Artificial Intelligence
the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
We all deal with artificial intelligence, some more than others, on a daily basis. Even the term AI or Artificial Intelligence causes us all to conjur images of what it is.
We touch it every day. Go on the internet, you are touching artificial intelligence, use your smart phone, AI. Go to pump gas at the gas station, AI. Buy something at the grocery store, AI, Go shopping, AI. Smart Vacuums that vacuum our homes for us. Devices we can speak to and they understand and answer us. (Most of the time.)
It is amazing the society we live in where AI so permeates us that we no longer are even aware of it.
Some people are terrified of it, and some are fascinated with it.
In the film The Matrix, we are taken to the year 2199. The world has been taken over and is being run by AI: artificial intelligence. Harvested humans live in a computer generated dreamworld of artificial reality, never understanding that they are captives of an evil empire. But there are a few people still connected enough to reality who discover the Matrix. What they see is that there are two worlds now. One is evil, and it depends on control and deception. It is an unreal world. The other is the real world, even though it would not be seen as such by those caught up in the Matrix. There is a great deal of religious symbolism in the film, and it picks up on the biblical theme of the kingdom of God and its opposition to the kingdom of evil. In the movie, Morpheus tries to explain the Matrix and says to Neo: “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”
In the same way, we live in the real world while so many around us are living in a world of deception. Unable to wake from the dream, they only know what they see. They have never known anything different. Our responsibility is to never forget which is the real world and which is fantasy. We are also responsible for rescuing as many as possible of those who are trapped in the Matrix. We live in parallel kingdoms — the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world — and the reality is that we are in one or the other, there is nothing in between.
The wheat and weeds are growing together, and will be together, until the end when the chaff is gathered to be burned, and the wheat is gathered into the Father’s barn (Matthew 13:30).
I’m sure most of you know what an oxymoron is. It’s a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself. There are lists and lists of the things, and here are some of my favorites:
- Artificial Grass,
- boneless ribs,
- big town,
- harmless lie,
- green oranges,
- easy labor,
- fresh frozen,
- jumbo shrimp,
- cafeteria food,
- military intelligence,
- one choice,
- random order,
- slumber party,
- freezer burn,
- small fortune,
- government organization,
- living dead,
- same difference,
- plastic glasses,
- peace force,
- pretty ugly,
- head butt,
- working vacation,
- Dodge Ram,
- healthy tan,
- good grief, and
- devout atheist,
- as well as its sequel, Thank God I’m an Atheist.
- And to add to the list Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI in Business
I work as most of you know in IT, but more specifically my specialty is Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.
Today, as much as the world coins the term “Artificial Intelligence” it does not truly exist, but is rather a set of clever algorithms written by some very smart people. Machine Learning is also an oxymoron, because machines can only discover and at that can only discover what a human tells it is within the bounds of discovery. So I guess if you say, wow, a phone can take what I say, translate it in to understandable language,understand what I intend, and then take action upon it. The one could say that it is “artificial” but not really intelligent.
Let me give you an example. I think we have all been on a call with a “BOT” that doesn’t understand us, the fact it understands us at all is amazing to me, but there are many people who get frustrated.
You should come to our house some time. Janice fights with Alexa. She tells Alexa, “Alexa, set the bread timer for 30 minutes”. And alexa will say “Fred is being timed for 30 minutes.’ Janice will tell alexa, “NO set the bread timer to 30 minutes.” Alexa will say,”I’m sorry I do not understand Bed Rymer, would you like me to search the internet.” And on and on she goes.
Alexa understands me almost every time and it frustrates Janice to death.
Yet if we think of the complexities of our human language, and the how our human mind works. It can take partial sentences and while we may not even hear 100% of what was said, our brains can fill in the gaps and make sense of it. The fact a computer can pretend to fascinates me.
We worked on a project at Afni for our Help Desk. It was a conversational AI project to reduce the amount of human interactions and get people working faster when they have a technical issue at work.
