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...