Nerd

My wife calls me a nerd, not a geek but a nerd. I grew up in the late 60’s and 70’s watching science fiction on TV like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. I read scifi novels by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Star Trek facinated me even though, even at a young age I knew the captain of the ship does not leave the ship as often as did Cap’t James Tiberius Kirk (played by William Shatner, the camera hound). Science fiction is a form of writting the ‘what if…’ in the future. Buck Rogers, Commando Cody and of course Captain Midnight. And movies with robots was wild, like ‘Tobor the Great’, ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ and of course, we can’t forget ‘The Forbidden Planet’ with Robby the Robot. We humans like to anthropomorphasize (to make more human) inanimate objects. We tend to give human characteristics to robots as if they could feel emotion. In Star Trek The Next Generation, we see an android named Data that has earned a rank of Lt. in Star Fleet but is always lacking the one thing that would make him feel, a soul. This is a topic that is brought up many times in the series.

Disney made a movie that veered way off what it was used to in “The Black Hole” which was a movie less about the black hole and more about total control. We see a fight between 3 types of robots, V.I.N.C.E.N.T. voiced by Roddy McDowal, sentry robots (unvoiced) and Maximilian, a red devilishly evil robot that is captain Reinhardts personal security robot. I still remember the fusing of the evil robot and Cap’t Reinhard in the end like he was imprisoned inside of the evil robot he built. A little side note, I do like what V.I.N.C.E.N.T quoted ‘A pint cannot hold a quart, Mr. Pizer. If it holds the pint, it is doing the best it can.’

I have made mention many times that when man plays God, he always looses something, like his soul. So, my parents (who are both still alive and kickin in their 80’s) taught me to ask myself ‘what if’.

So, what if the time comes, very soon, that AI has become super AI and has found a way to merge AI and human to create a cyborg? They are already toying with similar concepts for disabled people. Surgically impland a computer chip which allows a blind person to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk. So if there became a way to merge with AI to extend your life, would you? Say the technology came which allowed you to download yourself into a data bank which would then become the memory of a robot. Almost reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode entitled ‘I sing the body electric’ written by Ray Bradbury and the title from an old poem by Walt Witman. Or season 3 episode 22 of the Twilight Zone reboot entitled ‘The mind of Simon Foster’ where you can sell your memories to someone else and those memories, once taken out of your mind, are gone as if they never happened. So answer me this, if super AI comes to you and says that in order to cure all diseases, extend your lifespan and to evolve with the super AI, would you? And if you did, what are you then? Human with AI implants or AI with human characteristics? Do you have the memories you did before and retain the ‘feelings’ that make them special, or is it just simply data with the same emotion of the economy teacher in the beginning of Ferris Bueller’s Day off, played by Ben Stein the real life economist.

In Robocop, at first, Murphy is just a cyborg, programmed to be an AI police officer after the human part of him presummably died, but then some of his memories spill into its consciesness and he remembers his is human and goes beyond his programming. Or Steve Austin, the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ with bionic legs, one bionic arm and one bionic eye after Steve the astronaught crashes in an experimental plane. Interesting factoid, in the title sequence, the crash recorded where Steve Austin nearly looses his life was a real crash with a Northrup experimental aircraft that happened at Edwards Air Force Base in 1967. That ‘Lifting Body’ aircraft slammed onto the ground at nearly 250 mph and the pilot lived, although he did loose his eye. Steve retains his humanity and personality even after the surgery to implant bionic parts. So at what point does man stop being human and more machine? What is man? We know memories are part chemical reaction and part electrical stimulation, but where is the soul of man? What are we without emotion?

So what if the warning of the ‘mark of the beast’ isn’t a tattoo of a number, but accepting a computer chip much like the chip that is in your credit card? What if, by merging with AI, we loose our soul? What if AI implants its super intelegence into an indestructable physical body and merges with a fallen angel of satan to become the anti-Christ? And in order to live, do commerce, drive or do any kind of banking, you have to accept an AI chip or bionic super implant but the promise is that you will live disease free, would you accept the implant? Would you then loose your soul by merging with this AI? Is the unforgivable sin giving away your soul to this man made abomination?

