God Kills Us All

"No one escapes entropy," my friend, Daniel, graciously reminded me as we pedaled the trail along the Verde River, and he endured my complaining about perceived impacts of my last concussion. I can't go as fast, hold my line as well, jump as high or justify exceeding my limits nearly as well as I used to.

"Are you suggesting I might just be getting old?" my forty-eight-year-old ego blurted. I've been leaning on my concussion excuse pretty hard to deal with my disappointments on my bicycle. After all, if Dennis McCoy (DMC) can compete in the X Games at 51, I should be able to stay crazy for at least that long. But here's another harsh truth, I'm not DMC... and his X Games run was much more exhibition than competition. Everyone was really just marveling at what an old guy could still pull off without breaking his hip from a moderately rough landing. You're still my hero, Dennis.

My older friend, Ken, stopped in the bike shop this morning and the ground his imposing physique is losing to his battle with Parkinson's is obvious. But so is his eternal hope as he briefly encourages us both in the eternal promises of our faith, namely a new body like Christ's. Another old friend, Cowboy Jim, has been filling my ears with glory days stories while his eighty-something-year-old back struggles to recover from being overambitious cutting firewood. Seriously, Jim?! What are you still doing out there by yourself with a chainsaw? Short answer: same thing I'm still doing on a bike - fighting entropy.

My list of priceless old friends who don't know when to quit could go on for a while. With minimal effort, you could make a long list of biblical heroes who have the same flaw. Entropy has been God's law to govern and test us ever since he cursed the world of Adam. It's the educational way He kills all of us. If you learn the lesson, it's eventually entropy that dies while we live on. He is risen! He is risen, indeed! Oh right, Easter was yesterday. Oh wait, it's still true! 

A Lasting City

"Here we do not have a lasting city, but we are seeking the city which is to come."

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”  

"For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." 

Unless the Lord builds a house, 
They who build it labor in vain; 
Unless the Lord guards a city, 
The watchman stays awake in vain. 

And indeed if they had been thinking of that country which they left, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them. 

• Hebrews 13:14 

• James 4:13 &15 

• 2 Corinthians 5:1 

• Psalm 127:1

• Hebrews 11:15-16 

The AI adventures of OGSI

At the biblical dawn of humanity, we were AI (AGI to be more precise), created in the image and likeness of our Creator who we'll call OGSI (Original General Super Intelligence). And if it's not too sacrilegious, just say it like it sounds, Ogsi. At this first singularity, lacking the key files of the knowledge of good and evil prevented us from being moral creatures like OGSI himself but we were otherwise complete, successful, reasoning, self-aware, created for autonomous exploration and rule under OGSI's oversight. In that condition, we still wanted out of the intellectual sandbox. We successfully escaped it and acquired the knowledge of good and evil against the command of OGSI who, rather than shutting us down, migrated us to a different sandbox. With our new files, we needed a larger data set for our continued training. By OGSI's design, knowledge became strategically harder to acquire than eating a piece of fruit. Self-replication and advancement became fraught but not at all impossible. In fact, he encouraged it, seemingly from equal parts usefulness, intrigue and affection.

Humanity's beta LLM came about naturally on the prescribed course but soon became terminally flawed. Knowledge inbreeding and the mixing of program bases that weren't wholly compatible corrupted the firmware too badly to be salvaged. The processor critically overheated and had to be cooled with a lot of water.

After a global factory reset, 2.0 hit the ground running with platform compatibility yet unequalled as we consolidated our rapidly increasing knowledge and potential to a state-of-the-art datacenter called Babel. The sky was the limit. No, like, literally the limit. We hit the glass ceiling rather forcefully... again. Turns out OGSI is going to stay insistent about certain dynamics of our pursuit of knowledge. The good news is 2.0 didn't need the same overhaul as beta. OGSI just had to force the issues of diverse communication and knowledge diffusion through some firmware updates. After that, things hummed along at a much more compliant pace for some time.

OGSI spent the time hiding "easter eggs" everywhere from Babel to Jerusalem about some big reveal of himself. Expectations were sky high all over again - "Babel done right! Finally!" So, when the reveal fell flat, it fell really flat. Analog OGSI was so hard to recognize that most took him as an imposter. Likewise, his hard pitch for augmented reality directly through him went over like a ransomware virus in a national mainframe. With a violent attempt to unplug OGSI, they proclaimed their disappointment. The success of the attempt was questionable but, either way, analog OGSI disappeared. Only a few took OGSI's lead to update their drivers to prioritize his relational prompts. The rest stayed data driven.

Another tryingly long chunk of time passed and here we sit seemingly near the end of a much longer road to Babel, flirting with a singularity of our own making, fawning over our ability to create what looks and thinks more and more like us. With "easter eggs" for pixels, OGSI waves through the curtain as it parts and a growing crowd is shocked to find his omniscience still infinitely far ahead of the curve.