We started with a “chat bot” and it has evolved into phone conversation. We named our conversational AI Bot “IDA”. “Intelligent Data Algorithm”
Someone can go to a website and type in the chat box, “I cannot log in to my computer”, or “I forgot my password”. or “My password isn’t working” or “I need my password reset” or “I try to login and I get an error.” or “I forgot my password.” any variation of those things. By the way there are approximately 37 ways to say you forgot your password.
As humans, God made us so wonderfully. We are beautifully and wonderfully made. We are created in His image. Our intelligence can take any of those phrases, understand what the person talking to us is saying, and resolve the issue.
A computer is not able to do that until someone “teaches” it to. In the AI world, we call these “intents”. What does the comunicator “INTEND” regardless of the phrasing of the question.
So to tackle this we had to teach the “intent” to the computer so that when any of these phrases were used, it would respond accordingly. And if it doesn’t understand fully, ask the right questions to get to what the actual intent is. Not that easy of an undertaking.
However the result is a “BOT” that seems like a human or to some degree any way.
Belief Systems
You know we talk a lot about belief systems here and how important they are. There are dozens of scriptures in the bible about our mind, protecting our mind, setting our mind on Christ.
(5) One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.
Romans 14:5 – NIV
In context here, Paul is saying everyone is at a different place and with different belief systems and those systems aren’t all black and white. They are not all wrong or all right, just different.
Like the artificial intelligence, our minds work so wonderfully, but often not in ways we think. A particular machine learning algorithm, called a neural network, is an algorithm that was meant to mimic the way the human mind works.
See our mind doesn’t truly work in words and pictures as we might imagine. Our mind works with neurons and synapsis with electrical impulses that cause new synapsis to be formed as are continually learning. And as we learn and those synapsis are formed, we learn and therefore we “know” something to be true or not true. Thus our belief system is formed by a bunch of synapsis between neurons being formed as a result of what we learn or are taught, or observe, or are treated, or rejected, or abandoned, or mistreated, but nonetheless, the neurons are formed and become an almost permanent part of who we are.
Let’s look at the example sampled neural network.
There are inputs: One is the ground is wet, the second is water is falling from the sky, the third, the sky is cloudy. That is combined with any bias we might have and our bias is interesting as our past experiences could impact or override the other inputs or at best influence them.
In this example lets presume that we really have no bias and or experiences. So the reult of these three inputs is “It is raining”.
Now let’s take a look at a bias that might enter in here.
Bias #1 – What if when you were a young child and when water fell from the sky, it was your dad dumping water from the hose on you.
Bias #2 – And what if when you were a teenager, you saw a wet ground and all you ever knew was a wet ground was from the irrigation in the field next door because you’ve never seen rain at this point in your life.
Bias #3 – And what if when you were a young adult, still never seeing rain every time there was a cloud in the sky it snowed.
Now look at this chart and your “Belief system because of what you have learned which has some strong biases, makes your “outcome” different that someone else.
First, the ground is wet and we have seen wet ground before, so our bias immediately says “oh, there must be irrigation going. But wait a minute, there is also water falling from the sky and our next bias tells us, water falling from the sky from my past experience tells me that my dad is spraying me with the hose, but I do recall the ground also being at least little bit wet. So must be that my dad is dumping water on my head., but wait a minute it is also cloudy, and my bias says it might be snow but because our biases conflict a little, we can accept the fact that the cloudiness is not relevant so there fore we our belief systems says, Dad is dumping water on me from the hose.
Along comes the Pastor and says “Hey how do you like the rain?” But our belief system says “what do you mean rain, clearly dad is spraying the hose.
Our brain works the same way. Those synapses were formed and once synapses are formed and biases interact, even when someone tells us the truth, our brain cannot comprehend that it is false.
