Faith Hacker

James 'Jim' Wilcox

• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781638141570
• eBook ISBN:
  9781638141587
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

There's no escaping this truth: something is broken.

Is the platform updated? Does a restart fix it? Can we attach a debugger? Does the hot fix apply? Is it the architecture? Did any of the DevOps pipeline steps fail? Who does "blame" say touched it last? Are the cognitive models trained with the right set? Is that a best practice or an antipattern? Is there a performance bottleneck that's not scaling?

At the risk of heresy (0.0132% probability), the author, a well-seasoned software architect, approaches biblical Scripture in terms of troubleshooting a modern software system.

Along the way, the journey touches on topics like the following with a nod to Isaac Asimov and C. S. Lewis thrown in for good measure:

Artificial intelligence,

social media,

social injustice,

virtual reality,

gaming,

geek culture,

rock and roll, and

the singularity.

(Yes, this blurb is wordy. It's search-engine optimized.)

Chapter 2

The Core Assumption

In reality, artificial intelligence, as a technology, is making huge progress. I tell folks all the time that if they’re in a job where they’re not learning, they’re in a job that can and possibly should be automated. If an employee in such a situation plays their cards right, they can become the subject matter expert that helps develop the automation.

Artificial general intelligence is a rising technology as well. Right now, AI models tend to be good at specific limited-purpose things. In order to achieve a general intelligence, a huge number of AI models would need to be strung together and given a common context.

AGI technology research is already a ball in motion. It’s like cloning Dolly the sheep, designer DNA, or the invention of the atomic bomb. We could shy away from it, but less inhibited actors are already working on it. We (in whatever scope you want to consider the plural first-person pronoun) might as well be the ones to do it first/best and hope to have a measured handle on the outcome.

I’ve heard some estimates say we’re a couple decades away from it. By applying AI to improve itself (deep learning—it’s already happening) to develop an AGIS, I suspect we’ll land much closer to sometime before 2030. But again, this is all speculation.

Speaking of AI, in my real job, I work with artificial intelligence cognitive models often.

Let’s talk a moment about how artificial intelligence works by looking at how teaching people works. Classically, teaching people involves feeding examples to students.

AI is a little like that too. Since computers are all about data, examples for machines typically look like data. Often, it’s the kind of data that statistics can be drawn from. A volume of example data is called a training set.

In order to “teach” a computer, you have to feed it lots of example measurements or metrics—temperatures, durations, distances, speeds, locations, orientations, status changes, sequences, results, images, sound patterns. You get the picture. The computer then often uses tricks of statistics to interpolate and extrapolate “predictions” based on those measurements. It appears to learn to “read between the lines” in a way that we call artificial intelligence.

A statistic that data scientists love to add to their training models is an outcome value. With each example in the training set, did an example produce a good outcome or a bad outcome? Positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement?

It’s pretty well documented that people learned to build machines that simulate reason based on the way we do this ourselves. We don’t understand all the inner workings of our brains, but we do understand that we try actions and naturally reinforce those action examples with our own biochemical rewards and punishments. This is a digital shadow of that.

All of that starts with a core assumption though. What do the positive biases and negative biases mean? Positive and negative, relative to what? A baseline? A goal?

It’s a guiding principle.

Training sets need an understanding of good and not good.

A knowledge of good and evil.

Okay, back to the faith part of this hack.

Scripture is inspired and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction, that a person seeking wisdom may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16–17)

Y NOTE

Consider all the way back in earliest chapters of the first book of the Bible. Genesis often described the object at the center of the first human contention as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That, known as the fall is part of another narrative we’ll dig in on later.

Here are the core assumptions of the Bible according to one of the (like it or not) most influential persons in human existence, Jesus:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the foremost commandment.

The second is like it, Love your neighbor as yourself.

Upon these hang the whole Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 22:37–40, emphasis mine.)

The first (“Love the Lord your God”) is the abstract, divine mission. It’s the thing the tome of texts known as “the Law and Prophets” (the “Old Testament” of the Bible) wants us to work on. It’s the Creator in the narrative, ultimately inviting us to participate in this thing called love.

Let’s focus on the practical part of this:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

It seems so simple. But wow, that is a loaded statement.

Love is so important—a concept that the author of the following passage, Paul of Tarsus, tries to separate the divine out also, to some extent, in a letter that comes later in Scripture. Consider the following scripture from 1 Corinthians 13:1–3 (paraphrases mine):

“It doesn’t matter if I use secular or divine terms; if I don’t have love, I’ve become as useless as an incorrectly set clock alarm. If I can hear the universe’s thoughts and know all creations’ plans, and if I had nature’s power that I could move mountains but don’t have love, I am null. And if I give all I’ve got to charity, and if I waste away in fasting but still do not have love, it’s all a humorless joke.”

Where Descartes offers “I think, therefore I am,” Jesus and Paul might suggest, “I love others, therefore I am.”

The entire remainder of the Bible lists examples of “love your neighbors as yourselves.” It’s intended to be a means of living the way we are made to according to Scripture. Scripture provides lots of specific basic examples in the form of verses, historical accounts, stories, Psalms (songs), Proverbs (poems), parables (fictions) written in the context of its time.

These are all recorded examples, a training set, from which we can interpolate and extrapolate when we encounter something that doesn’t quite fit strict examples. (Please note, word definitions and historical context have changed over time, so it’s important to always go back to the greatest commandment when trying to understand them. If they still don’t fit, there’s probably a measure of context that’s missing. It’s usually in the form of a bit of common knowledge that has since been forgotten.)

Scripturally, the greatest commandment is the definition of the “learning model” Jesus commissioned us to improve ourselves upon.

Good

“Love your neighbor as yourself” says so many amazing things, starting with Captain Obvious stuff.

• “Love your neighbor”.
• Neighbors are a gift. Some assembly required.
• It also says “as you love yourself.”
  i IMPORTANT
  The clear implication in “love your neighbor as yourself” is that one must love oneself.
• It does not say “love yourself less.”
• It does not even say “love your neighbor more.”
• It also uses the word “neighbor.”
• It doesn’t say “fr...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1