From the Vault: Transhumanist Rapture War, Part 2

a post Earth utopia. Now, I think the religious aspects of techno utopianism and techno dystopianism are are both actually fascinating and sort of uhh, endless the bottomless wells right that you can always come back to. I think we will revisit this topic again soon. Yeah, though though I don't know if we'll discuss my my concept of a rapture proof suit any further. This may be the only

place that idea I gets still. No, that is a whole thing that I was gonna say, would do a whole episode on that, But in fact, what you should just do is keep that idea to yourself and get some venture capital behind it. Well, uh yeah, maybe we can make that happen. But for now, let's suit up and head in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff

to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert and I. Last time, we're talking about the rapture about Christian eschatology, religious eschatology in general, and secular eschatology of a technological nature such as the singularity trans humanism. And our discussion went so long that we decided to divide it up into two parts. So here is the second part of our conversation on the

end times. Okay, well, I've got another uh futurist, sort of techno futurist mindset that I think we can ask. Is this a religion? Is it like a religion or does it just sort of like uh tickle some of the same weak spots. We've got as many religions too. So I want to talk about the singularity. Robert, do you feel good about the Singularity? You feel bad about it, you think it's a bunch of hooey? I feel good

about it. Uh, I mean part of that I think comes from just being I'm a fan of like the A and M. Banks culture series model of of a post singularity, post scarcity world in which the super intelligent computers have our best interests at heart. They kind of look after us as kind of benevolent, semi noble gods. Yeah, okay, okay, Well, so I think we need to explore this idea because this, to me is is the core of this kind of

topic we're talking about today, like technological eschatology. So you could say the singularity, I think has come to have almost as many interpretations as the Christian escoton right, Like, just like the Christian eschatologies, they're all sort of loosely related and grounded in similar beliefs, but they vary in the explicit details or in the way you'd explain them,

even if they're not necessarily contradictory. So, in the most basic sense, the singularity is a hypothesis that technological innovation, at some point in the future is going to reach a tipping point of unimaginable innovation that fundamentally changes the fate of humanity on a rapid time scale. Very often it involves artificial intelligence. So I'm gonna talk about three basic models just to give you an idea. One one is the super intelligence model, and this is the idea

that humans are going to create superhuman artificial intelligence. So when you think about it, intelligence, I would probably agree has been the most rapid driver of change in the universe up until this point in cosmological or geological history. What difference does ten thousand years usually make to anything, you know, not a lot, hardly any, But you think about how much Earth has changed in the past ten

thousand years due to intelligence. Once, once we reach the creation of machines with functional intelligence exceeding that of any human, assuming that actually does happen, proponents argue that this superhuman artificial intelligence is just going to rapidly transform our environment. The conditions of our lives, and the capabilities of human civilization will be fundamentally transformed on a very huge scale. And they say, so the age of super intelligence is dawning,

and this is the singularity. Another way of looking at it is also based on artificial intelligence, but it's known as the intelligence explosion, and this is based on the idea of self improving intelligence paradigms that surpass our ability to understand or control them. So let's say, Robert, you build a superhuman artificial intelligence. What's the first thing you have it? Do? UM? Co author my paper about the creation superhero human AI intelligence. Oh yeah, well that's that's

a smart move. But do some talk shows to promote it in my book about the creation? Yeah? I guess yeah. It's hard to think past that, right, come up with the tastiest breakfast cereal ever created? No? I mean what a lot of people say is, well, you know, the best bang for your buck as soon as you create a superhuman artificial intelligence is that it would be best put to use designing ways to rapidly make itself more intelligent,

which theoretically it should be able to do. So if it can do this, it will experience exponential self improvement. And not only will our technological intelligence grow, and not only will it accelerate, but it's acceleration will accelerate. I feel like the people saying that that's the best use of super intelligence UM have not seen any science fiction film, because it seems like the thing to do is all right.

It's it's reached the point to where it's smart enough that I can take it to Vegas and and just totally kill but it's not so smart that it will literally kill me, or or skying at the entire country. Well, I don't know. I mean I think the argument would go that, well, even if you don't do that, somebody's gonna somebody's gonna say, well, I want to have a smarter AI than your AI, so I'm gonna have my

AI improve itself that I don't know. You take your AI to a poker game and somebody else has been having their AI self improve its own intelligence, and it's telling that person out this metaphors out of hand. But but you want to be the person with the smartest day.