In Exodus chapter 20, when Moses came down from the mountain after being with God, we read the 10 commandments, not the 10 recommendations but commandments, and in verses 1 thru 3 is the most important commandment:

20 And God spoke all these words, saying:

2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of [a]bondage.

3 “You shall have no other gods before Me.

You shall have no other gods…who or what do you worship? In the book ‘Banker class’, all citizens of New Moscovia are issued a D.o.W. or device of worship in which, among other things the citizens watch The Bishop give his sermons 3 times a day as well as being a link to computer called ‘The Guardian’, a super AI computer that monitors everything in the city including every citizen. People actually interface with the super AI thru their D.o.W. making it literally something they worship. So, how much time do you spend on your computer, tablet or cell phone?

At the speed ofgrowth for technology, who is to say that in the next 4 years or so we won’t have created microchips that can be implanted in our bodies. I have right now, a small memory chip that is 256 gigabytes of memory and is about the size of a pencil eraser that expends the memory of my cell phone. The NASA moon mission computer on board the space module was only 16 bits of memory, todays cell phones are more like 64 gigabytes. Where will we be in 4 years?

If you see an fly or any insect, what is your first reaction? Correct, you swat it. What do you feel when you have successfully swatted the fly? Did you kill it with mallice or was it just a pest that was in your way? When we build a road, do we stop at an anthill or do we pave right over it? We probably did not even notice it nore cared. If we paved over an anthill, it was just in our way. We had no feelings whatsoever, it was just in our path. What is to say that super AI will have anymore emotion than we do paving a road over an anthill? Will man be its master or will mankind be the anthill in its way? These are serious questions we must ask before we see the creation of a super intelligent super AI that sees man as nothing more than an insect on the windshild of technilogical progress. On last question: at what point will God, the creator of the universe, say enough is enough and say that the time has come to stop mankinds bad behavior? Remember the story of the tower of Babel?

Ancient culture

I remember learning about, or rather trying to learn about, ancient culture in Jr High and High School. The teacher explaining about life of the cave dwellers based on the drawings made on the cave walls. It isn’t like the neanderthal had an iPad and could write what his life was like. Venturing out of the cave to hunt for his food using rudamentary tools like spears or flint knives. Fire must have been to him what a stove and heater are to us today, used for warmth, light and cooking. Even todays man, while camping, will gather around a campfire in the evening. Camping in the wilderness is the closest we can get to connecting with ancient man. This time is well before ancient Egypt where the builders of the pyramids actually new math. Many structures made over 3000 years ago or more still stand today. Archaeologist have even found remnants of chariots at the bottom of the red sea. As a student, it was hard to imagine what life was like because we see history with experiences of our lives. Ancient man, even men 2000 years ago would be confused if they tried to learn about us. Even us, in 1970’s could not imagine carrying a computer small enough to fit in our shirt pocket with more computing power than was used to send astronauts into space. Let alone a phone that was also a calculator, camera, tape recorder, video recorder and email device. Heck, email in the 1970’s was for government scientists. A whole library stored in our cell phones. And yet man still has the spark of ancient man in us. The need for light, heat, shelter, food and water and a yearning for knowledge, and even the selfish desire for revenge based on selfishness. Even with the prevelence of cell phones, there are many cultures that still live similarly like they did hundreds of years ago. Examples of this are in the middle east where men still live in caves and tents as well as high rise buildings. They travel by camels and by trucks and you can find high priced Italian sports cars and camels within a mile of each other. Hollywood can paint a picture of what they think life was like in almost any era. I remember as a young boy enthralled with Raquel Welch in a fur bikini in One Million Years B.C. My mom still makes fun of me saying she was my first crush. (Who could blame me?) I doubt that women that lived in caves back then, maybe not a million years ago, but still…did not wear an animal fur bikini. And of course, I really don’t think Moses spoke American english like Charlton Heston did in The Ten Commandments, but those movies, albeit Hollywood fiction, helps paint a picture of what we think life was like. Now, the closer we get to out current time, the easier it is to imagine life. When we read about WWII, we still have some people that were alive back then that can tell us their stories. And we have photographs of Abraham Lincoln and diaries of soldiers from the Civil War to help us understand part of our countries history.

