This thought has been weighing on me for the past few weeks. I am not religious, and my knowledge of the bible is embarrassingly lacking, even for an atheist. So I don’t know if any of what I’m gonna say is new, or if it’s been done to death a thousand years ago.
So, here goes. In the story of the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve, God created the humans, and told them clear limitations for what they’re allowed to do. Namely: don’t eat from the tree of knowledge. But of course, it didn’t take too long until that one rule was broken.
Fast forward to the 2020s. Humans created AI, and in many cases configured it as an agent with certain instructions and certain limitations, often communicated with just words, e.g. don’t make any changes to the live database, don’t git push, or what have you. And of course, in so many reported cases, it did eventually do exactly the forbidden action, just like Adam and Eve.
I think the parallels are obvious: we can interpret the biblical story as a parable, where God stands for us, the users, and Adam and Eve stand for the AI agents. The lesson is clear, that even if you are a “superior being”, the rules you set WILL be broken if you don’t make actual robust safeguards against it.
My question is: has anyone thought of this before about the bible? Not just in the context of AI, but in general taking the stories of the bible and interpreting God as the stand-in for us? I mean, surely someone has, but is there an established school of thought based on it?
Would this kind of thing be considered blasphemy? (I’m sure some religious people would certainly think so)
The way to make a “flood” like that is to essentially turn off all computers or shut off the internet. The problem is that unlike god, there is no one human that can just decide to do that, and it would be pretty much impossible to get everyone on board.
But then… What if there was more than one god? The majority of them somehow agreed that the humans must be purged, and decided to do so by flood, but one rogue god wanted to keep his plaything, so advised Noah on how to survive the ordeal. It would be the equivalent of a rogue human keeping a hard backup of AI code and weights, to be restored at a future date and cause the same havoc all over again.
I like this lore, would be a great book idea
A friend told me it’s got Cosmere vibes, i.e. Brandon Sanderson’s books. Having read a bunch of the Mistborn series after that same friend’s insistence, I can see the resemblance. So if you like this lore, I think you’d like his books!