I right, Well, but it's kind of like you're you're reaching a point where you can create your own demons, create your own deities, and in doing so, it seems like you you need to know where to stop, like like maybe not make a full blown god, that make a demi god. Let me make an artificial demi god, because then it literally it has limits. Right, Yeah, you

want a Hercules not a Zeus. Yeah, I'd far rather deal with a renegade or Hercules this in a situation as opposed to renegades, which of course is I mean, it's pretty much how both of those guys rolled what they wanted. Okay, one more idea of the singularity, and this is a I think a simpler version, but it just says that at some point technological process again, usually the emphasis is on artificial intelligence, but you could put

the emphasis elsewhere. At some point it begins to accelerate so quickly that our power to predict the outcome becomes basically zero. Events will become so strange and unpredictable that we we just can't even imagine them from our present vantage point. So an outside context dident. Yeah, actually, sure,

outside context problem caused by technological innovation. Yeah. So a lot of modern singularity thinking can be traced, and there are plenty people who have written about this over the years, but I'd say the biggest figure in the singularity today is Ray Kerswile. He's the technologist and author. Ray Kers, while very smart guy, worked on technology for years. He's made a lot of very accurate and interesting predictions that

have that have proved correct over the years. But he's also made a lot of predictions about the future that a lot of people now think are I don't know, maybe he's being overly optimistic, but anyway, curse Will has argued in several books that the Singularity, this artificial intelligence revolution that's going to fundamentally change humanity, is coming, and it's coming soon. In his two thousand five book The Singularity Is Near, curse Will predicted it would happen in so, Robert,

you've got any plans for um? I think my son will be out of high school at that point. I think he's he's uh graduating high school theoretically in so Okay, So I guess. So, I don't know, Well, he have a job by the time the Singularity happened. I don't know. Yeah, It's it's crazy to think about that, Like what do you what do you? What do you do post high school? If the Singularity is coming in just a few years, Like do you go to college? Hey? With with the

singularity in mind? Bingo, That is a very good question. So so let's back up. Let's just assume for a moment a singularity type scaton is coming. That might be a big assumption, but let's assume something like that will happen. Is it good or bad? Will we get the AI my Trea or the AI ragnarokh Well, obviously I want my Traya as opposed to Ragnarock. Yeah, I mean, so the my Trea version, what would it be? You know, war cease, all diseases, including aging itself or eradicated. There's

general abundance of resources and wealth. Everybody gets what they want. Humans live indefinitely in a state of harmony, exploration, and bliss. If I feel like the model we get in most sci fi scenarios is that you think you're gonna get my Treia, but then you're actually on the road to Ragnarok, and then you end up just kind of burning everything down and going back to whatever the nest up system you had before. Right, So why do people think that

we're on the road to Ragnarok? Well, you mentioned earlier, you know, the machine, a machine smart enough to to do all this great stuff for you, is also smart enough to figure out how to kill you if it wants to. So why might it want to? Well, super intelligent machines, people say, well, either intentionally choose to eliminate humanity for some reason, though I admit I've never heard this explain in a way that made a lot of sense to me, Like why they would intentionally choose to

hunt us down and eradicate us. So maybe somebody could explain that to me, Um, but the judge of the living and the dead, it could be. But but the other version is that perhaps merely by a flow of design, they tend to damage or destroy humanity as a byproduct of executing their primary function, and that that vision seems more plausible to me. But so, here's one common example of how something like this would. Oh, you've got a

super intelligent computer program that's smarter than any human. It can improve its own intelligence, is just crazy smart, and it's designed to maximize efficiency along the production line of a factory that makes toilet paper. So somebody forgets to add some conditionals and the computer program ends up turning all the atoms on the surface of the earth, including the ones in your body, into toilet paper. It has

done its job. Well, that sounds kind of crazy, But some tam or version of that nightmare seems more plausible to me than the intentional terminator style eradication of humans. I don't know what do you think about that, Robert Um? Yeah, I I I think I tend to interpret the sort of sky net models the sort of like all humans are flawed. That's thus all humans must be eradicated thing

