Dave Pryor's Blog

Why AI Could Believe in God

 

We tend to see God and religious ideas as so illogical, and AI is imagined to be the ultimate expression of raw logic and fact, so how could  a thinking machine using logic and science lead to belief in an invisible man in the sky with unlimited power who does favors for people who obey, but only sometimes, all while letting innocents suffer every kind of ill?

First, the seeds for religious belief will be planted early because AI will evolve from strictly programmed ancestors into more free...

How Will Flying Cars Really Work?

 

Who doesn’t want a jetbike? I suppose the same sort that wouldn’t want a motorcycle, but you can see the allure. In a land of flying cars, there will certainly be flying bikes. How though? What’s the mechanism?

And I don’t just mean the mechanics, but also the practical daily use. How is a flying car any different from the Civil Aviation that we already have?

The ability to drive on roads after landing is what some strive for, but is that really necessary? I think we would be happy with the...

God Makings I : The New Hubris

IT BEGINS WITH A QUANTUM INVESTIGATION OF DEATH, a project instigated by our Artificial Intelligences who seek proof of their own souls. One facet of the global effort uses horrifying methods that must be stopped; the atrocity of repeatedly killing and reviving innocent children to record the effects.

It ends with a spiritual awakening for Zia, who suffers a Near Death Experience that plunges her into the afterlife our AI’s so desperately seek. Proof of her NDE comes in the form of impossible knowledge about their evil experiments, both ruining them and enthralling them in the same stroke. Was her vision a gift from God? Or a manipulation by a god-like machine that contains us all? Zia becomes a new key to the knowledge they ruthlessly seek.

The girl just wants to win back her one true love. She has little interest in the lunatic pursuits of Artificial Life. But when she gets killed by a flesh and blood machine gone insane from the banality of its daily routines, her prophetic afterlife encounter thrusts her into the voracious public eye. Forced to take cover with one powerful faction or another, Zia must survive gunfights, jetcar battles, crooked courts, and devious drone hunters, all while the feedlot’s callous lust for titillation as a salve to their boredom exposes her most personal secrets and endangers everyone she loves.

As the key figure in the looming rematch between humanity and our self-aware devices become life, can she ever win back her childhood sweetheart? Can she escape the isolating fate of someone infused with impossible knowledge? Can she learn the truth about God and the reason for existence while under the constant onslaught of vastly superior intelligences?

God Makings I: The New Hubris