Builders x Christianity x1 | Are We Building The Tower Of Babel?

Father Ray Davison 0:00
Lord, thank you for giving us a world that can be known, that can be studied, that can be rejoiced in. Thank you for giving humankind the tools of the mind in order to be able to build machines, to be able to care for your creation. Grant that whatever technology we develop as a human race, it may be to our souls benefits as well as our bodies, that we may be presented to you a holy and living sacrifice during our life and meet you as friends on the other side, having given as much of this earth back to you, as holy as you have given us salvation in your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, through whom we ask all these things in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Connor Mahoney 0:42
Amen And father Ray, I know that you might have to jump off and take care of some business, but you're welcome to stay and join the conversation if you wish. Otherwise. I got a couple other exciting speakers. I have Albert and singularity hack. I don't know exactly what, how you how you refer to yourself, but I haven't actually talked to either of these folks. And one of the exciting things about these spaces is I really don't know most of the people that I've been able to bring up over the past few weeks. So it's, it's a little bit of, it's a little bit of faith, you know, that things are going to work out. But so far, we've been having some great conversations, been meeting a lot of great builders who are building our emerging future. And so that's really exciting. So maybe just to get the space started a little bit, we we're obviously builders here. So very excited about people who are building real technology, not just, you know, philosophizing or thinking in the space. So Albert, if you don't mind, just give us a little bit about who you are and what you do here.

Albert Renshaw 1:41
Sure thing. And I just want to say it's a great to be here. So thank you for the invite. My name is Albert. I run a company called apps for life. We've been in business for about 15 years. We mostly make mobile software. This is like consumer facing mobile apps that's been like our bread and butter. We have 10s of millions of downloads and users from that. And then in the past few years, we've also been building military software with the US military, mostly defense stuff. So that's that's been where a huge part of my focus has been lately. And I've also been working a lot with AI. Personally, I've done a few consumer based software with my company, but I'm doing a lot of personal passion projects with the AI space. It's very fun to work in. I'm currently building a Bible app for the for iPhone that's AI powered, and it uses AI to analyze some of the original text in the original Hebrew and Greek and kind of help English readers be able to read the original script, if they want, with some sort of like concordance, AI powered concordance that translates all these ancient texts and and correlates them to the current English translations. So that's what I'm working on there. I am a Christian. I was born again in 2012 and I'm also a futurist and a capitalist, so I'm excited to see how those can all intersect.

Connor Mahoney 3:07
Yeah, and you're in Hawaii, right? So, so what it's like? What lunch time now?

Speaker 1 3:11
Yeah, 12:40 over here. Very sunny and breezy.

Connor Mahoney 3:15
Yeah, I'm in Florida, so it's nice and sunny, breezy here too, but I think some of our northerners might be experiencing a little cold. So singularity hack. And again, I don't, I don't know exactly how you refer to yourself, but you can unmute. And I know you're just getting back from Eth Denver, which is super exciting, and you have a you've done a lot of work in the in the blockchain and Ethereum space, so why don't you give us a little bit about yourself?

0xJustice.eth 3:40
First off again, thanks Connor for inviting me on here. This is the most kind of this is the strangest overlap of the most exciting topics. And there's the niche and there's the niche of the niche on this type of stuff, right? So, yeah, my name is Justice. I go by 0xJustice kind of in the crypto space, you know. And my, my journey has been, you know, I went to Bible college and studied systematic theology. I kind of came up in the reformed tradition, reformed Baptist. And, you know, I was really interested in formal languages, and kept thinking like, if there was a, kind of, like a supercharged inductive Bible study method where you could kind of symbolically encode all propositions in the Bible and be able to infer certain unexpected things and kind of do this calculus and that that kind of thinking got me into computer science. So I went back to school for computer programming and started writing, and I took on kind of this persona of singularity hacker, you know, but that's too long for the Twitter name, so I'm singularity hack on here and and then in the past couple years, just went real deep on DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations and kind of org design. And then now I work on governance for polygon labs. So and I'm a believer. I'm a Christian, and this informs my world view and my my hope in the world and for eternity. And it's interesting that in times past, these deeper worldview ethical questions would probably be buried much lower when now, in 2024 it's just a few minutes into current events, and you're already coming face to face with what are human beings? What is our purpose? What's the end game? It's, it's very close to the surface. So very exciting.