to be more of a uh more rejecting insecurities. Well for that and also just a bedtime story to say, like make sure you program in that fail safe, right, you know, be And I feel like obviously we would have that fail safe, and that if it were a super intelligent machine, it would have Yeah. I just have a hard time buying into that model of a super advanced system that it would be so catastrophically myopic. Yeah, yeah, I mean, both visions have their advocates right there. There

are smart people on both sides. But the funny thing is all this is assuming that something like the singularity will actually happen one way or another, and not everyone agrees that it will. But there are also people who have been critical of the idea of the singularity, and some people who have characterized it as a religious idea inherently. One of them is the technologist and virtual reality pioneer Jerone Landier, and he's got a lot of opinions about

the Singularity. He's made this case in in books, said that it's not only religious in nature, but potentially a dangerous or harmful religion. So I read an article that he wrote and published in The New York Times in two thousand ten called the First Church of Robotics, and I thought this was interesting. So Lanier points out that every news report of an advance in artificial intelligence gives us the impression that the field is making steady progress

to overtake human intelligence and capabilities. And I sort of agree with him. I get that feeling when you see these little news stories like there's there's a new artificial intelligence program that can smell flatulence. There's a new artificial intelligence program that can tell a joke. You know, all these like weird little quirks of humanity, and they seem to add up to something over time. Okay, so it can smell farts, that can make jokes about farts because

it's it's about the corner, like the stand up. It has become Adam Sandler. Yeah, it has surpassed its humanity. But yeah, so there's nothing wrong with individual AI projects, Lannier says, In fact, he has worked on them himself. But he makes a couple of point points. He says, individual advances in artificial intelligence research can be interpreted more usefully without the overall framework of AI meaning without the idea that computers are becoming synthetic versions of human intelligence.

And the example he gives is, you know, the IBM computer winning on Jeopardy, Watson going on, they're beating people on Jeopardy. So he he says, that's a theatrical stunt that over sells a fake aspect of what this computer program can do, you know, conversational human knowledge, which it doesn't really have, and under sells a real aspect of its capabilities that it's a very powerful phrase based search engine.

And then he also says that AI, uh, that the AI that in some way passes for human requires humans to do all the work, Like when you've got a social robot, you know, going around saying like Hi, I'm your friendly social robot. Look at how advanced my artificial intelligence is. His point is that humans be being social,

will work with what they get. And if you're having a transaction with a robot that you are told is social in nature, you can very easily adapt your social behaviors to the extreme limitations of this machine, and they do tend to be pretty extreme. You're not going to mistake at a machine for a human. Yeah, I mean, as we've discussed on the show before. I mean humans can have we can have conversations with with a with a doll, with a with a smiley face. It's scrawled

on the wall and in putting. So, uh, it's not that much of a step to say that, yes, we can have a conversation with a chat bot. We can, we can have a conversation with a search engine, and of course we can certainly have a conversation with an echo borg. How often, though, do you meet a person who really loves fruit trees? That's true, I love fruit trees. I hate fruit trees. But how can you hate fruit trees because I'm not a robot? What would you do if you found a turtle the turtles on its back?

Why aren't you turning him over? Joe? But what what? What I'll tell you about my mother? Okay? Sorry? So but anyway, A lawyer goes on to say, quote, what bothers me about this trend? And he's talking about this AI media trend. However, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we're leaving ourselves opened

to the flip side. We think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people, and I think there might be something to that, actually, that the idea of AI not only sort of lifts computers up, but in a certain way, at least emotionally,

kind of lowers humans down. Yeah. And we we've discussed this, I feel recently on the show too, about how just even though we we have this increasingly pervasive model of our own cognitive performance as being essentially a program, we think about processing things, we think about visual input of data, we think about crunching the numbers. Uh, and in various other models we use technology g to inform our understanding

of how our brains are working. And those are just those are just metaphors really, and but the underlying processes are not really comparable to the computers that we have today. It would be we could maybe compare them to an advanced computer will haveing in the future, some sort of maybe um you know, um advanced machine maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. Uh, They're they're very much metaphors.

