AGI Maps Weirdly Well to Christianity's Book of Revelation

While written with a light heart and touch, this is a serious post. I went through a bunch of permutations of the title and there's just no way that it doesn't come off as click-bait, but that's honestly not deliberate; it's just part of the nature of the topic and why I decided to research and write about it.

Very to-the-point-ly: AGI has the same pattern matrix as the Book of Revelation: A prophecy, an event, a lot of discussion and arguments around if the event happened, is still happening, has already happened, or is yet to come, and an nearly-identical pattern of social distortion surrounding it.

What's also noteworthy is its meaning to people, which can be extremely visceral, even juxtaposed with their spiritual identity. I'm not going to really comment on that other than to point out that it's happening, which makes the time that we live in really significant in a historical sense.

What you believe in, if anything, isn't questioned in this piece. My goal is only to point out the multitude of similarities between now and then in an objective and (hopefully) somewhat entertaining way, with a data-over-dogma approach to both Revelations and the fury surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI).

I'd also like to point out that the two (AGI & Revelation) map conceptually extremely well, but are incapable of mapping physically because LLMs are real and not metaphysical beings.

What's Revelation?

First, lets try to picture ourselves as a first-century educated and informed person, trying their best to navigate Roman occupation; apocalyptic doom was the general vibe on the street, and lamenting indirectly through coded prose at Rome's meddling in the affairs of its many vassal states (like Judea) is the elixir of the oppressed.

We're not by any means part of the power structure in this perspective, but we're acutely aware of it. We can read Greek, Aramaic and Latin; most of what we've come to know as "philosophy" is coded ranting about "tyrants" echoed in street performances where nobody actually comes out and says how terrible things are, and the Romans refrain from torturing them.

Revelation was written around 90 - 95 CE (end of the first century) very likely during the reign Domitian. It was written to inspire a specific set of Christian communities facing imperial oppression at that time. Dan McClellan's data-over-dogma take on it is very compelling - it was written using symbolism to reinforce a divine belief that Rome was soon to crumble.

Not everyone believes that it was a political response, however; a not-insignificant group of people strongly believe that Revelation is still valid prophecy, and that the things described within will come to pass in a very literal sense, at some point in the near future.

It always seems as if it's set in the near future, even when people in the modern era first read it, because the patterns of political instability still track. And, well, lots of people are still waiting for their messiah's return. They don't believe it was imagery, or at least not all of it.

What's AGI?

Artificial General Intelligence

Let's fast-forward to the mid 20th century. The US worker hasn't yet faced a mechanized existential threat from robots or computers, in fact a "computer" is something that takes up an entire room, even if it's an advanced prototype. But, starting with the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, a scientist named John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence."

US workers in the middle class and upward were doing pretty well for themselves in a post-war economy, but the swiftness of industrialization, of skylines forever being changed in just mere seasons, of giant ships being unloaded in previously quiet harbors and a new cold war and arms race taking shape made people keep their optimism bright, but sensible.

We had also just imported a ton of foreign nuclear scientists after Germany collapsed, and academics started defecting from behind a new iron curtain. Curiosity was, just like caution, a major part of what crackled in the air. And after ending a war with just a few of the world's most powerful new bombs, we had a quiet arrogance building in us that made us feel like nothing was out of reach.

In AI, math tends to be understood well before our ability to use it the way we'd like. We didn't have NLP, linguists with an aptitude for trig and geometry knew that we would, because they already had a pretty good idea of how it would work once we achieved enough floating point operations in a second. Remember hearing about FLOPS?

So yes, a bunch of really smart people did concede a possibility that human kind could, one day, create machines that enslave and undo us, but the only frame of reference for it was sci-fi and vivid, fertile, naive imaginations. It wasn't a prophecy that people would be replaced with machines, it was math nerds being exhaustive in explanation of their visualization of what was possible.

Like Revelation, some people didn't really think it was a laughable bit of fiction, but the grounding in reality wasn't a growing fear of mechanization like we have today, it was just open speculation with just enough grounding in reality to be mistaken for something probable, and in most perspectives, deliberate.

By the 1980s researches had a full grasp on all of the math that's needed to construct embeddings from natural language, and this only fanned speculation as to possibilities, but nobody in any of the fields working with language models would have suggested deploying them the way they're trained and prompted today.

But, once something is known, there's this feeling of "no stopping it now" and that's what happened throughout the 80s and 90s. By the time the earliest conversational models were coming online, people did feel as though lots of jobs were being lost to mechanization, and people were terrified after just watching manufacturing go to robots.

So by the time AI as we know it now was generally available, it was as if the whole AGI suggestion had restarted completely new, but was now reinforced by folks not looped into the math thinking that everything had just suddenly come to pass.

And now some people feel there's divinity to it, some even see it as even more signal of messianic prophecy. I don't pretend to have any of the answers; I am just an observer.

So, what's my point?

My point is, if you look around you right now, you're watching a phenomenon a lot like one of the most controversial books in the Christian bible coming to pass; it's just a mini-version (no empires or nations hopefully crumbling this time), but the pattern is almost the same.

Arguably, if AGI was originally coined as the result of God-inspired realization, then we're right at the threshold of it as I write this, and many of us are seeing that these machines aren't as capable as marketing teams made them out to be, and realizing that they probably won't ever be.

But, because this is such a meta-moment in time, much like Revelation, it's likely always going to seem like we're right about to get in the thick of it, no matter when you jump on.

I'm not here to argue one way or another what to believe, dream about, fantasize or have faith in. I'm just pointing out that the moment you're in is a little more special than you might have realized, if you're keeping up with AGI.

And please, if you like scholarly discussion around religion, go check out Dan's YouTube channel.