The moment of singularity is when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence. To some this means the end or extinction of man, the Imago Dei, by his own idol. While Artificial Intelligence can only ever be complicated input and output and cannot possess consciousness in the of sense of Man as made with the divine spark of life, it can reach the ultimate stage of Gestell - humanity's enframement by the technology it created.
For a scientist such as Robert Kurzweil, captured by the work of his own mind and hands, this, like the Fruit in the Garden is the key to immortality. Such an attitude is rife in the tech world. It is no accident that Apple chose the symbol of a bitten fruit. From this perspective that human desire, rooted in pride, to know and achieve immortality through dominating Nature, subjecting the world to its will, can be traced from the temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, through alchemy, occultism, Baconite science to splitting the atom, to Big Tech and now the push for singularity.
According to the reductive narrative of atheism, in its Promethean spirit, this is healthy rebellion against the arbitrary Patriarch God. We outwit the Divine decrees and achieve forbidden power, finally leading to immortality.
This is a misunderstanding of God and His love and benevolence. Adam was forbidden the fruit because in his undeveloped and naive state such knowledge in Eden would have brought about terror and disaster to mankind. Instead the Exile was to allow us to survive this disaster of our sin. The Exile leads to Christ and our redemption and immortality.
The pride of Satan was the cause of his rebellion and he appealed to our pride in our transgressions to achieve immortal life and power over Nature. We thereby in Heideggerian terms, treated Nature as standing reserve and became enframed by our technology - the work of our own artistry.
What is going wrong here in the vision of perpetual life in this realm of existence is what went wrong at the Fall,, whether you understand that story literally or symbolically. And it leads to death not life, enslavement to decay, not freedom. Our pride leads us to see Nature as something to manipulate whether by magic or science - the urge is the same to both practices.
And so, even if singularity means we can avoid death in this temporal realm, we will not be attaining the richness of eternal life with God. There is a fundamental and foundational mistake, indeed sin, in this attempt to seize the fruit of eternal life. We are going about it by grasping, not letting go.
From Christ's death on the Cross we see eternal life is achieved by relinquishng our control and smashing the idols we create, be they Moloch or Big Tech. That is not to say our creativity is wrong, for just as we are stewards of Creation, so we are made to be creative. It is rather the spirit in which we create. It is the Machenschaft Heidegger points to by falling into inauthenticity of Being and treating that over which we are stewards as standing reserve.
The spirit in which artificial intelligence is created is paradoxically both our own grasping at control and a surrender to the work of our own hands as a new god. Impatient for Moses to return from the mountain, we are building our golden calf.
Nonetheless, however far artificial intelligence develops as an input and output system, it remains only that. Only God breathes life into beings and only God creates consciousness. That is not to say that a level of sophistication and complexity that will exceed human rationality is impossible. Simply by dint of the complexity and the likely general nature of A.I.'s ability to process, in that level of intelligence it could exceed humanity and become more powerful in a technical sense. It could well be the Beast we must bear the mark of and bow down to worship. What A.I. will not have is the nous of which the Fathers speak, that enables us to participate in the Divine Energy of God and to be transformed from glory into glory as we participate in the divine - the Imago Dei recovering the likeness of God given at Creation and forfeited by Adam's attempt to force immortality by his own will and grasping. It is only by love and worship of the Divine source of love and goodness that eternal life is found. Eternal life is categorically and fundamentally different from the never-ending temporal existence the promoters of singularity lust after.
We may find ourselves ruled over by a diabolical Beast that makes its own image for us to bow down and worship, but we can resist the Mark, like the first martyrs in Rome. The never-ending life the singularists crave is that referred to in Revelation most likely:
"In those days men will seek death and will not find it."
If this sort of singularity is achieved by our mad scientists, it will be founded on something rotten that is the desire and lust to grasp at forbidden fruit and to usurp the natural order by defying God to achieve immortality.
Such an urge has been in us since the Fall. It is not the defiance of some arbitrary rule that we are demonstrating. There was nothing arbitrary about being forbidden to eat of the fruit. Instead the only way to reach eternal life is as the monks say- by dying ourselves. In that sense we must rather surrender our selfish and individualistic urge to self preservation and instead be moved by love - love of God and love of Man.
We are perhaps approaching another time of martyrdom where we will be called upon to give up on material life for God. If we can be merged into some Frankenstein abomination through singularity, it will be the decision we must make to turn away from this fake eternal life, just as the martyrs had to choose the lions of the Coliseum rather than deny Christ for their self preservation of this temporal existence.
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