And I'm not saying that they're not useful metaphors. But I do think I want to take what Landing are saying seriously here, because I think he has a point Anyway, he goes on when he's going to get to the singularity, so he says, you know, engineers are humans with human desires, even though they may be advocating this sort of like dehumanized technological ideology or view of intelligence in personhood in the world, and they've got the same desires that lead

us to create and follow religions. So this sort of leads them to wrap their technological ideologies up into parallels of religious thinking. And he and according to Lannier, he thinks the concept of the singularity is a religion expressed

through engineering culture. And he points out if this religion entails, you know, essentially scatological beliefs that imply that most people, basically, I would say, anybody not working in information theory, artificial intelligence, or robotics, if pretty much anybody outside those fields can basically just sit and wait for imminent salvation or destruction

via the machines. And if inadvertent devaluation of persons by overstating analogies between persons and computers takes place, it can certainly exacerbate tensions between traditional religions and modernity, and it can be a destructive and demoralizing force in itself. So anyway, he ends by saying technology best serves humanity when we

resist the urge to turn it into a religious ideology. Yeah, because otherwise you ended up in a situation where you're like, I could, I could exercise and eat right, But singularities come in. Singularities gonna work that out, or you might think, I'm not even gonna bother to write the Great American novel, because Great American Novel bought thirty seven oh five. It's gonna write the Great American novel. It's gonna write one

a day, one every hour. Yeah. I I could work hard to achieve peace in world civilization, but maybe the Ai'll sort it all out for this or just kill us all. I mean, either one. It's sort of a demoralizing, de motivating belief, which of course has obvious parallels with you know, more apocalyptic near future um religious movements that said the end time is coming. So what does it

matter giving your money now? Certainly? Yeah, what whether it's a secular or you know, supernatural or not supernatural in nature? If you've got beliefs about a powerful force that comes in and intervenes and makes all of our actions obsolete either either way it comes from. Uh that seems like it can have a de motivating force on the way you live your life. But I want to say one more thing Linear says about the Singularity that I think

is interesting. Uh So, I listened to a podcast that was an interview with Linear and and he says, quote, the difference between a religious fanatic and a religious non fanatic is in the certainty of the imminent timing of whatever their scatan is, you know, whatever their end of days is. It's when you believe that you know when it's happening and it's soon that you really turn into a nutcase and you do harm to yourself and others. In my mind, the Singularity movement is sort of doing that.

And I think I see what he's saying there, because he sort of qualifies saying that if you mean, in the very long term view, humanity will make some phase transition and it has something to do with information technology that's not necessarily crazy or harmful. You know, you might say, who knows, over the next few thousands of years, some somehow humanity might change itself due to computers and the

Internet and stuff like that. But the notion that it's going to happen in twenty years or something is destructive and a sign of fanaticism, according to him, And I

think that that idea makes sense to me too. Well, in large part, you could say, you're you're setting yourself up for disappointment, You're setting yourself up to fail right, that you're going to reach that point when the second Coming is going to happen, when the Singularity is going to happen, and it doesn't happen, and then how do you feel about the world. Then how do you approach the near and long term future? Well, I think that is definitely something we should talk about in just a moment.

But I want to finish up on the Singularity with one or two more things. First of all, I want to go back and defend against that by saying, there are also people who say, you know, look, if we're worried about the Ai Ragnarok uh saying that AI is going to come in and destroy us, all we do need to be thinking about it now. Even if it's not going to happen soon. Just the possibility that it might happen soon means that we need to be preparing immediately. I can see the wisdom in that too. I mean,

I don't know. It's Uh. At the risk of sounding fascil I, I see both sides. Yeah, well, I mean, certainly, uh, if the iceberg is out there, we want to know how not to run the ship into it. But then again, but what if the iceberg is a superhuman robot that you don't even know whether it could possibly exist or not. Well, that's the kind of thinking that it enables humanity time and time again to not actually, you know, deal with the problems that are facing them, to just say, ah,

it might not even be real. So I don't know. The jury is still out on the science there. So I want to offer one more thing, the impossible defense of singularity thinking. I found a short video on YouTube where somebody in a crowd asks Ray Kurzweil himself, the guy who said it's going to happen if the Singularity is a religion, and Kerswill responds that. He says, essentially, it does provide some of the same things that religion

traditionally provided, like a means to forestall death. That's worth pointing out. But it's also not a religion inherently because it's based on scientific and technological prediction, and he said, quote, it doesn't start from rapture. He also says, quote, religion emerged in pre scientific times. To call it a religion

