And A stands for appendages or arthritis?ROFLMAO? Someone always has to take it over the top....
Oh man, college biology flashback!Amygdala....
I learned what this was from Firefly. Poor River...Amygdala....
My specialty....You just made another rabbit trail Andrew
And, once again.... we've come full circle.I learned what this was from Firefly. Poor River...
ROFLMAO? Someone always has to take it over the top....
It's easy to claim to know what prophecy is about, far more difficult to actually be correct. We can't fully understand until after it happens. But, assuming the "image of the beast" involves some sort of super-intelligent computer system that interacts with people, consider:Revelation 13:15-17 said:And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
This will be one of those "wha-huh?" things.
Of note to our little band of brothers is that that law I mentioned (42 USC 666) was targeted at "deadbeat dads" (remember them?). It's all about separating the husband/wife, father/mother bond, making the men the slave labor of the Almighty State, and the State the Provider/Protector for all women and children. "May you live in interesting times...."
The tech industry is rapidly working on artificial intelligence, and openly promoting the idea that AI should be used in government, because in theory an intelligent computer can know and take account of millions of times more facts than a human can and come to a more carefully calculated conclusion based on more facts. For instance, an AI computer planning public transport systems for a town could know every single individual person, where they worked, how often they travelled, what their age was, predict based on their stage of life how their travel requirements may change in the future, know the future businesses planned for the town, and calculate the cost-effectiveness of every single option. By monitoring their communications it could even know who they communicated with electronically and the likelihood of in-person and online interactions being substituted into the future. And that's a very simple example, this can get a whole lot more complex. In theory, it could actually work well. But...
It would only work with complete surveillance of every aspect of life. And, more seriously:
The ultimate goal is that the computer would be so much smarter than humans that we would not be able to understand how it came to the conclusion that it did. We would just have to have FAITH that it knew best.
An all-knowing (ie spying on everyone through technology) super-intelligent computer that comes to conclusions that we cannot understand and have to simply accept by faith is the closest thing to God that man could possibly create. It is actually a direct substitute for God.
It's easy to claim to know what prophecy is about, far more difficult to actually be correct. We can't fully understand until after it happens. But, assuming the "image of the beast" involves some sort of super-intelligent computer system that interacts with people, consider:
For a computer that is programmed to control everything to make a "better world", anybody who cannot be controlled is an unpredictable liability. It is entirely understandable that the computer would conclude that they are too great a risk to the system and need to be killed (because it's a global system, so the only way to eliminate them from the global system is through death, you can't put them outside the system any other way). And if people are accepting what the computer says out of faith, they might say "I don't know why we have to kill Fred, it makes no sense to me, but the computer is always right, maybe the computer has worked out that he's about to strap a bomb to himself and blow up a crowd of people so we're having to stop him, I'd never have thought of him as a criminal but who am I to know, whatever the reason we'd better just get on with the job..."
- All people must "worship" the image of the beast. Worship simply means to bow down to, to submit, to obey. So everyone must do what the beast says through the image of the beast.
- As part of this, everyone must receive a mark that allows them to function in this new system.
- Anyone who does not choose to obey the beast and receive the mark, ie who does not "worship" the beast, will be killed.
Might not be completely correct. But it's very plausible, and becoming more realistic by the day.
I came to basically the same conclusion independently a few months ago, without reading another site -- that the image of the beast, the abomination that makes desolate, which is given power to speak, would very likely be some form of government AI system (so if FH doesn't want to take credit, I'll take it!). That's a very cogent scenario.I can't take credit for that, I started looking at it that way only following recent coverage of technology advances by trunews.com.
On a more light-hearted note, we're not quite completely there yet: China kills AI chatbots after they start criticising CommunismRichard Stallman said:If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.
I know I sound paranoid and crazy, but I don't use GPS systems for this very reason. I feel like the routes they take me on somehow reflect the route a particular corporate sponsor of that system wants me to go down, and thereby pass all of their businesses on the way.Just to dig a bit more into this (now that I'm sitting at an actual keyboard instead of thumbing on a phone over lunch break), here are some of the trends that I've been seeing that make this a likelihood. By way of qualification, I'm a software engineer by profession, and I've had introductory A.I. and robotics classes at the Masters level, though I'm not active in those fields directly.
We already trust A.I. with making minor decisions for us: Where is there a good restaurant? How can I get there? What movie should I watch next on Netflix? What music track should I listen to on Pandora? We're even starting to get "smart home" systems like Alexa. Meanwhile, social media companies use sophisticated algorithms to analyze "Big Data" collected on individuals from various online sources to determine what ads I am most likely to respond to. Most of an airplane's flight is controlled by autopilot, which works similar to cruise control. But now algorithms are getting sophisticated enough to drive cars for you. One of the problems regarding automated cars is who's held responsible when a mistake is made? I'll just say that I would not want to be the software engineer in that situation. As folks here will know, decision-making and responsibility are two key aspects of authority.
As much as technology helps people communicate, it turns out that people still have a sin nature, and that gets exposed. For example, when a public figure makes an unpopular decision, the "twitter mob" descends from on high to shame and harass them (while virtue-signaling their own supposed merit). So of course, we have to start policing how people use technology... for our own good, of course. Facebook is notorious for controlling what its users do and don't see in their feed. Algorithms go through youtube videos and flag anything that looks like it might be copyright infringement. More recently, companies have started getting skittish about what youtube videos they support, and videos that mention controversial topics are likely to get automatically demonetized for wrong-think. Certain users on twitter have reported getting "shaddowbanned", where it looks like their account is still active, but some subscribers don't see what they post.
AI technology also played a huge part in the 2016 US elections, with the company Cambridge Analytica (which claims it "uses data to change audience behavior") allegedly providing sophisticated online microtargeting algorithms -- using techniques such as "psychographic profiling" and "emotion analysis" -- that apparently helped boost Trump's popularity in key battleground states. As an even scarier fallout from the election, people on both sides are now decrying "Fake News" and "Echo Chambers", and trying to find a way to use more AI to decide what stories are and are not "true". This is a departure from previous systems which try to guess what you might be interested in, since it now makes an AI (and by extension, it's programmers) the arbiter of what gets presented to you as truth. That's scary!
With computers learning more about us and getting better at making decisions for us (and us trusting them to do so), and with corporations having an active stake in controlling how those computers control us, it creates the basis for a sort of unofficial "corporate technocracy". Right now, much of it tends to end up being very "democratic" -- in the bad, "mob-rule" sense of the word -- because corporations have to pander to the people's whims in order to prevent a PR nightmare. But it's not hard to imagine that government will step up and take control of this system and start regulating it before long, leading to the opposite evil of an "authoritarian technocracy". And with the continuing trend towards globalization, a global technocracy seems inevitable.
The other day, I came across the following quote from Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and the idea of "copyleft", as opposed to copyright). Though this is in the context of charging for software (which I'm not totally against, not muzzling the ox, and whatnot), I think it illustrates a much larger point:
On a more light-hearted note, we're not quite completely there yet: China kills AI chatbots after they start criticising Communism