AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace Humans Without AI

Re:AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace... by rsynnott on Saturday August 05, 2023 @09:18AM (#37011730)

Arguably the key point for Christianity and Islam wasn't that they were monotheistic, but that they were _proselytising_; their adherents had a strong incentive to spread them. Granted, a polytheistic religion is probably less likely to be proselytising; "those people over there have our gods and we have our gods, that's fine" is an easier proposition if you're okay with multiple gods in the first place. But it's not universal; notably the Romans tended to actively try to spread aspects of their religion to other polytheists (while also adopting foreign polytheistic concepts; Roman religion was messy). Conversely, Judaism does not proselytise.

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Re:AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace... by jquery on Saturday August 05, 2023 @09:35AM (#37011873)

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Re:AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace... by rsynnott on Saturday August 05, 2023 @09:50AM (#37012010)

Birth rates wouldn't historically have been a big differentiator. There are edge-cases, I suppose (some early Christian sects encouraged complete celibacy, for everyone!) but in general effective contraception wasn't available, and even where it _did_ exist (Romans _may_ have had some sort of somewhat effective contraceptive/abortifacient drug, say), it didn't attract all that much religious interest until the modern era.

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Re:AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace... by kian on Saturday August 05, 2023 @06:08PM (#37016736)

This makes a lot of sense from a perspective where the "gods" are essentially ancient AI running on distributed (neural) hardware and communicating with itself via our standard human sensory channels that are able to hijack our wetware in proportion to our devotion. Monotheism then becomes a form of centralization of processing, restricting societies to a (more) unitary direction of intent [at the cost of much waste at the level of individual processing units (people)].

A slight tangent to your slight tangent: Monastic regimens look an awful lot like proof-of-work... Is the next step in facilitating the human-machine meta-minds minting AI crypto-religions?

Also, taking into account the earlier thread on Sci-Fi vs Sci-Fantasy, with a comment mentioning that science fiction tends to be current social commentary in the guise of the future: self-aware (and self-minting) currency a la Accelerando is an interesting analogy for religious, spiritual, cultural, and economic movements.

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Re:AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace... by OfSanguineFire on Saturday August 05, 2023 @11:00AM (#37012673)

> Conversely, Judaism does not proselytise.

That is a later development. In the first millennium AD there were active attempts to export Judaism, the most famous result of which was the conversion of the Khazar kingdom to Judaism. And the very etymology of the word “proselytising” refers to Judaism making some inroads among other inhabitants of the Mediterranean.

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Re:AI Won’t Replace Humans – But Humans with AI Will Replace... by rsynnott on Saturday August 05, 2023 @12:03PM (#37013340)

Fair, it happened occasionally. In most cases where it’s well-documented, though, it seems like it was more realpolitik than the sort of “spreading the good word” approach of the other monotheistic faiths; AIUI the details of the Khazar case are a bit of a mystery.

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