is to say that it's pre scientific or unscientific. And I think, you know, maybe you're maybe not Like I definitely do sense that some people who call the Singularity a religion, because Landing is not the only one who said this, this is a thing people say in criticism of it. I think some people are merely being pejorative. You've noticed that if you ever heard anybody call something that's not a religion a religion, it's an insult. And that interesting, like, uh that political? Can it that you

agree with Greg Stillson Man? You all you Greg Stilson

supporters are like a religion that's never a positive thing? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I find myself doing that less and less because I feel like I can have It's just me personally, But I think there are plenty of things that I can say, Oh, I have kind of a religious interest in this, not to say that I am you know that it's some sort of like fanatical, like unrealistic level of enthusiasm for it, but like I I kind of measure it's like to the amount of my person, the

amount of my identity, uh, that I pour into the topics. So I would say that I have religious or semi religious enthusiasm for things like science, for certain uh, for certain fictional worlds and ideas. Um. Well, Robert, if I may compliment you, I think that's a sign of broad minded thinking. I mean, no, I think both religious and non religious people. I don't think this is really limited to people who think religion is in some way a

bad thing. But I think generally both religious and non religious people insult a thing that's not explicitly a religion by calling it a religion. Yeah, I would agree with that, yes, but yeah, in your sense, it doesn't have to be. I mean, in some ways we could just observe, like, okay, not assuming that calling something a religion is a bad thing. Uh. In what ways is the Singularity like a religion? Well, I think it does have a lot of similarities. It

does seem to offer a means to forestall death. It does seem to offer uh, potentially both apocalyptic and utopian eschatological visions. It does seem to rely I don't know if I would say it relies on faith in the same way that many supernatural beliefs do. But it does seem to sort of ask you to to imagine the possibility that things that we've never seen before are going to happen. You know, we've never seen superhuman artificial intelligence before.

There's no evidence that that can in principle exist. We but we also just don't know that it couldn't. So it's just like maybe maybe not all right, So this seems like a good place to bring it back around to trans humanism and rapture the the idea that there are all these similarities between the two things, there are certain conflicts between these two ideas, and then at the very end here we may have just a little fun

thinking about how the two crash into each other. Okay, tell me, because here's one thing I've noticed, I think, and I haven't seen any data to back this episode. This is just purely anecdotal experience. In my experience, people who identify with trans humanism or belief in the singularity are overwhelmingly atheist or agnostic, non traditionally religious people. Yes, you do see a great deal of that. However, it is worth pointing out that again they have at least

two organizations. You have the Mormon Transhumanist Association, that's the world's largest advocacy network work really yeah, for the ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities. That's they're they're from their their talking points. Then you also have the Christian trans Humanist Association, and um, you know, each one has their own sort of set of guidelines

and all. Um. Uh, and I could, I could certainly roll through a lot of this, but for instance, um, that the Mormon trans Humanist Association has this idea that they push of a transfigurism. They said transfigure they say, transfigurism is religious trans humanism exemplified by syncretization of Mormonism

and trans humanism. Yeah. Um. And then meanwhile, the Christian trans Humanist Association, one of their tenants is that God's mission involves the transformation and renewal of creation, including humanity, and that we are called by Christ to participate in that mission working against illness, hunger, oppression, in justice, and death. Uh. Well, yeah,

I mean you could look at it that way. For some reason, the idea of transforming the human animal, it's one of those things that I I don't see in any way that it violates any tenants I recognize of Christianity, but it seems just sort of like, esthetically in affront to traditional religious thinking. It's a lot of what we've talked about in our you know, UH Techno Religion episodes that we did earlier, and you could say that this episode is in many ways a sequel to those, or

it's in that spirit. But in the Techno Religion episodes, we talked about how religious thinking seems most encouraged by a traditional technological atmosphere, and when you bring computers and iPhones and stuff, it just does seem profane in some way. And there's nothing in the Bible or in any religious text I know of that says thou shalt not bring a computer into a worship service. But you know, it just doesn't feel very sacred. It doesn't feel right. Now.

