Today’s Scripture Reading (April 7, 2017) Ezekiel 17
Stephen Hawking,
the physicist and best-selling author of “A Brief History of Time” (not to
mention the intellectual idol and sometime antagonist of Sheldon Cooper on the
television comedy “The Big Bang Theory”) admits that the idea of artificial
intelligence scares him. With so many advances in the field of artificial
intelligence, as well as the number of companies and the amount of money that
is being spent on chasing after the elusive dream, the science fiction plot device
might not be all that far off. In fact, we already
see forms of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, including
self-driving cars and digital personal assistants like Google Now. Even my
I-phone insists on telling me the driving times to places that I routinely go,
without me asking or the information, simply because it knows that I have been
there before. The future may be already arriving.
For Hawking, the
problem of artificial intelligence comes down to who it is that is controlling
the intelligence. In the wrong hands,
artificial intelligence could be a weapon like we have never seen before. But,
for Hawking, the larger problem is the question of whether artificial
intelligence could be controlled at all.
And if it can’t be controlled, what would
happen next. Hawking doesn’t know the answer to that question, and he is pretty
sure that no one else does either. His solution is to pause the development of
artificial intelligence while the scientific community ponders the appropriate
questions and holes in our knowledge. While Hawking believes that we might be
technologically ready to make the leap toward artificial intelligence, he is
sure that in every other area of our existence we are just not mature enough to
be ready to make the jump.
Ezekiel tells a
parable about two eagles and a vine. The eagles
represented the two principal powers in
Israel’s circle of influence – Babylon,
and Egypt. The vine itself represents Israel. And according to the story, the
vine is threatened by the one eagle, and
so it creeps toward the other. But in the end, the second eagle cannot help the
vine - and so the vine is uprooted. The reality for the people at that time is
that it did not seem that the two eagles could be
stopped. The vine would not be just
uprooted; it looked very much like the vine would be permanently
destroyed.
But this is when
God steps in. He too has a shoot of the vine – one that he had taken from the
top of the cedar. And he too decides to
plant the vine. Only God doesn’t plant it in the lush valley. He plants it on
the top of the mountain – not the most advantageous
place to plant a vine. But according to the story, while the vine that was in
the valley would be destroyed, the
remnant that God would plant on the mountain would survive. The identification
of that remnant from the mountain can be
seen in the Israel that was born in exile, the Israel that remained in Canaan
living in constant danger and without the support of a nation, and ultimately
in the Messiah that would come not to be born in a palace, but in a manger. But
no matter the challenges, the remnant would survive because God had decreed it.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 18
No comments:
Post a Comment