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"If the intelligence difference is big enough, there is no fight but a massacre."

The physicist Max Tegmark in "Life 3.0 - Being a Human Being in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"

One thing must be left to Moses: he knew something about branding , as one would say today. Out of his Ten Commandments, the first three are aimed exclusively at preserving, delineating and maintaining the "God" brand:

  • "I am the Lord, your God, thou shalt have no other gods beside me."
  • "Thou shalt not abuse the name of the Lord your God."
  • "You shall sanctify the holiday."

Only after this little branding catechism - exclusion of competition, exclusiveness and value retention, ritual laid-down brand care - does it start with the actual rules of conduct for human coexistence. (Here, compare!).

The best brand promise of all time

Moses was so successful with his branding campaign that the core idea - monotheism - produced three world religions. The monotheistic religions are therefore among the most powerful memes, as Richard Dawkins calls it, of human history: ideas with built-in self-preservation and propagation instinct.

Christianity was a fresh, cheeky rebranding of Moses' old brand: instead of old men with beards and many rules young men with beards and lots of love and - bonuses! - Resurrection from the dead. That's as - unverifiable! - Brand promise hard to beat. Happy Easter.

That is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church is the most long-lived organization in human history.

Supernotes interested in our destiny

The monotheistic religions owe their longevity to another circumstance: We humans always feel a bit lonely. This feeling was already known to mammoth-hunting Stone Age people. Since then, human societies have been fleeing into the notion of supernatural beings interested in our destiny.

Two hundred billion galaxies

At least the Enlightenment brought this heretical analysis into the mainstream. Now, this creeping poison has been working in western societies for more than two hundred years. The old meme is remarkably tough and resilient, but has suffered measurably. In the mid-fifties, nearly 12 million people regularly attended Catholic services on Sundays, compared to just 2.3 million in 2017. Every year, hundreds of thousands more Germans leave the churches.

But the other factor that has made the monotheistic religions so strong is that nothing has changed: we are still afraid to be alone. Maybe even stronger than before?

Do you also believe in aliens?

In the meantime we know how enormous this world realm really is that we humans inhabit. The previously known universe consists of one hundred to two hundred billion galaxies, each containing billions of stars. We have not lived very long with this shattering knowledge.

Nearly half of humanity, according to a large-scale survey, believes in intelligent life somewhere out there.

The need for someone - or something - to be there, who finds us, or just wakes up, and finally sees us, appeals, perceives, protects and makes sense, seems to be unbroken. And be it someone we create ourselves.

The new Mem: We make the gods ourselves

This is the new meme that will replace the monotheistic religions.

In the science fiction of the past decades, it is a leitmotif: Machines develop an awareness. Often this ends up being unpleasant, like in "2001", "Terminator" or "Transendence". But sometimes the awakened gods in the machines are benevolent, friendly beings who help humanity finally overcome its own inadequacy. To be read in the utopian "Culture" series of the late Scottish author Iain M. Banks. In this humanity lives in absolute freedom, protected and protected by powerful KIs. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are fans.

Meanwhile, there are other very serious people who consider such ideas not only as entertainment, but as a plausible future scenario. These include some of the richest people in the world: Google founders Larry Page and Bill Gates. Not only in Silicon Valley is the idea that, thanks to the rapid development of machine learning, we could build gods sometime in the next few decades, has become a new, powerful meme.

What if there is only one way to stop climate change?

There is even a new religion whose founder, a Silicon Valley developer, wants a "smooth transition" to a world of artificial gods.

The beginning of this new debate was marked by the book "Superintelligence" by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. The MIT physicist Max Tegmark spells out the possible scenarios and risks in detail in his book, which is highly recommended. Tegmark has founded an organization dedicated exclusively to AI security research. Because he fears that we might accidentally create a god who will abolish us afterwards.

One of the promise of artificial intelligence is that it could help us avert or limit climate change. But what if the machine, as in Tom Hillenbrand's science-fiction novel "Hologramatica", decides that the only way to save the earth is to eradicate humanity?

Promise and seduction

Such risks may seem exaggerated, irrelevant, even ridiculous at the moment. In fact, given the continued exponential evolution of technology, it would be negligent to simply explore it and perhaps seek out artificial consciousness. What if the god then suffers and wants to defend himself? You may find this silly, but there are already several international research groups working on exactly such issues.

Machine learning can help humanity with many pressing problems. It will enable new materials and medicines, optimize agricultural processes and energy networks, bring about biotechnological sensations and probably help answer long unexplained research questions.

What we should refrain, however, is the attempt to give these machines consciousness and their own intentions.

As lonely as we may feel, humanity should not build gods.