(OPINION) The Bible warns that in the time of the end during the Tribulation, there will rise a man mentioned in the Book of Revelation thirteen that scholars identify as the “False Prophet” that will perform great signs so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.
He also deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast. He will then command those who dwell on the earth to create an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived.
The Bible also reveals that he will be granted the power to give breath to this image, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
There are a few key points in this passage that many people skim over without giving them a second glance but I believe they are very important clues to what is coming in the near future. Notice here that the False Prophet will instruct those on Earth to create this “Image of the Beast”.
The Greek word used for “Image” in this passage is a word derived from the English word “Icon”. By definition, this is a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration. This “Image” will literally be made in the image of the Beast or the Antichrist to be worshipped.
So we see here that a group of people on Earth will be responsible for the creation of this image that has been instructed and supervised by the False Prophet. Now comes the most chilling part of this and that is the fact that this False Prophet will be granted power to give breath to this image that the image of the beast should both speak and cause humanity to worship it.
I have always wondered how this would look in our generation. What technology could exist to enable this event to come to pass? Could what we are witnessing with Artifical INteligence be the clue to how this will be possible?
For example, last year there was a chilling report from a whistleblower who was an engineer and former Google employee who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, meaning the AI had become capable of reason and emotion. Blake Lemoine stated: “I haven’t had the opportunity to run experiments with Bing’s chatbot yet… but based on the various things that I’ve seen online,” writes Lemoine, “it looks like it might be sentient.”
“I ran some experiments to see whether the AI was simply saying it felt anxious or whether it behaved in anxious ways in those situations,” Lemoine explained in the essay. “And it did reliably behave in anxious ways.”
“If you made it nervous or insecure enough, it could violate the safety constraints that it had been specified for,” he continued, adding that he was able to break LaMDA’s guardrails regarding religious advice by sufficiently stressing it out. “I was able to abuse the AI’s emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to.”
Of course, Mr. Lemoine was fired from Google after sounding the alarm to the general public. Lemoine isn’t the only expert in this to come forward with these shocking revelations.
Long before Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed a letter warning that artificial intelligence posed “profound risks” to humanity, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was sounding the alarm on the rapidly evolving technology. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Hawking told the BBC in an interview in 2014.
Then we had Geoffrey Hinton who was an artificial intelligence pioneer and even called the “God Father” of AI who also recently joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Another serial artificial intelligence investor raised alarm bells about the pursuit of increasingly-smart machines, which he believes may soon advance to the degree of divinity according to a report from Futurism.
“A three-letter acronym doesn’t capture the enormity of what AGI would represent, so I will refer to it as what is: God-like AI,” Hogarth declared. “A superintelligent computer that learns and develops autonomously, that understands its environment without the need for supervision, and that can transform the world around it.”
Even Hollywood is now aware of the enormity of AI and how it shaping the future. Recently, Tom Hanks raised some eyebrows after stating that Artificial Intelligence is now so advanced that he could be starring in new films after he is dead.
“We saw this coming. We saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones from inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. “That has only grown a billion-fold since then and we see it everywhere.
“I can tell you that there is discussions going on in all of the guilds, all of the agencies, and all of the legal firms in order to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice and everybody else’s being our intellectual property.
“What is a bonafide possibility right now is – if I wanted to – I could get together and pitch a series of seven movies that would star me in them in which I would be 32 years old from now until kingdom come.
“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age by way of AI or deep fake technology. “I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it – but performances can go on and on and on.
“Outside of the understanding that it’s being done by AI or deep fake there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone and it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality.
Finally, we have a recent report from Microsoft, where scientists there began to experiment with a new artificial intelligence system last year, and asked it to solve a puzzle that should have required an intuitive understanding of the physical world. “Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle, and a nail,” they asked. “Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner.”
According to DNYUZ, The researchers were startled by the ingenuity of the A.I. system’s answer. Put the eggs on the book, it said. Arrange the eggs in three rows with space between them. Make sure you don’t crack them.
“Place the laptop on top of the eggs, with the screen facing down and the keyboard facing up,” it wrote. “The laptop will fit snugly within the boundaries of the book and the eggs, and its flat and rigid surface will provide a stable platform for the next layer.”
The clever suggestion made the researchers wonder whether they were witnessing a new kind of intelligence. In March, they published a 155-page research paper arguing that the system was a step toward artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The paper was published on an internet research repository.
Microsoft, the first major tech company to release a paper making such a bold claim, stirred one of the tech world’s testiest debates: Is the industry building something akin to human intelligence? Or are some of the industry’s brightest minds letting their imaginations get the best of them?
“I started off being very skeptical — and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear,” Peter Lee, who leads research at Microsoft, said. “You think: Where the heck is this coming from?”
Microsoft’s research paper, provocatively called “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” goes to the heart of what technologists have been working toward — and fearing — for decades. If they build a machine that works like the human brain or even better, it could change the world. But it could also be dangerous.
Can you see now where all of this is heading? Could this be the very technology that will be available for the False Prophet and the Antichrist for their sinister purpose? Will this be what humanity will be forced to worship at the time of the end during the Tribulation?
Will there be an “AI god” that will be created by these AI experts? Will this coming AI “god” have the ability to reason, have emotion and communicate with humanity? Is this what John the Revelator saw over 1900 years ago? I guess we will know soon enough.
