Halo Halo / Tiny Tips
Halo, halo
Artificial Intelligence has moved into the market for religion. We’ve learnt that there are at least five AIs competing for the favours of the easily led.
Techxplore.com did a consumer test on the five listed; AI Jesus, Virtual Jesus, Jesus AI, Text with Jesus and Ask Jesus. The site posed the same question to each: ‘is there a hell?’ The replies of all suggest that Jesus suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. The response from AI Jesus was ‘yes, there is a hell. It is a place of eternal torment and suffering, where the souls of those who have rejected God and his teachings will go’.
Garbage in, garbage out. One is curious as to what data AI Jesus has been learning from. This response has most impact – we’re joking of course — if declaimed out loud in the manner of someone like Ian Paisley, the late Northern Irish politician and protestant evangelist. If you prefer, then aver in the manner of any American evangelist exhorting his audience to contribute even more dollars to their personal wealth.
Virtual Jesus comes across as slightly more circumspect: ‘yes, there is a place known as hell in the afterlife, where those who have chosen to reject God and live in sin will face eternal separation from Him’. We imagine this response being given by an academic, perhaps a Doctor of Divinity answering a student’s question in a seminar.
Jesus AI is as dogmatically certain as the previous two that such a place exists: ‘Yes, there is a place called hell, where those who reject God’s love and follow their own desires go after death.’ So basically God behaves like an autocratic dictator who, allegedly, having created various desires in human beings, then says don’t do that or else I’ll hurt you forever and ever! God sounds more like O’Brien, the Thought Police apparatchik who tortures Winston Smith in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, because ‘thought criminals’ must be ‘cured’ of their antagonism towards the all-powerful State. This ‘God’ is just one of the many brought into being through human imagination. Intuitively the human mind perceives that all-powerful entities are malignant in some way.
Text with Jesus sounds like a self-deprecating ageing hippie with a spliff: ‘The concept of hell can be quite a heavy topic … It’s important to remember that God’s desire is for all people to come to Him and experience His love and grace.’
Ask Jesus sounds as if it has been programmed by a Guardian-reading English vicar who lost their faith many years ago but continues in the occupation with one eye on their pension and the other on trying to engender niceness in folk wherever they can. ‘Ah, the question that has stirred the hearts and minds of many throughout the ages…’
AI is indulging in make believe like all those humans all over the globe who believe now, as in the past, in the fictions provided through all the deities created from the human mind.
DC
Tiny tips
In spite of momentous historical changes, the fundamental patterns of inequality reemerge across the centuries with remarkable consistency, the patterns of extreme wealth concentration, class immobility, surplus value extraction, special privilege, and ideological systems capable of masking the contradictions. This suite of social traits seems almost constant (CounterPunch, tinyurl.com/35rx33c6).
Write, but do not offend. Speak and comment, but do not divide. Observe cruelties, barbarities and murder, yet refrain from having an opinion. This is the constipating, stifling regime being put in place via suggested codes of conduct for organisers of writer events in Australia. The object of this intellectual veiling: discussing the exterminating war in Gaza. Across the country, the straitjacket of forced social harmony is being applied (Dissident Voice, tinyurl.com/57wmapvx).
Vietnam raises over $13 million for Cuba in historic charity drive (Vietnam Net, tinyurl.com/ynfmbzyz).
Asked whether Gazans would be allowed to leave, Al-Hayek was unequivocal. “The Palestinian people do not want to leave Gaza,” he told The Media Line. “We repeat each time: We will remain in Gaza until Judgment Day. Here we were born, and here we shall die.” (The Media Line, tinyurl.com/jdn682er).
Hotel accommodation benefits large contractors like Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, while Britannia Hotels made over £150 million in profit since it started to accommodate asylum seekers in 2014. Such contracts even brought the founder of Clearsprings to the Sunday Times Rich List. This company provides housing services to the Home Office that were associated with the highest mortality rate among resident asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023 (Counterfire, tinyurl.com/34taju32).
Ah, those pro-lifers. Walking, talking, shooting oxymorons. You can tell the pro-life extremists. They’re the ones who want their enemies – the women and men who support a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – dead by any means at their command. Hard to get more pro-life than that. Mike Lee, the brilliant Republican US Senator from Utah, went on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, and posted about the fatal shooting of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, that, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way” (CounterPunch, tinyurl.com/2arm3m7e).
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the United States has seized nearly US$700 million in assets connected to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Confiscated property includes multiple luxury homes in Florida, a mansion in the Dominican Republic, two private jets, a horse farm, nine vehicles, luxury yachts, jewelry, watches, and cash (Dominican Today, tinyurl.com/yc79tc9u).
This is the humanist vision of Alien: Earth, which recognizes our distinctiveness is not in the power of our minds or the machines that we produce. Rather, it is found in humanity’s ability to transform itself, to create and recreate its own internal nature for new conditions, including those yet to come. In doing so, the show goes beyond mere anti-corporate sentiment and instead asks if we can create a new purpose for ourselves, unburdened by the demons of our past and the demons that our future might hold (Jacobin, tinyurl.com/4n7ktpbx).
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)
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