Club for the Destruction of Humanity
By Tom Gilbreath
In the December 27th addition of The Telegraph, a headline read, “‘Godfather of AI’ says it could drive humans extinct in 10 years.” These are not the words of some nut walking around Times Square with a sandwich sign hung over his body warning, “The End is Near.” This alarm comes from Geoffrey Hinton, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
And yet, we are not shocked. We’ve heard these kinds of warnings about Artificial Intelligence for years — though perhaps not from so respected a source, nor one giving such a brief time frame for our demise. Still, it’s just one more voice shouting, “The End is Near.” When a Nobel Prize winning computer scientist warns of possible human extinction in 10 years, we shrug our shoulders and go on. An extinction level event? What’s one more?
The sub headline read, “Prof Geoffrey Hinton says the technology is developing faster than he expected and needs government regulation.” And there it is — the universal panacea — government regulation. But can government really regulate something it cannot define? Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are vague terms that apply, to a greater or lesser degree, to millions of projects going on around the world. If a government tries to define and regulate AI, its makers will simply re-label their products, or will take their development to other jurisdictions where regulations are less severe.
AI is just one member of the club for the destruction of humanity. In 2024, the possibility of World War III seemed more real than it had in decades. Threats came from the war in Europe and the war in the Middle East.
The death drums of climate change continued their incessant rhythm in 2024. In a world where extreme weather events take place every year and always have, each such event now carries with it the warning of impending doom. According to NPR, “Scientists say this year is almost certain to take over the top spot as the hottest year.” [“2023 was extremely hot. Then came 2024” by Lauren Sommer, NPR, December 24, 2024.] The article neglects to say that “hottest year” calculations contain so many guesses that, should they so choose, climate scientists can make any year the hottest ever by adjusting those guesses.
Other extinction level events threaten earth, things like coronal mass ejections from the sun, geomagnetic reversals, meteor or asteroid impacts, and volcanic eruptions. Many scientists believe there have been five mass extinction events in earth’s history. The Bible tells us about only one — a global flood, ending with God’s promise that no such flood will happen again.
Experts on almost all problems tell us that the answer is more government, bigger government, and global government. We are trained to think this way. If there is a problem, a faraway, centralized government can fix it. Activists focus their efforts on increasing government regulation and on acquiring more government subsidies. The utter failure of the most intrusive governments would seem to prove the premise wrong. But it is taught as a matter of course.
One day, leaders will turn to a government led by Antichrist as the ultimate panacea for all that ills humanity. The medicine will finally kill the patient. The answer is not government. The answer is God. We will not find an answer in greater restrictions on human enterprise and ingenuity, but in the freedom which springs from wide adherence to a biblical moral code.