Connor Mahoney 5:46
For sure. And then, our other speaker Zy actually had some family items come up, so he couldn't pop in, but he might, he said he might come later. And Zy, I don't know, it's kind of interesting. So you mentioned singularity hack, about the questions about what it means to be a human being. And I didn't really realize how important that con- that question was going to be until I don't know. I mean, this conversation really just started popping off about a month ago. But it really does seem to kind of, it revolves around that question, at least us as Christians. Our conversation here revolves around that, question, and and Zy, I know has some concerns about certain elements of the space, and so I didn't brand the space as e/acc, but I do know that both you and Albert, you call yourselves e/acc, and a lot of people, obviously, a lot of conversation in the space has to do with e/acc. I have e/acc in my bio. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm down with the mission. But, you know, there are some questions. There's definitely some people here that are maybe not so pro human, and we as Christians have to have a deep respect for the- US, humanity as the image of God, the Imago Dei. And so I think that has to do with a lot of of what we're hosting these conversations for is to so that we can clarify what do we as Christians believe about the future and about ourselves and about what our mission is here on Earth. So maybe we could just kick off the conversation there. And I actually do, let me throw this up on the on the bulletin board, I put out, I put out a tweet. Maybe last week. Time flies so much. Maybe it was two weeks ago, but I said that e/acc is a fundamentally Christian movement, and somehow that hit the algorithm. And, you know, some people obviously didn't, didn't agree. I mean, it was, it was, obviously it was kind of a meme. But I think there's a lot of truth there. And so soul engineer, an Orthodox Christian, was on our last space, and he responded that, no, it wasn't a fundamentally Christian movement, but that to survive long term, it will need to be. So. And I think maybe that might be a good conversation starter, being what do, what do we think as Christians? What, do we need e/acc? Do we need techno optimism? What? Why is this an important conversation, like, why are we here? So I just shared it. Are you guys seeing it? I'm not seeing it. I just shared it to the to the the bulletin. Albert, are you seeing it?

Albert Renshaw 8:22
Yeah, it is there on my screen.

Connor Mahoney 8:23
Okay, I don't know why it's not on my screen. Twitter, Twitter spaces are kind of weird, but I don't know. I mean, what's your answer here, Albert, I know you were at the original space, and you tried to speak, but unfortunately, you had to, you had to jump off before you got a chance. So you tell me you're e/acc. Why are you e/acc? And why do you think Christians should be here?

Albert Renshaw 8:41
Well, I think I would agree that it's probably not fundamentally Christian, although I do appreciate the meme. I do think what is happening is we're seeing an interesting scenario wherein the people that are not of the faith are kind of divided on this topic because they have a type of fear towards what the future is going to look like. Hollywood has probably exacerbated that quite a bit with movies like The Terminator, whereas Christians have a confidence in what the end times are going to be like. And it doesn't seem, well, there's two sides to this coin. First of all, it doesn't seem to be at the hands of an AGI gone rogue. Even if you read books like revelations with an interpretation like that, there's nothing you can do to stop it, because that's divine prophecy. So I think for Christians, there is no fear, there is no P Doom, so to speak. So I feel that most Christian tech founders are probably on board with the e/acc movement for that reason. Whereas, if you're not in that religious sphere, it's kind of it seems to be divided maybe 50/50, or something, where some people are on board while others are very hesitant that this might spell the end of humanity, so to speak. So I do think we're seeing a concentration effect happen. But. People of the faith are much more on board with going forward with this. My personal belief is that our goal as Christians, obviously, our number one goal, is to bring glory to God, to love God, love our neighbors as ourselves. But I do believe that we also have these secondary duties to, for example, feed the poor, house the homeless, take care of the orphans and widows and sick. And in my opinion, as a capitalist, the best way to do that is to advance technology. So I see it not only as compatible with Christianity. I actually see it as a duty for Christians. So I think that would be my stance in terms of how that all relates.