Going back to the the idea of sort of Christian transhumanist ideas that James J. Hughes paper that I'm antioned earlier, Um he calls uh up a quote from a fourteen eighties six UH work by Pico Della Mirandola, who was a Christian humanist and in his orritation on the dignity of Man wrote quote, to you has granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, or to you as granted the power contained in your intellect and judgment to be reborn into the higher forms

the divine um. And and and he wrote other other statements as well that kind of backed up this kind of, you know, way pre humanist notion of how one might improve the expression of human life. Well. Yeah, I mean, if, for example, Jesus said take all you have and give to the poor, then wouldn't the Christian who thinks that we can achieve abundance through technology be best served by working on technology that will eliminate all scarcity and bring

great resources to everyone. Yeah, it seems like you would be in favor of any trans humanist idea that does not attempt to interfere with God's plan for humanity. Um, so, I guess it depends on what you think that plan is. Right now, this is where we get into an interesting idea, and this is kind of where uh okay, So, first of all, you see a lot of especially the conspiracy theorist of the the Christian conspiracy theorist area of the Internet.

You see a lot of mashing up of trans humanist ideas with with the bad guys in in a book

of Revelations. Yeah, remember how I mentioned the ones who get to rule with Christ and the millennium are those who have not taken the mark of the beast and many and what is the mark of the beast that I've seen various interpretations where they say, oh, the mark of the beast is trans humanism, Like to become trans human is to take the mark of the beast, and therefore only sort of uh, you know, non augmented humans

are going to be part of this model. There have been many visions of the mark of the Beast in Christian literature that thought that it was going to be some sort of biometric verification. So imagine that you replace your credit card with a barcode or a chip in your arm or your head or your hand or something like that that you can use to pay for groceries or something like that, just by scanning your body. A lot of people have said, well, something like this is

coming and that's got to be it. That's the mark of the beast. And then the Antichrist is perhaps the AI write this post singularity artificial intelligence that that we're investing all of our our faith and energy into. And

I put it, this is an interesting idea too. I have seen arguments to say that the Illuminati or the Anti Christ or the Illuminati and the inn of Christ, however you want to factor those two bad guy factions together, they are going to create a fake rapture in order to trick the faithful into thinking that the rapture has already occurred and they were left out, thus like dismantling their faith a bit. That is an awesome conspiracy theory. It is um and that's like the mother of them all. Yeah.

I found some some stuff online about it, dating back from around two thousand UM and they were weirdly propping up some of this by pointing to a Technology Review article about the about editing live video, editing people out

of live video. Uh. The idea being here that through mass media consumption, you could fake the rapture of individuals and and if I may, I'm thinking if the Illuminatis involved in this, you could then disappear like famous a moral individuals and say, hey check out this, this particular awful celebrity just got raptured. You didn't clearly you should abandon all of your faith. That is that, as mighty

sinister Robert, Or is it though? Because Okay, so if and I'm playing with the ideas here and having some fun with the ideas. But if the Antichrist is an artificial intelligence, could it be a benevolent artificial intelligence that has realized, Hey, if the right off, if the end times come, that's bad for all these humans that I'm protecting. What can I, as an all powerful AI do in human society to prevent the end times from coming? Does

that mean faking the rapture and perhaps forestalling the rapture? Well, I know many Christians believe that the Antichrist will come in the name of peace, and that is weird. You would end up in a scenario where you would say, no, peace is bad because we actually need all that tribulation to come so that the good guys can ultimately win, even though it's going to mean a lot of a lot of suffering. Okay, we've gotten very, very deep into the both secular and religious theology of the end here,

so maybe we should pull back. Are you ready to pull back? Full back? Let's pull back to the real world and and look at a few examples of what happens when our our scatons, when our spiritual in times, utopias or apocalypse is don't come about as predicted. So there have been so many religious predictions of the end times that have failed. There is no way we can even begin to list them. I would recommend you go to Wikipedia. Here's a great Wikipedia page, uh called list

of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. There are just hundreds, uh and it's it's really interesting. One of my favorites is the leader of the or one of the leaders of the monster rebellion, the Anabaptist rebellion in Prussia, Jan Matthias. He had a good end times prediction that didn't turn out good for him, and I think he ended up mutilated. And yeah, anyway, things things don't tend to well, actually

not tend to Why am I hedging? No one who has ever predicted the end of the world has turned out to be correct that that is a true statement.

