi Moshe Avraham Halperin, head of the Machon Mada’i Technology L’Halacha (Institute of Science and Jewish Law) rejected the concept of a computer generated deity as proposed by Levandowski.
“This new religion states that man can make a new God for himself, in precisely the same manner as men 5,000 years ago did when they made a small idol of some strange creature they just thought up and called it God,” Rabbi Halperin told Breaking Israel News.
“Worshipping a computer is like bowing down to a tiny gold elephant.The only differences are that this new version has an on-off switch and needs to be plugged in.”
Rabbi Halperin pointed out the shortcomings of this high-tech version of God.
“They are saying that man can make God, program him, and also unplug him when things get unpleasant or out of control,” the rabbi said. “People who believe in a God they can entirely understand and control, are to be pitied. They simply do not understand what God is, or even what Man is. They believe in a God that is below us, not a God that is above us in heaven.”
Levandowski is not alone in considering the theological implications of AI. Some technologists believe that a supercomputer is going to usher in, or even be, the Messiah. Transhumanism is a growing movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology. Many transhumanists believe that humanity will enter a Messianic era referred to as the technological singularity, when AI is developed with intelligence equal to or beyond human beings. This level of technology is expected to be achieved within the next two decades.
In an article two years ago, Zoltan Istvan, head of the Transhumanist party, explained how this development will affect humanity, effectively making previous forms of religion obsolete.
The idea of teaching anything to an intelligence that could rather quickly be far smarter than humans is contradictory. Another possibility is that AI will teach us new things about spirituality that we never considered or understood. It may tell us how the cosmos were created, or whether we exist in some simulation theory, or even that there are many AIs before it—ones that are much more sophisticated than itself.
Not only do men of faith disagree with Levandowski’s belief in artificial intelligence, but many technologists also question the direction the field is taking. Using decidedly religious terms, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and a pioneer in self-driving cars, warned that such smarter-than-human AI systems pose an existential threat to humanity.
“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” Musk said at a conference in 2014. “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”
When Musk heard of Levandowski’s epiphany and his new religion, he was unimpressed, stating simply, “Just another day in the office.”
Levandowski is the wunderkind of self-driving tech, now one of the hottest fields in technology. A technophile from a very young age, he was already earning $50,000 annually building websites while still in college. He was snatched up in turn by technology giants Google, Uber, and Waymo.
The self-declared prophet is currently at the center of the multi-billion dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber. In addition, in a suit filed by Waymo against him, Levandowski allegedly stole many of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation before resigning to found his own company.
Credit to breakingisraelnews.com
Read more at https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/95758/high-tech-millionaire-founds-idolatrous-new-religion-computers-gods/#Jjpio8kwimAxigDf.99
Rabbi Moshe Avraham Halperin, head of the Machon Mada’i Technology L’Halacha (Institute of Science and Jewish Law) rejected the concept of a computer generated deity as proposed by Levandowski.
“This new religion states that man can make a new God for himself, in precisely the same manner as men 5,000 years ago did when they made a small idol of some strange creature they just thought up and called it God,” Rabbi Halperin told Breaking Israel News.
“Worshipping a computer is like bowing down to a tiny gold elephant.The only differences are that this new version has an on-off switch and needs to be plugged in.”
Rabbi Halperin pointed out the shortcomings of this high-tech version of God.
“They are saying that man can make God, program him, and also unplug him when things get unpleasant or out of control,” the rabbi said. “People who believe in a God they can entirely understand and control, are to be pitied. They simply do not understand what God is, or even what Man is. They believe in a God that is below us, not a God that is above us in heaven.”
Levandowski is not alone in considering the theological implications of AI. Some technologists believe that a supercomputer is going to usher in, or even be, the Messiah. Transhumanism is a growing movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology. Many transhumanists believe that humanity will enter a Messianic era referred to as the technological singularity, when AI is developed with intelligence equal to or beyond human beings. This level of technology is expected to be achieved within the next two decades.
In an article two years ago, Zoltan Istvan, head of the Transhumanist party, explained how this development will affect humanity, effectively making previous forms of religion obsolete.
The idea of teaching anything to an intelligence that could rather quickly be far smarter than humans is contradictory. Another possibility is that AI will teach us new things about spirituality that we never considered or understood. It may tell us how the cosmos were created, or whether we exist in some simulation theory, or even that there are many AIs before it—ones that are much more sophisticated than itself.
Not only do men of faith disagree with Levandowski’s belief in artificial intelligence, but many technologists also question the direction the field is taking. Using decidedly religious terms, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and a pioneer in self-driving cars, warned that such smarter-than-human AI systems pose an existential threat to humanity.
“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” Musk said at a conference in 2014. “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”
When Musk heard of Levandowski’s epiphany and his new religion, he was unimpressed, stating simply, “Just another day in the office.”