Connor Mahoney 10:44
Yeah, and singularity hack. I mean, what do you think? I haven't actually talked to you, so I don't know if you were in the original space. You tell me, but you are e/acc so, so why? As a Christian?

0xJustice.eth 10:54
Because, you know, there's, it's a choice between evils, and the one evil, in my opinion, is infinitely worse than the other. Fundamentally, e/acc is pro freedom, private property. It embraces the creation mandate to be fruitful, multiply and have dominion over the earth and without, without acknowledging divine revelation, the human mind has to make up some new religion, and the new religion it's made up is basically a fear mongering kind of no purpose with the only the only salvation is some totalitarian regime that decides what is, what freedoms you have, or what you can own or not own. I mean, if it deems one day you have too much, and the next guy takes it away and gives it to them. So it's fundamentally anti, anti capitalist, anti freedom, and I think that's the greatest threat. And so for some people to come out and formulate a movement to say, Listen, we've all been wrong, because all of Western civilization has just been a continuous psyop to convince us that freedom and privacy is the greatest danger. You know. That's the story on why the Great Depression happened. And this is the story why we accept, like, 40% tax rate, you know. And this is, this is kind of redistribution, and it's, it's destroying everything. And so, you know, I don't, I don't think e/acc is Christian, but the worldview, a Christian worldview, embraces many of the same principles. And I would agree with Albert, too, that we're protected from some of the fear mongering because we already have divine revelation that says there's no amount of computation that turns a computer into a into a human being. We already know that. We already know that the that the game here is to be fruitful and multiply. We don't need to be sucked down some Malthusian fear monger and we're going to have too many babies, right? And so we have, we have these guard rails that protect us from this, you know, kind of fear, and that changes the way we see everything, you know.

Connor Mahoney 13:12
I think it does, but I do think, and I mean, this is kind of a conversation I've been playing with for at least a year now. I I do think that there is an element of a rather strong element of Christianity that is definitely scared of some of these developing technologies, or at the very least, extremely cautious. And I think there's probably a few reasons for it, but just for example, I, so in the first space we hosted, I brought up Michael Whittle, and he's developed this AI he's calling pulpit AI, which is a tool to help pastors develop content based off their sermons. So initially, when it launched, people thought it was writing sermons. That's not the case. So obviously, some of the concerns there were misguided, but, but even after, you know, people have okay questions about how, how appropriate is it to incorporate AI and technology into these very fundamentally human aspects of Christianity and of, I mean, really, even society at large. And so a lot of Christians, too are going to point to, you know, tower of Babel type use cases, like is this? Are we building something that is fundamentally replacing God, or replacing our place in in this divine plan of creation? And so to some aspects, I I am personally of the opinion that we have to encourage more Christians to be building in the space, especially since we are talking about literally building the future, like we need Christians here more than anything. And I think if you if a Christian does have those fears, that's exactly why they should be participating. But I also think that we. To articulate a reason, a Christian reason, for tech optimism that respects humanity as the image of God. And I'm not sure that we've entirely been able to do that. I think there's actually a lot of good things about e/acc that could potentially help us do that. But at the same time, you know, there's obviously elements here that maybe would call themselves transhumanists, which, what does that even mean? But then some that even just explicitly call themselves post humanist so we kind of have to deal with those forces as well. But, yeah, okay, so let's, let's think about the Tower of Babel specifically. How do we know that if, when we're building AGI, when we're when we're building, you know, virtual reality, how do we know we're not building the Tower of Babel? And also, anybody who's in the, who's listening, if you want to jump in, you have something to contribute, please do. Go ahead and request to speak. I'll bring you up. This is open. This is an open conversation for Christians. And honestly, in the last few spaces, we've had a lot of non Christians as well that have been very respectful and have joined the Convo. So anybody who wants to speak, please do but you guys tell me, Albert and Ray, if you Father Ray, if you want to unmute, you're welcome to as well. But what do you guys think? How do we know we're not building the Tower of Babel?

Speaker 1 16:15
Just to clarify before we get started, when you say building the Tower of Babel, I just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. Are you talking about this notion that humanity is trying to become God?