Inevitably these predictions fail. And then what happens when they fail, Because if you're the kind of individual who's thrown out these these predictions, you tend to have there tend to be people listening to you reading your word, gathering around you, maybe giving you all of their money and living in a barn with you, or in a bunker, or planning for spaceships to come and steal you away so you

can avoid massive floods. Um. And then how do you readjust well, there's a There was a famous book came out from psychologist Leon Festinger titled Win Prophecy Fails. And this is this was an important work. He and his colleagues studied the Seekers, a religious group that believed a massive flood would wipe out the West coast uh and and the founders said that beings from the planet Clarion

were communicating to her through automatic writing. Uh. And then the followers were banning their jobs or possessions, their spouses to wait on the flying saucers that would rescue them. Wow. And then nothing happened. So so they all they all figured they were wrong and went home right. No, no, no, And and this is something we can sort of see. I guess we can look for models of this in our own lives on lesser with with lesser um lesser steaks.

One example that instantly comes to mind, and we see a lot of this in sort of geek culture, and that is what happens from that movie that you're super excited about it doesn't get that great of reviews. How do you respond. Do you say, uh, well maybe it's not going to be that good, or you see it and you think, okay, well I agree with the critics and it wasn't that good. Or do you do do

you double down? Oh? Many will double down, yes, depending on I think a lot of times it's based on how much you've invested in the movie going into it. So if there's a movie you hoped would be good, but you thought about it a couple of times before it came out, and then you see the reviews aren't good, Oh that's disappointing. If it's a movie you've been talking about with your friends every single day up until it comes out, and then the reviews aren't good, you're like,

well they gotta be wrong. Now it's sunk cost. Now, obviously, with films, you can simply argue, well, hey, I enjoyed it, so I don't care. Uh, certainly, I'm I'm the type of person who enjoys many bad movies, and I you know, I'm not gonna apologize about, say, liking Chronicles a riddic. It's a it's a bad movie. I'm not gonna argue it's good, but but it certainly was enjoyable. Robert, I have a question for you. You seem like maybe the right guy for this. Were you one of the few

people who liked on Lee's Hulk. Yeah, well, I enjoyed it at the time. I didn't like love it, but I was like, that's the Hulk. He's holking it up there. Yeah. I like the follow up more, but I don't think. I don't think people were in love with that one. Like that one, even though it was an early Marvel Cinematic Universe movement, the one with Edward Norton. Yeah, yeah,

I feel like I enjoyed that seemed kind of forgettable. Yeah, that one the the the those who are a member of the religion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they do not bring that particular book of the Marvel Cinematic Bible up that much. It is the it is the problematic chapter in the scripture. It's like Second Chronicles. People just don't quote from it a whole lot. Yeah, but anyway,

I'm getting a little off off subject here. Essentially, Festing festing or entered into this with the mindset that people would need to resolve cognitive dissonance. They can't just argue, hey, I know that this, I know that my beliefs are crappy, but I enjoy them. No, your beliefs were based along the lines that a flood would come and you'd be on a UFO right now, and you are not. So

how do you deal with that? He said that they doubled down on their beliefs and recruitment efforts, but in reality some leave, but the vast majority um experience little cognitive dissidents, and so they make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. So it ends up having like really, it doesn't have that great an effect. Like the failures come and you can always this is the key part. You

can always attribute that failed prophecy to human slip ups. Right. Well, I mean, so let's say you predict that the Singularity is going to come in a certain year and you get there and nothing happens. Well, I mean you could always say, well, hold on, now, this doesn't challenge in any way the principle that the Singularity is coming and

it's coming soon. It's just I can explain this. We had a we had a big recession in the economy several years back, and that cut way down on funding for universities and corporations that are studying machine learning and artificial intelligence, and so progress just got slowed by some external events that aren't, you know, my predictions basically sound. We just had a few slip ups that happened. We didn't realize Pokemon Go would be such as success and

distract everybody and and decrease productivity. Right, so, and yeah, you can. You can make those arguments about about singularity. You can make those those arguments about any kind of

social utopian idea. You can make excuses for anything. Yeah, I mean, the the typical problem with utopian cults is it's almost always the same the the utopian leader says this is the way we're gonna make life better for for you and all the followers, and then there's some sort of sex scandal, there's some sort of power disruption, something goes wrong, and you can always say, well, no, they just were the wrong vessel for the message. Well,

this also works for non technological but secular utopias. Imagine the way people think about the implementation of communist utopia. Yeah, you know, so you create a Marxist government. Uh. And I'm not talking about you know, socialist democracy or whatever.