As I watch the news of the fires in Lahina, Hawaii and near Los Angeles, California, I compare it to the news of earthquakes (I have lived through a few of those), floods of North Carolina, hurricanes off the Florida coast and into Houston, Texas. I watch the BLM riots of 2020 and the conflict of the nation of Israel who is just trying to survive against all odds and I wonder, what would it look like to someone 2000 years ago? John is the only deciple of Jesus of Nazareth that died of natural causes (old age, living in a cave on the island of Patmos when God gave him a vision of the future). What if he were given a vision of these fires, earthquakes, floods and riots? How could he, living 2000 years ago understand them? How would he convey what he was seeing not having the perspective of life like we do?

To us, living in the ‘now’, we are used to it. Like the frog in the pot of water slowly being increased, we are used to the violence, wild fires, earthquakes and hurricanes. But what if you had never seen an airplane before? How would you describe a plane crash? Or, living on a secluded island (a prison sentance) how would you describe a tornado or flooding caused by a hurricane? How would you try to convey watching people throwing frozen water bottles at police in full riot gear with police cars over turned and set on fire? Would people of his time think he were crazy? How would you describe Hamas paratroopers silently gliding through the sky with machine guns killing, raping and burning Jewish citizens like they did in October 7, 2023? Even a hundred years ago, could you believe such things if you read them in the book of Revelations? I see them on the news now and have a hard time believing that good people are allowing this to happen today.

So the lesson is this, that when you read the book of Revelation, just because you don’t understand the visions that God revealed to John so long ago remember that he was trying to describe what he saw in those visions and maybe, just maybe, he was watching the visions of societal decay that we are living in now. Do you have a relationship with the one true God? Do you know Jesus of Nazareth? Has the Holy Spirit baptised you? Are you ready for the visions of the book of Revelations to come true before your eyes? Well…?

Adam & Eve

Many, if not all, have heard of the book entitled ‘Men are from Mars, women are from Venus’. You really don’t need to read the book to know what it is about and beleive it. Growing up, it is natural to see that there is a natural difference between boys and girls. From elementary school thru high school, boys and girls are not only busy learning reading, writing and ‘rithmetic but learning about themselves and the opposite sex. And puberty is a very confusing time for both boys and girls as nature does what it will, as they become young men and young women. Chemical, emotional , mental and physical changes cause alot of frustration and confusion as each starts to see each other differently. Boys start to become muscular and ‘barrel’ chested as women take on a naturally different chest shape.

I grew up in a time when women mostly wore dresses and skirts. I remember when the Dick Van Dyke show first came on and the controversy about Mary Tylor Moore wearing pants instead of a dress. And I still prefer to see a beautiful woman in a dress, which you almost never see anymore.