Levandowski is the wunderkind of self-driving tech, now one of the hottest fields in technology. A technophile from a very young age, he was already earning $50,000 annually building websites while still in college. He was snatched up in turn by technology giants Google, Uber, and Waymo.
The self-declared prophet is currently at the center of the multi-billion dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber. In addition, in a suit filed by Waymo against him, Levandowski allegedly stole many of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation before resigning to found his own company.
Credit to breakingisraelnews.com
Read more at https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/95758/high-tech-millionaire-founds-idolatrous-new-religion-computers-gods/#Jjpio8kwimAxigDf.99
The Globalists Are Systematically Destroying America’s Middle Class
When people are dependent on the government they are much easier to control. We are often told that we are not “compassionate” when we object to the endless expansion of government social programs, but that is not how the debate should be framed. In America today, well over 100 million people receive money from the federal government each month, and the number of Americans that are truly financially independent is continually shrinking. In fact, only 25 percent of all Americans have more than $10,000 in savings right now according to one survey. If we eventually get to the point where virtually all of us are dependent on the government for our continued existence, that would give the globalists a very powerful tool of control. In the end, they want as many of us dependent on the government as possible, because those that are dependent on the government are a lot less likely to fight against their agenda.
Back in 1992, the bottom 90 percent of American income earners brought in more than 60 percent of the country’s income. But last year that figure slipped to just 49.7 percent. The wealth of our society is increasingly being concentrated at the very top, and the middle class is steadily being eroded. Surveys have found that somewhere around two-thirds of the country is living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, and so living on the edge has become a way of life for most Americans.
Earlier today, I came across a Business Insider article that was bemoaning the fact that the U.S. economy seems to be rather directionless at this point…
- We do not have a real plan for health care, and costs continue to gobble up American wages.
- We do not have a plan for dealing with globalization and economic change, but that change continues to shape our economy.
- We don’t have a plan to update our decrepit infrastructure.
- The one plan we did have — the Federal Reserve’s post-financial crisis program — is about to be unwound, marking the end of the last clear, executable plan to bolster America’s economy.
Ultimately, the truth is that we don’t actually need some sort of “central plan” for our economy. We are supposed to be a free market system that is not guided and directed by central planners, but many Americans don’t even understand the benefits of free market capitalism anymore.
However, that Business Insider article did make a great point about globalization. Most people don’t realize that our economy is slowly but surely being integrated into a global economic system. This is really bad for American workers, because now they are being merged into a global labor pool in which they must compete directly for jobs with workers in other countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
Even down in Mexico, many autoworkers are only making $2.25 an hour…
Most of the workers at the new Audi factory in the state of Puebla, inaugurated in 2016 and assembling the Audi Q4 SUV, which carries a sticker price in the US of over $40,000 for base versions, make $2.25 an hour, according to the Union.Volkswagen, which owns Audi, started building Beetles in Puebla in 1967 and has since created a vast manufacturing empire in Mexico, with vehicles built for consumers in Mexico, the US, Canada, and Latin American markets.Volkswagen, Ford, GM, or any of the global automakers, which can manufacture just about anywhere in the world, always search for cheap labor to maximize the bottom line.
Would you want to work for $2.25 an hour?
Over time, millions of good paying jobs have been leaving high wage countries and have been going to low wage countries. The United States has lost more than 70,000 manufacturing facilities since China joined the WTO, and this is one of the biggest factors that has eroded the middle class.
In a desperate attempt to maintain our standard of living, we have gone into increasing amounts of debt. Of course our federal government is now 20 trillion dollars in debt, but on an individual level we are doing the same thing. Today, American consumers are over 12 trillion dollars in debt, and it gets worse with each passing day.
The borrower is the servant of the lender, and most Americans have become debt slaves at this point. This is something that Paul Craig Roberts commented on recently…
Americans carry on by accumulating debt and becoming debt slaves. Many can only make the minimum payment on their credit card and thus accumulate debt. The Federal Reserve’s policy has exploded the prices of financial assets. The result is that the bulk of the population lacks discretionary income, and those with financial assets are wealthy until values adjust to reality.As an economist I cannot identify in history any economy whose affairs have been so badly managed and prospects so severely damaged as the economy of the United States of America. In the short/intermediate run policies that damage the prospects for the American work force benefit what is called the One Percent as jobs offshoring reduces corporate costs and financialization transfers remaining discretionary income in interest and fees to the financial sector. But as consumer discretionary incomes disappear and debt burdens rise, aggregate demand falters, and there is nothing left to drive the economy.
This debt-based system continuously funnels wealth toward the very top of the pyramid, because it is the people at the very top that hold all of the debts.