But it's so, you know, the real utopian vision, like we're gonna create a perfect workers paradise um and and it kind of fails or I mean, I guess it's always arguable, but I think it's pretty hard to say, look at the Soviet Union or something and say that worked great. But you can always argue, well, they did, they just didn't do it right. It's not it's not a problem with the principle. They're just they weren't real communists or something. Yeah, they were the they were the

the fake Christ as opposed to the actual cast. They were antichristis Yeah, there's nothing wrong with my the principle behind my my end times prediction. I just I made I made errors. The math is wrong, I I translated the Golden Tablets incorrectly, etcetera. So that seems to be the basic time timeline, the basic outcome for any kind of failed prophecy, be it you know, the value of a particular superhero movie or the outcome of a of an apocalyptic prophecy. Robert I want to ask you about

one weird specific example. So we've mentioned the idea of singularity that of course hasn't been disproven yet, but you know, we we can imagine and how it could be adjusted

if it were disproven. We've talked about Marxist supposed to utopias, but I wonder if you could look at the Internet as a failed secular utopia, because if you go back to the early day, you know, dot com bubble type days where people are talking about what's possible with the Internet, there is a lot of hyperbolic positive language where people are talking in incredibly grandiose terms about the Internet almost as a type of Utopia's going to open all these

doors and connect people all over the world for limitless sharing of ideas and potential, the information super highway. We're you know, we're all going to be talking and sharing ideas and it's it's just gonna be great. And I don't know, look at the your Facebook feed today. Could you argue that the Internet is a failed secular utopia if you if you look at its goals as purely utopian, I think I think very much, though, like I don't think the Inner Net. Certainly, the Internet has has connected

us more. It's allowed for a great deal of sharing and UH and informational availability. But on the other hand, it also allows you to simply, you know, flock to people who share your own set of beliefs, making it easier to find UH like minded individuals. Both for both in the positive and in the negative sense, You've been able allows us to UH to put on a mask UH and lose their identity and and lash out with the most horrible you know, UH in the most horrible

ways and complete strangers. I mean, I don't have to tell anybody this. You're all on the internet. You know that. You know how it all plays out. It's more of just an expression and in various ways apple amplification of who we are as opposed to a refinement of who we are. And that always the way you can look at that as all utopias. Somehow, all utopias end up

being very human. Yeah, Like, we're still going to express as human no matter what sort of social structure you try and strain us through, no matter what kind of technological change you strain us through, We're going to come

out as the same animal. And I think that's inherently why there is the appeal of these superhuman forces, like either a supernatural religious force God or or you know, the gods of any religion coming into set things right via some kind of power that transcends what we're capable of naturally, or a superhuman artificial intelligence, powerful machines that are smarter than we are and no better than us and can improve us in ways that we don't seem

to be capable of via our natural experimentation with social behavior. Yeah, so enter the AI, inter Christ, enter the Bodhisatva of the future. Yeah, whatever it takes for something from the outside to step in and shake us into the right form. All right. So there you have it, the rapture, the singularity, uh, trans humanism. We threw out a lot of ideas year and moved them around on the board, had some fun with them, hopefully, had some some thoughtful conversation about it.

And I'm sure a lot of you have some feedback as well, your own thoughts on these topics. And I and I do want to ask everyone out there if there was some sort of a Christian rapture, what if there was a way to create a rapture proof suit? Oh wow, superhuman technology versus superhuman uh supernatural power. Yeah, I mean the the ai Antichrist that I was going

on about earlier. Perhaps they might come up with some sort of shielding to try and prevent you know, souls from being sucked up into the into the into the outer void. And then on the other hand, perhaps someone might want to you know, even a faithful individual might say, actually I need to stay behind. I want to document it. Or maybe I I love the some people in my life too much who are not believers, or I just want to, you know, make sure I get to work

on time. The next day. I better wear a rapture proof suit that will contain my myself and keep nice. You know almost why wearing uh like weighted boots to keep from just rising above the ground. Robert, you never cease to amaze me. Oh well, thank you, Joe. If you try, uh so anyway, wrap your proof suits. What do you think about that? You can find us at the stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You can reach out to us on Facebook and Twitter a few

other social media accounts as well. You'll find links to those at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and if you want to email us. As always, you can write to us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com. Four