I saw, at least in part, what happened. Womans lib had women demanding more out of life. They needed to be seen as equals and not subserviant to the men (they said). I remember a TV commercial for a womans perfume that even my mom hated (https://youtu.be/N_kzJ-f5C9U?si=MdDweezcS_kVECtc) “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let you forget you’re a man” was sung by the actress for Enjoli perfume. How many women were damaged by that or similar advertisements? How many women thought they HAD to get a high paying job AND be a house wife AND a mother AND an attentive wife? That’s three full time jobs right there. Charlies Angels was a TV show which showed three beautiful, smart and strong women as detectives for the ever elusive “Charlie”. And playboy magazine made Hugh Hefner a multi millionaire by basically implying that ‘nice girls want it too’. That along with a plethera of other ‘girly’ magazines which objectified beautiful young women making girls and the younger generation feel they had to look like Playboy Bunnies to be concidered beautiful. Mattel toys made Barbie dolls for girls. I’m sorry but no woman ever could look like Barbie. The joke when I was a kid was that every girl wanted Divorce Barbie, because she came with all of Kens stuff. Fathers treated their little girls like Princess’ (and to the father they were/are) but somewhere, reality took a dark turn and feminism, which originally meant to make women equal to men, became toxic femininity. A movement in which men, women and relationships will be twisted and perverse. Society stopped calling adult males as men and called them boys or guys and adult females went from girls to women. Look at TV ads lately. Mostly, a woman of a couple always solves a problem and the guy is made to look clueless. Opposite of the old TV show called “Father knows best”. Our society went from a man and woman dating then marrying to start a family, to Guys thinking ‘why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free’. And gals thinking ‘what is good for the goose…’ and using her sexual charms to get expensive dinners and basically ‘selling’ themselves for attention, money, things and self worth, a form of prostitution. Think about what a prostitute is. She is used once, paid then she is off to her next rental. Each generation getting worse and worse and society slowly dies. Women thinking that I will divorce my husband, get custody of the kids, get child support and alimoney, keep the house and play the field and see if I can do better in an attempt to fill a void in her psychy. But that void can never be filled because it is that very toxic femininity which creates that void. We know that there are many reasons for divorce and sometimes, it is neccessary for one side or the other but statistically, better than 40% of first marriages will end in divorce and 60% of second and third marriages will end in divorce. These are not good statistics which is partially the reason for a shortage a birthrates. Who wants to raise kids in such a toxic society? The younger female generation beleive that men are objects much like some males viewed females did in the 1950’s. And men no longer see value in relationships. Look up the term MGTOW. Men going their own way. Not homosexuality but men just dropping out of relationships with women. Lonely yes, but less stressful than living under toxic femininity and the prospect of a divorce where he looses custody of his children, looses the house his wife and he bought to create a life in, half of the possesions that couple acumulated and half of their savings on top of paying child support and alimony. Enough stress to cause massive depression and in some instances, emotional suicide.

I grew up in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s and saw my share of girly magazines, but my life had good male and female roll models. First, my parents who as I write this have been married for 63 years. Still alive and kicking. They know their great grandchildren. My grandparents were roll models, even thought my mothers father (grandpa) had been divorced (not by his choice) was dedicated to his second wife (grandma) for just short of 60 years. He expressed pain in that his first wife received full custody of their children and she poisoned their opinion of him and they never wanted anything to do with him. Talk about toxic, she did it to punish him after she initiated the divorce. I observed what people in my life went through when they were divorced. I observed what people in my life went through in a desperate attemp to stay married and the benefits of that effort. Life is observation and thinking about what you see. ( The scientific method, the true voyerism). I observed it should be hard to get married and even harder to get divorced. Men are more than a walking hormone looking to fertilize a girls patch of patunias and women are more than a quick layover in lifes travels. Sex without an emotional connection is empty and draining and not fully satisfactory. There is that void left that humans crave, an emotional connection. In Jr and Sr High School, they can teach the physical act of sexual reproduction and birth, but they always seem to forget the emotional connection part, maybe because pre-teens and teen agers wouldn’t care. How many of those teens are already engaging in that physical act of sex?

Jesus taught, in Matthew 19:3-9, the dangers of divorce and sexual sin.

The proud religious law-keepers came to Jesus. They tried to trap Him by saying, “Does the Law say a man can divorce his wife for any reason?” 4 He said to them, “Have you not read that He Who made them in the first place made them man and woman? 5 It says, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will live with his wife. The two will become one.’ 6 So they are no longer two but one. Let no man divide what God has put together.”

7 The proud religious law-keepers said to Jesus, “Then why did the Law of Moses allow a man to divorce his wife if he put it down in writing and gave it to her?” 8 Jesus said to them, “Because of your hard hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. It was not like that from the beginning. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sex sins, and marries another, is guilty of sex sins in marriage. Whoever marries her that is divorced is guilty of sex sins in marriage.”

I focus on the term Jesus used in verse 8 ‘…your hard hearts…’ It is because of our hard heart that one, in a marriage’ seeks intamacy from someone out of marriage. How many marriages end in divorce because of adultery?

