The Tower of Babel Project: how human beings must prepare for the approaching Singularity – Medium

THE TOWER OF BABEL/PIETER BRUGEL THE ELDER

The Singularity will be able to solve every problem except one: evil.

These days we have no shortage of problems. We struggle with poverty and a lack of affordable housing. Depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and eating disorders are rampant, especially in teens. The world is getting hotter and the consequences may be worse than we thought. COVID-19 shows how vulnerable we are to disease after a century of successes against it. No one knows how it will end.

For all these problems, technology offers answers as long as policy makers are willing to embrace the solutions. Smart cities are the answer to housing and urban woes such as crime, traffic, and pollution. Affordable housing is ripe for tech disruption. Poverty can be fought with tech. Global warming and climate change only need new sources of energy, electric cars, smart homes and factories to become affordable and ubiquitous. Even disease may eventually kneel to human ingenuity in genetics and AI.

Despite modern woes, they are nothing compared to the struggles of the past with diseases like small pox and plague, wars of conquest and religion, brutal oppression of women and minorities, slavery, and backbreaking toil. Life is getting better and better for everyone. Even problems that technology supposedly causes like loneliness and isolation, technology can also help to solve. Moreover, it isnt clear that these are worse than they used to be anyway. In the past, if you didnt fit in, you were often ostracized. Now, there is a community for everyone, and the ways that we can connect with others will only grow and improve. Those who are more vulnerable to loneliness, the elderly, benefit the most from tech such as Virtual Reality.

What technology offers most is choice. If we dont want to live a suburban existence, for example, we can choose a communal one or, if we crave fresh air, we can live out in the country and telework.

The Singularity represents that moment in the future when that choice becomes almost limitless. Any technological solution you can dream up can be created and implemented almost instantly. With Artificial Intelligence as our partners, human beings can choose whatever lives they desire. The problem is that there will always be some who choose to do wrong and be snakes in the garden of paradise rather than enjoy its (permitted) fruits.

As psychologist and Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl observed in his classic Holocaust autobiography, Mans Search for Meaning,

[T]here are two races of men in this world, but only these two the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of pure race and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

Progress for the human species does not equal progress for the human soul, and the consequences of allowing limitless power fall into the hands of these indecent people could be catastrophic.

This project of constant building to the skies reminds me of the ancient Near East myth of the Tower of Babel, which Biblical authors folded into the Book of Genesis to stand as a testament to Gods power and a warning to human beings who seek to raise themselves up without His guidance or approval. Whatever Higher Power you subscribe to, you cannot deny that human power cannot be increased without limit without a matching elevation of human responsibility at the level of the individual as well as the collective. To do otherwise, is to invite a similar scattering of human potential as our egos grow beyond our ethics.

To give a little background, the Tower of Babel reads like a childrens story sandwiched in between the flood and the story of Abraham. While modern readers interpret it as explaining the origin of languages and nations, it has a far deeper meaning, one that would have been apparent to a reader in the Ancient Near East. There are essentially two groups involved. The people of Babylon (Babel is a transliteration of Babylon from Hebrew) and the heavenly host with God as the Prime Actor. In the story, the Babylonians, who represent all the people on the Earth, decide to build a big tower. The reason they give is that they all want to stay together. Why they need a tower to the heavens to do that is not explained, but there is a lot going on under the surface here. God comes in and sees that they are building a big tower and He says that there is no telling what they will do next. They are too powerful, so he confuses their languages, and they spread out over the Earth instead. The tower is left unfinished.

On the face of it, God seems to be acting like a Jerk. These people are minding their own business building this giant tower and God comes in and messes it up for them. But the issue at stake here is that the people are essentially repeating what happened in the Garden of Eden in that they are taking power for themselves without Gods permission and likewise disobeying his commandments (which was to spread over the Earth). In doing so, they are developing limitless power without having the humility (which is represented by obedience to God) to manage it. (Some Rabbinic interpretations even suggest the tower itself is a big F-you to God.)

In our era, our Tower of Babel is modern technology and institutions and the consequences of ultimate power: power to do evil. If we do not deal with this evil, we will be scattered as God scattered the people of Babylon.

Is evil something that we can solve? Probably not without changing human nature itself. Will technology offer such a cure? Perhaps it will be an anti-evil pill. But would an evil person take such a pill? If the future offers us choices, it must offer us freedoms as well. Freedom inherently contradicts forcing people to change their nature. Perhaps this was really the conundrum that faced the Almighty why not just make people good? But how without taking away who we are?

If we are to protect the Paradise that we seek to build, we must prepare to cast evil out of it. The future cannot be for everyone, but only for those decent people who are worthy of it. This is why even in the post-scarcity society of Star Trek, there are still prisons.

Technology is the Tower not the God. We build higher and higher but we come no closer to heaven. Most of us will be content with an Earthly paradise. Some will choose to explore the stars and others to find new ways of being, but, still others, like the Archangel Lucifer, will seek to destroy it for their own gain.

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The Tower of Babel Project: how human beings must prepare for the approaching Singularity - Medium