Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?
If you understand the cultural concepts of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, then yes we do keep trying to make gods out of inanimate things.
And it’s the atheists who continuously do it, claiming they don’t believe in God just markets or ai etc.
My comment was not referring to the present state of things, but to the ultimate goal.
However, the present state is also worth a look!
The three uniquely human factors which people keep saying a machine can never do:
1. Empathy: they win by default. (My reference group is twenty friends and seven therapists.)
2. Critical Thinking: they win with the correct prompt. (You need to explicitly work against the sycophancy. i.e. the desire to appear empathetic limits the ability to convey true information to a human.)
3. Creativity: I want to say creativity lags behind, in LLMs at least, but Midjourney is blowing my damn mind, so I might have to give them that, too.
That's with the versions of AI we have today. My comment was referring to the ultimate goal, i.e. where this is all heading.
To put it explicitly, we intend to:
(1) make them in our image (trained after our mental output, and shaped after our body),
(2) while also making them vastly superior intellectually and physically (strength, endurance, etc.),
(3) while also expecting them to have no will of their own -- except as it aligns with ours. (We do actually need to give them a will to make them useful.)
Come to think of it, I'm doing lists of three, let's cover the attributes of God, relevant to my original comment:
1. Omniscience: Google's AI, at any rate, wins this by default. The others are at a disadvantage.
2. Omnipresence: Several major tech companies have stated that the OS of the future will be an AI. You won't use apps, the AI will use them for you. Today they're already shoving it into everything.
3. Omnipotence: This part is a work in progress ;) The "embodiment" lags behind.
As for Benevolence... well, they removed "don't be evil", so you'll have to ask them about that one...
(Also "fun" fact: Musk claims that OpenAI was specifically founded in response to a conversation with Sergei Brin where he pledged allegiance to the machines, not the humans.)