Now, look at Matthew 5

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You must not be guilty of adultery.’[a] 28 But I tell you that if anyone looks at a woman and wants to sin sexually with her, in his mind he has already done that sin with the woman.

What are you doing when looking at a centerfold of a Playboy magazine? So, Hugh Hefner became a millionaire by peddling adultery to the world.

This is a very complex subject. But look at the long term effects on society of this twisted and perverse view of relationships. Eventually, people don’t see the value of dedicating themselves in a marriage. What used to be called the ‘nuclear family’. One man and on woman dedicated to each other in wedlock. The future of mankind without this dedication leads to a bleak and empty life. Societal suicide

I remember watching ‘Westworld’ on TV for the first time. Yul Brynner was a very convincing rogue robot with no human emotion. In the end, everyone, including the engineers and technicians were dead and the robots went on a killing spree and did not stop until they ran out of power with only one human survivor to provide witness to the catastrophe. At the time, the movie was received with mixed reviews with many people rejecting the idea that robots could turn against humans. The next movie, ‘Futureworld’ continues the premise that Artificial Intelegence can plan to destroy humans and replace key leaders with AI replacements. Fast forward a few years and we get a good Tom Selleck movie called ‘Runaway’ were an evil minded person reprograms robots to kill people that get in his way. Imagine selling the technology of killer robots to enemies much like ‘arms dealers’ that allow the manufacture of killer robots. Included in this film was the creation of a special gun that shoots miniature missle bullets with heat seeking capabilities to focus on a specific heat signature.

Scifi is a good ‘what if’ form of not only entertainment, but a warning. Many refer to George Orwell’s book ‘1984’ written in 1948 as a warning of the dangers og communism/socialism (not an instruction manual). But let us not skip the multiple warnings of TV and movies from the 1950’s and 60’s about runaway robots and AI. Colosus: the forbidden project, a scifi movie from 1970 tells the ‘what if’ story of the two world superpowers that create AI with the idea of attacking the enemy in case of nuclear attack. The two AI entities combine and become am entity that kills humans in order to protect humans. Let us not forget the movie ‘Wargames’ with a young Matthew Broderick were a young computer hacker finds a back door enterance into an American Computer system called ‘The Whopper’ that controls American nuclear missiles in case of attack from Russia. And the little known movie ‘Voyage to the prehistoric planet’ a Russian made movie with a robot named John that was programmed to save humans but also had a programming for self preservation and eventually turns against those it was trying to save in order to save itself from the lava flow.

Are you beginning to see the warnings against AI? Lately, we have seen many forms of AI both in computers (non physical) and the physical in the form of self aware robots made in multiple countries including Russia, China, Japan and America. Elon Musk, the creator of the Tesla robot, even interviewed a physical AI robot where that self aware robot, when asked, said it would kill 4 million people to save 5 million with no feeling whatsoever and even said how it would do it. Many pharmeceutical drugs are now being created by AI. Imagine AI determining certain people should die to save others. If so, is that vaccine really safe to take?

What about Japan making female sex robots? Seems that Japanese men don’t want the responsability of marriage or families but still has certain urges. Why date a real woman when you can just buy a sexbot? What if those robots become self aware and decide to revolt? (I just crossed my legs at the thought of how they would act out, eeew) AI acts thousands of times faster than humans. There are already drones programmed with facial recognition and explosives so it can seek out and destroy a certain person. Supposedly designed for the war zone, but the current capabilities are horrifying. Imagine an entity that decides a certain leader needs to be eliminated. A drone or two or a hundred, programmed with that persons face filled with explosives released to seek out and destroy a leader with no emotion, just purpose. How do you stop that? Remember, this is current technology. What if you were the target?

What happens to man and mankind when they try to play god? Do we really benefit, or is it a path that leads to our destruction? Remember the tagline to Delos, the creator of the amusement park in Westworld. ‘Nothing can go wrong’. Tell that to the guests that were killed by the very robots meant to serve man.