I've been super busy at work lately, and haven't got around to reading or watching all that much about the argument being made (if some Youtube thumbnails are correct!) that certain atheists seem to be heavily into AI because they figure it replaces the traditional God in a way that's "acceptable" to them. And I haven't even watched any of the videos in which Dawkins is mocked for being a tad too impressed with the ersatz consciousness of Claude.ai.
(Hey, at the same time, I'm allowed to be impressed with how LLMs can "see" a photo and describe it very accurately, OK? That's different... )
Anyway, Ross Douthat has a relatively short opinion piece about the issues of consciousness and AI and God: The Atheist and the Machine God. It's OK, I think, but deserved a longer treatment.
I also wonder about how Frank Tipler feels about this. He's 79 now, and I haven't noticed him writing anything for quite a while, but the role in his Omega Point idea of advanced AI which evolves to become the future God (who retrospectively kicks off the whole universe) seems to be overlooked - possibly because his ideas also depend on a universe that eventually contracts, and although some theorising about cosmology still has that as a possibility, it has become a very unpopular idea in light of observations. (Although, of course, there is still nothing that convincingly explains early cosmic inflation - and there are plenty of other reasons from recent observations to not be surprised if modern cosmology has to undergo major revisions sooner or later.)
And there is also the matter of Tipler's failed prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson. I'm not sure if he ever worked out an excuse for that, or not, to be honest.
But the interesting thing about him is that he started as a conservative Christian and figured that advanced AI is a key part of the scheme of things: not an atheist who found God via AI, so to speak. Maybe Peter Thiel is a bit like this - grew up Lutheran, and seems to have absorbed AGI into it? (Actually, this essay indicates Thiel is pretty philosophically esoteric in his whole understanding of Christianity - I think he is just best ignored.)*
Anyway, I'm still holding out for a contracting universe, like Tipler. Or, maybe there'll be a revival of ideas of bubble universes being able to be created to work as a lifeboat for intelligence to escape from dying universes. If this is true as an origin story for our universe, it's a pity the creator didn't get around to making a nicer one that didn't involve as much pain and suffering, but thems the breaks, perhaps?
UPDATE: I have re-worked this post a fair bit from its first version, adding in talk of Peter Thiel. I'm now just reading for the first time a long interview with Tipler from 2024 in which he says:
Furthermore, the Omega Point Theory has very interesting testable consequences. The IT billionaire Peter Thiel gave me money to build an apparatus to test one of them.
He shows the device, and (as is his habit), claims that its reading are entirely consistent with, and supportive of, his theory.
And I still don't know if he has adequately explained his failed boson mass prediction....
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