On Wednesday Night, November 28^th, we will discuss the future of FAITH in the new world of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. By “artificial intelligence”(AI), we are talking about a world that is increasingly run by computers and robots. I have received several articles about advances in AI spelling the end of our need for God.

Industry experts are predicting that over the next couple of decades, AI will replace millions of human jobs. Robotics have already replaced many factory jobs. Our financial system is all digital. Our military runs on AI – from personnel managment to “smart” weapons systems. Our healthcare and insurance systems are coordinated online. AI is being used in self driving cars. Computers fly airplanes, create artwork, and compose music as well as, if not better than, humans. We have “Siri”(or Alexa) in our homes listening to our conversations. Our emails are scanned to determine purchasing patterns for retailers. The average person checks email 74 times a day, and switches tasks on their computer 566 times a day. We average around two hours a day on our phones and 60 “pickups” (just checking to see if I have a message or email or something). The “internet of things”(IOT) collects information from virtually all electronic devices in our homes and processes all that information to make predictions about the future. Computers are not just collecting and storing data. Computers are being taught to think – to make rational decisions. The concern by many AI experts is that these machines can be wired for emotions and self-awareness. And then what?

Ray Kurzweil (a “futurist” and Director of Engineering at Google) predicts that by 2030 “Mind uploading becomes successful… as humans become software-based.. living indefinitely solong as they maintain their ‘mind file’… Eventually, all human beings will migrate to a postbiological state….”  Once AI offers human beings “immortality” – it’s not a large jump to the prediction by Dan Brown (writer of the Da Vinci Code) who says “people may nolonger worship God or pray to Jesus – instead putting all their faith in an AI Messiah.”

In May of 2017, Anthony Levandowski a former Google executive, filed papers with the IRS to create a tax-exempt status for his new church called “Way of the Future”(WOTF) whose stated purpose is “the acceptance, realization, and worship of a Godhead using artificial intelligence as it is being developed through computer hardward and software.” Three months later, the IRS gave WOTF church their 501(c)3 status. Levandowski goes on: “with the internet as its nervous system, the world’s connected cell phones and sensors as its sense organs, and data centers as it’s brain, the NEW GOD will hear everything, see everything and be everywhere at all times, and the only way to influence that deity is through digital and mostly online prayer and worship.”

Our question for Wednesday evening:

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