Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way,” they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry.

• Deuteronomy 29:19

So the palace administrator, the city governor, the elders and the guardians sent this message to Jehu: “We are your servants and we will do anything you say. We will not appoint anyone as king; you do whatever you think best.”

• 2 Kings 10:5

“If it pleases the king,” she said, “and if he regards me with favor and thinks it the right thing to do, and if he is pleased with me, let an order be written overruling the dispatches that Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, devised and wrote to destroy the Jews in all the king’s provinces.

• Esther 8:5

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

• Philippians 4:8

The first Scripture is about someone thinking incorrectly, becoming too confident and not understanding what God was talking about.

The second was a nation willing to turn the country over to a warrior (not kingly material at all) because they were too used to letting the previous evil king and his even more evil wife tell them what to do – a generation of people who did not know how to think.

The third shows Esther begging the king, her husband, to think if her people were worthy to be saved.  She wanted his decision to be based on what the king thought was right.

And then the Apostle Paul tells us what things we should think about.  For nearly three years, I have been writing a weekly philosophy / theology article in hopes that people would think, and mostly think about what Paul tells the Philippians to think about.

I wrote a post some time ago about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  The post was AI and the Year 2020.  The link is HERE.

In the post, I talked about how one of the main producers of Artificial Intelligence went before the US Congress and told them that they could not help themselves.  He said Congress needed to regulate AI before it took over the world.

I thought this a stupid idea in that AI is programmed by computer programmers.  AI can gather information, but AI cannot truly “think.”  AI can make decisions based on algorithms and trends.  But the “thinking” is done by the programmers behind the scenes.  In my post, I talked about how some of the advertising in the blogosphere is prejudiced toward the year 2020, since I have many posts from that year getting more views this year than in the year the post came out, while many other posts are ignored.  It is all based on how the AI is programmed.

The problem in that is twofold.  The bosses of those programmers may have an agenda, and some people get silenced while others flourish.  It seems the world has tilted in a certain direction, but only due to what AI allows to be said.

Backhanded censorship as described is one issue, but the other is more sinister.  We, as inhabitants on this earth, are lazy and we have not been taught how to think.  I listen to one pastor’s podcast and in a recent one, he lamented that when he was in school, say 35-40 years ago, he was taught how to think, but his children were taught a set of “facts.”  I put that in quotes because some of the “facts” are simply not factual, even proven wrong, but it was what was in the textbook and it was what the answer was supposed to be in the standardized tests.  Schools teach standardized test taking.  And regurgitating the “facts” is all that is required.

History used to be explaining how we got where we are, the good and the bad.  Then someone thought that if you memorized dates, then when you study world history instead of your country’s history, you can match the dates and realize why things happened as they did.  What goes on in one place affects what goes on somewhere else.  But then, history became nothing but memorizing dates with no thought of connecting the dots.

But the hazards that I see on the highways and byways of life these days are caused by safety features in new cars.

I was driving along the highway the other day.  The car in front was driving erratically.  In my youth, people swerving from one lane, or at least to the line between lanes, and then back to the opposite side of the lane were either drunk or stoned.  It was a multilane highway, so I passed.  I watched as I passed.  The driver was either texting or playing a video game on his phone or tablet.  His eyes remained down, looking at the screen.  One hand held the device.  The other hand punched keys or whatever.  As the lane departure alarm went off, he took his left hand and punched the steering wheel in the proper direction.  He never held the wheel.  He never looked up.  The text or game was too important.  He was going about the same speed I wanted to go, so I pulled in front and checked on his progress.  Over ten miles down the road, never looking up, never holding the steering wheel, but constantly drifting to the left and right, punching the steering wheel when he was crossing into the adjoining lane on either side.

I wrote a couple of years ago about a teenager who ran a stop sign and drove through the “T” intersection.  When the lane departure alarm went off, he turned the wheel.  But then the collision alarm must have gone off.  He was headed straight for a tree.  With this adjustment, he was headed straight for me, and I am sure the collision alarm went off again.  I had already stopped because he had never looked up from his phone.  He turned the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision with my car, but that put him on a path of driving into someone’s front yard.  Did he then correct to avoid hitting a house?  I do not know.  I got as far away as possible.

With these two driving disasters, or what could have been disasters, we are now taking these safety aides and letting them drive instead of us thinking, paying attention, and driving the car ourselves.  There are self-driving automobiles, but neither of these vehicles were equipped that way.

We have a couple of generations, or more, who have never been taught how to think, and many of them are happy with it that way.

In the meantime, we have huge corporations that would rather pay for AI to run electrical grids and other utilities rather than pay people to do the operating.  That is something that AI is good at doing.  The company that I used to work for developed “Level 2” control systems.  The equipment may not operate with the utmost efficiency, but above average efficiency, and the marvel of the software was that it was consistent.  Quality issues and unexplained maintenance shutdowns were almost always eliminated.  Not having system upsets is a big selling point in most manufacturing settings.

Thus, people are not taught how to think, and they are comfortable with that.  Companies would rather have a computer make above average product consistently rather than have an operator screw something up.  And the world only gets to hear one viewpoint, what AI allows to be heard.

AI is computer software and computers only do as they are told, but AI will take over.

Why?

Because we allow it to do so while we risk our lives texting while driving and other stupid endeavors.

We will gladly let AI take over, so we do not have to think about … anything.

Are the callouses on our thumbs from texting too much the sign of the beast?

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.