Last night we watched the movie M3gan. I felt like I had seen most of it already because the guy in the row ahead of me on the plane back from Rome was watching it, and I saw most of it, just without the audio. I was actually trying not to watch TV on the plane, but his screen was right in my line of sight between two of the seats in front of me, so...
Anyway, it's not a great movie, but I do have to admit I love any story where the robot is the villain. It's a classic cautionary tale about science gone too far to the place where the human creator(s) cannot control their creation. In part, there's a built-in assumption that creation will always rebel against Creator, which of course is a metaphor for the fall and the human condition. But beyond that, it's also part of this new wave of AI speculation - how far can AI go? To what extent will AI replace people in relationship with us? Stuff like that. I won't spoil it, but you can guess from the trailers that the results are disastrous. And I love that, because as you have no doubt figured out by now, I don't trust robots.
But more than that, I don't really believe that true AI will ever exist - in fact I believe it could never exist because it would require a computer to be self-aware and get to the point where it could make decisions based on its own existence. I think it's like time travel - great for science fiction, but impossible in any future. Whether I'm right or wrong about that, though, the point is that I'm becoming more and more convinced that in certain contexts "artificial" is synonymous with "false." We live in a world that is constantly and increasingly "trading the truth for a lie" to quote St. Paul, and I think that the forces of evil would just love for us to trade true intelligence (wisdom) for artificial intelligence, which at the end of the day is nothing other than a false intelligence, that is, a lie.
And the biggest part of the problem is that we also live in a world where people are increasingly being convinced that they should believe what science tells them over what divine revelation tells them - that's nothing new, but my point is that people are already confusing "what science tells them" with what robots tell them, and people won't be able to tell the difference between what they're told by a non-human glorified search engine (garbage in-garbage out, remember?) and what they're told by actual human scientists, let alone what God has revealed to us. So we are experiencing, right before our eyes, the corruption of the very concept of truth. Again, I guess that's nothing new, but the increase is exponential - with all the enthusiasm over AI, much of our culture is not just walking in that direction, they are running after it.
On a side note, one of my guilty pleasures is those "fail" videos on YouTube. My favorite ones are the drone crashes and the ones where someone playing a VR game accidentally smashes their big screen TV. I laugh so hard. Anyhoo... I think I need to watch I Robot again...
I'm back, up and running, and ready to go - I should have a new JOURNEY episode within the next week or so - and because you are my loyal peeps, here is an exclusive, just-for-you, behind the scenes SNEAK PEEK into my new office:
This was for March 24th, recorded for the Ascension App
Thanks for your patience - here is our next installment of The Journey - it's session # 96, but I'm also calling it PART 1 of a "miniseries" on John chapter 6.
Whoever watches it first, please let me know if it looks good or if there are any problems with it - I get through the first two sections of the text on the feeding of the 5,000.
Enjoy!
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
Here's Matt Walsh's take on it - he says what I'm thinking...
if you watch this, I'd love to hear your thoughts
So here are the verses I look at to check whether a Bible translation is a good one:
These are mostly in the NT, but with regard to the OT, I don't want a Bible to minimize the phrase "Son of Man" so for me a Bible cannot render "son of man" or even "one like a son of man" in Daniel 7:13 as something like "human being" - that's a paraphrase and while it may convey the correct meaning for SOME OT passages, it does not convey the correct meaning for all of them, and you lose the connection to Jesus' own self-identification as the Son of Man in the NT, especially in Matthew 16:13-15.
Matthew 6:7 - better not say "vain repetition" or imply that repeated prayers are bad - Jesus was criticizing going on and on extemporaneously, not memorized prayers. The word "vain" is nowhere in the Greek!
1 Cor 11:2, and 2 Thess 2:15, 3:6 - better not render the word "teachings" just to avoid the positive connotation for tradition(s), especially if Col 2:8, which has a negative connotation (human traditions) is...
I've seen some YouTube posts lately by some of the Catholic apologists, apparently talking about the best Bible translations (and/or offering rebuttals to Protestant videos on the same topic). I don't actually watch these videos, mind you, because I'm not interested in entering into any debates over it (and I suspect a lot of it has to do with the deuterocanonical books anyway, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a non-issue, since the Church fathers DID read them, and Jesus DID quote them), but as you know, I do have my favorite translations, and some that I feel pretty strongly are no good. In the early days of the Original Church videos, I did a video about this, and I talked about how I have certain test verses, that I use to check a translation. I'll post my video and my test verses later, in case you want to refresh your memory.
For now, those of you who have been following The Journey from the beginning know that when I started, I was using the NABRE as my starting point (and then ...
