This might be a pretty shallow critique, but if you think of “Antichrist” as something that superficially looks Christlike but actually opposes all of the Christian God’s values, “AGI” (and the associated eschaton) fits that bill much more neatly than AI safety efforts? Like it seems much more likely that many people might end up worshipping the sand god (and indeed some already do!) than there will be concerted and successful efforts of religions to worship people opposing the Sand God.
Seems like a reasonable critique to me. Something like that came to mind when reading the following text from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
[T]he supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. the Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.
CCC 675-76 (footnotes omitted). Eternal life (of sorts), heavenly bliss (of sorts) . . . From a Christian perspective, a lot of what people talk about when they talk about AI can come across as an attempt to “realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement.”
This might be a pretty shallow critique, but if you think of “Antichrist” as something that superficially looks Christlike but actually opposes all of the Christian God’s values, “AGI” (and the associated eschaton) fits that bill much more neatly than AI safety efforts? Like it seems much more likely that many people might end up worshipping the sand god (and indeed some already do!) than there will be concerted and successful efforts of religions to worship people opposing the Sand God.
“There’s always a risk that the katechon [thing holding back the Antichrist] becomes the Antichrist.”—Peter Thiel
Seems like a reasonable critique to me. Something like that came to mind when reading the following text from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
CCC 675-76 (footnotes omitted). Eternal life (of sorts), heavenly bliss (of sorts) . . . From a Christian perspective, a lot of what people talk about when they talk about AI can come across as an attempt to “realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement.”