Each year it gets worse, and most Americans would be absolutely stunned to hear that the top one percent now control 38.6 percent of all wealth in the United States…
The richest 1% of families controlled a record-high 38.6% of the country’s wealth in 2016, according to a Federal Reserve report published on Wednesday.That’s nearly twice as much as the bottom 90%, which has seen its slice of the pie continue to shrink.The bottom 90% of families now hold just 22.8% of the wealth, down from about one-third in 1989 when the Fed started tracking this measure.
So how do we fix this?
Well, the truth is that we need to go back to a non-debt based system that does not funnel all of the wealth to the very top of the pyramid. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t even realize that our current debt-based system is fundamentally flawed, and it will probably take an unprecedented crisis in order to wake people up enough to take action.
Credit to Economic Collapse
Iran Deploys Tanks To Border With Iraqi Kurdistan
#Iran|ian military drill on Kurdistan Region border (Haji Omaran Crossing Border) despite business being conducted as usual.
Days before last week's Kurdistan referendum, Iran took steps to isolate and punish the Iraqi Kurdistan region and the government in Erbil (KRG). This included closing Iranian airspace to northern Iraq's two international airports and sending Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard forces to conduct drills along the northwest border with Kurdistan, but in the early hours of Monday Iran dramatically escalated its military build-up along the border by deploying dozens of tanks supported by artillery - this according to a Kurdish government official and Iranian state television.
The Kurdish official confirmed the tank build-up, saying "The tanks can be seen from the Kurdish side.” And Iranian state TV on Saturday indicated that Iran and Iraq would cooperate in joint drills and the establishment of heightened border security, to the point that Iran would "receive Iraqi forces that are to be stationed at border posts”.
Iranian government officials had warned just prior to last week's referendum that, “The republic of Iran has opened its legitimate border gates on the premise of the consent of the federal government of the Iraqi state. If such an event [referendum] happens, these border gates from the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran would lose its legitimacy." It appears Iran is now making good on its threats as it worries that an independent Kurdistan at its border would be a destabilizing force concerning Iran's own sizable Kurdish minority.
Last week multiple videos and images surfaced in Iranian social media purporting to show Iranian state police and security forces deploying to the Kurdish towns in Iran's north. Multiple reports indicate pro-Kurdistan demonstrations took place in various Kurdish Iranian towns in response to the Erbil government's referendum, something strictly banned and thus a rarity in the Islamic Republic. Iran's Kurdish population numbers over 6 million out of a total population of about 80 million people - most of which are concentrated in a northwest strip of land which runs along the border with Iraqi Kurdistan as well as in a small northeast pocket.
Two Iranian Kurdish political parties and a human rights watchdog all reported “scores” of arrests after thousands took to the streets in Kurdish cities of Iran chanting Biji Kurdistan, long live Kurdistan, and waving Kurdistan flags to celebrate the success of the independence referendum next door. Flying the Kurdistan flag and singing the national anthem are forbidden in Iran. Iranian intelligence and security forces have set up a joint command center “for the purpose of identifying and arresting the organizers of the demonstrations,” the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) stated. They are reportedly analyzing video footage of the gatherings.
Furthermore it appears that Iranian TV sent a message to its broader Kurdish population indicating that all activities were being monitored by authorities:
The Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) reported that Iranian police were closely monitoring the demonstrations that attracted rare attention in the country. “Iranian state television on Tuesday acknowledged the rallies, a rarity in the Islamic Republic broadcast,” the group stated.
As we previously explained, the Kurdish referendum pushed Iraq into the arms of Iran when the relationship between the Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Abadi and Iranian officials was at its lowest level. But after the KRG's insistence on pushing forward with moves toward independence, Abadi sees in Iran the only sincere partner to count on, and can rely on the Iranian Army and Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in the case of any military escalation against Kurdistan, particularly in the disputed Iraqi cities, with Kirkuk at the top of the list.
Map source: Iran Times
Baghdad is confident that Iraqi Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani didn’t take this step without a blessing from the Americans, despite official US opposition to the referendum. It seems Washington decided to swap its relationship with Baghdad with that of Erbil because it won’t be able to support both at the same time.
Supporting Erbil is more attractive to the US and its regional allies (particularly Saudi Arabia), in the hope that the Kurdish Iraqi move would trigger the appetite of the Kurdish Iranians (and the Syrian Kurds who are already on this same path). If this happens and we observe an uprising in Iran, which the Saudis would certainly support, the Iranian economy and that of the government of Baghdad will both be under severe pressure.
Iran supported Barzani in 2014 and provided him with weapons (at a time when the US was denying any support to Iraq, during the 6 months after the fall of Mosul in 2014), but it is today in an undeclared war against Erbil, fully behind Baghdad’s measures and supporting future escalation and punitive steps.
Credit to zero Hedge
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