In the computer world we call it training the model. We send a bunch of data to the machine learning algorithm and the combination of data at a high probability always results in a certain outcome. So everytime a piece of data comes across that is different for the probability and statistical model, it is rejected as truth. Thus our mind does the same thing.
Let’s look at another example.
Input #1 – The Pastor did not speak to me today.
Input #2 – The Pastor spoke to Gary today
Input #3 – Gary spoke to someone else.
BIAS:
1 – My father always ignored me, he was never around and even if he was around he told me I was worthless.
2 – When I was a child, my dad always spent time with other people and never spent time with me. He did nothing but tell me I am worthless and I am nobody.
3 – Even the other people who were my dad’s friends ignorned me. Even my mom told me I was worthless.
Now a synapse has been formed already with our dad who was not a good dad to us.
So now the physical brain has a belief system already burned in our brain that when we are not spoken to, we are worthless, I can prove it because “belief system” or burned in synapse tells me when someone talks to someone else that it is because “I am worthless”. And finally when the third party talks to someone else, it is “Because I am worthless”.
See how this belief systems can screw us up.
Let’s say next sunday, the Pastor comes up and says “Hey sorry I didn’t get around to talking to you last week, I had to talk to Gary about the upcoming Awakening Fire Service and make sure we have everything ready to go and you had already left.” But are you going to believe it? NOPE.
Then Gary comes up to you and says “Hey man, I know we going to hang out after church but I had to talk with Jim, because Pastor put me in charge of the Awakening Fire Service and I had to make sure Jim had everything he needed so the service goes smoothly.” Are you going to believe that “NO”. Why our belief system and biases will not allow us to. Physically our mind is so conditioned to the lies that the truth is not believable.
And when we get those synapses built the enemy only re-enforces it which makes the synapses even stronger.
I can tell you that a neural network is based on probabilities and mathematical algorithms that supposed to remove biases as much as possible, but never possible to completely remove them. And it takes a significant amount of data to build the pathways in a neural network model. But once the pathways are established, it takes more data to “break” the pathways than the original amount of data that built the pathways.
So it is in our brain. When the enemy comes in and keeps saying “Yuu are worthless, see Pastor isn’t talking to you today.” When we believe it, which we tend to do so because it aligns with our belief system. Then the enemy comes in and says “You are worthless, see Gary is ignoring you now.” Our belief system is once again “confirmed” in our mind because of the wrong belief system.
How do we change our belief system.
- Set our Mind on the things of Christ.
(2) Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
Colossians 3:2 – NIV
Well how do I do things. Read the word, study the word, get the word in your heart.
- Renew your minds daily.
(2) Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2 – NIV
I love the context of this verse. In verse 1 in Romans it says we are to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing. Then verse two. How do we do that? By renewing our minds. So our belief systems are restored to what God’s will is and not our false belief systems. But it doesn’t end there. This is such an important part of renewing our minds that I think gets skipped over.
Verse 3 through the rest of the chapter, it talks about the importance and value of the body of Christ. How do we renew our mind, yes by studying the word, but also by relying on the body of Christ. The various gifts of body and how we can help one another and how we can get help from the body.
When we get our thinking or beliefs wrong we can renew our minds by being around and hearing from and receiving from the body of Christ. Starting in Verse 5 of Romans 12
5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. 6 We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your (Note- Or the) faith; 7 if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach;
8 if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, (Note- Or to provide for others) do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.
9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. 11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
13 Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.
16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. (Note- Or willing to do menial work) Do not be conceited. 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” (Note- Deut. 32:35) says the Lord.
20 On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” (Note- Prov. 25:21,22) 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
As I was studying this I was overcome with this part of Romans 12. Here we are to renew our minds, but that we can renew our minds by not only receiving from the body, but by being a part of the body.
We cannot let our belief systems keep us from being a part of the body, withdrawing, or allowing the enemy to keep lieing to us. But by being your part of the body, you will renew your mind. As you give of your gifting, your mind will be renewed.