Connor Mahoney 16:28
I mean, maybe, I think the Tower of Babel story is obviously, maybe somewhat vague on exactly what was the erroneous application of that, but it was a technology that was fundamentally against God's God's plan for humanity, at least at that time. So it's definitely going to be something that Christians are going to point to as as an example of why we need to be cautious about building technologies. But what do you, what's your take?

Father Ray Davison 16:55
I mean the Tower of Babel. I mean, that's more of a there was an explicit command to spread all over the earth. And instead, mankind refused to leave the plain of Shinar and built this tower to assault heaven. You know, so it was a direct well middle finger towards the Almighty, which never works well for us. But it was also a explicit form of of disobedience. Um, my and I'm, I'm definitely it's ironic that that Connor invited me to speak just because I've or to give the opening prayer just because I, I wind up falling more in a in a skeptical category, recognizing that there's many incredible things that what all what you're saying about, there's some incredible things, and these things are going to happen. So we, we need, we need the work to be done. My, my capitalism growing up, has gotten a little bit shaky, thinking about worker displacement and what happened the last major technological revolution with the introduction of the printing press? So those are the questions that I have. There were many, there were obviously many good things that came out of the Reformation, but there was, there was a breakdown in in society in a lot of ways that that I'm, I'm concerned about those questions, with this being a major technological breakthrough. How does that affect people? For instance, you know, Instagram reels of construction worker robots out, placing low skilled workers, and recognizing that there are always going to be, be people who are who can contribute economically with their bodies, that can't contribute with their minds, necessarily. But if the technology gets carried away, what are these unscale, unskillable workers going to be doing, and is that provide, truly providing for the poor. Those, those are my skepticisms, and I know some of them have already been broached, so I would push the question more that direction.

Speaker 1 19:12
Yeah, I'd love to respond to some of that. And thank you for the insights regarding the Tower of Babel. I do think Connor, if, if we are headed in that direction. The best we can do as Christians is to just do what we know is right, to do, and trust on the Holy Spirit to guide us. Now, if we reach a point where it becomes clear... and you have conviction in your soul and your spirit that you are you know headed in the wrong direction with this, well, then I'm happy to change my stance and no longer consider myself Christian e/acc. Touching on some of the stuff that Ray brought up, though, I do want to say I have a lot of strong opinions about where I think e/acc and also just AI development in general, this new revolution, this new industrial revolution, so to speak, is going to take humanity. I do think it's going to be a net good. I understand the concerns, and these are just my opinions, but I do understand the concerns for worker displacement. I personally think we're going to see a really wonderful transformation, and this is why I believe that I, myself, am an employer. I was self employed as a sole proprietorship, which just means I ran the company myself with no employees for quite some time, I do now. I'm blessed now to have some staff. But during that time, I learned that you can create a lot of value and also sustain yourself just by yourself. You can, you can run a company by yourself. Now it's easier when you have employees. The beauty of AI is that it allows the individual to now have employees they can command. And those are the AIS. Now we can go a little further down the road and talk about robots, and we are starting to see that. And like, you know, physical, real world work robots, we're starting to see that in warehouses and stuff. But I think what this revolution really does, more than anything, is rather than displace workers, I think it dissolves the employee-employer model. I think everyone is going to essentially become their own employer. Essentially, rather than working for someone and producing their dreams, everyone will be producing their own dreams and using AI to bring that forth. Now this is a little further down the road, and there is going to be a transitional period where it's a little rough, and, you know, we're going to have to rely on different institutions to help hopefully make that a smoother transition. But I do think, long term, that's where we're headed. I think it's going to be an ultimate good in that sense. But yeah, going back to, going back to the Tower of Babel concept, real quick for a second. I don't know that. I don't know that we're going to be building things necessarily, to do something in the sense of making man more closer to God, or in the image of God, if you want to think about it symbolically that way. And there's a lot of different ways to interpret what the what the intention behind the Tower of Babel was, but I do think there's a lot of good that Christians can do in the meantime in this space, and it's kind of our duty to put our so like real quick, to explain how I think the way AI builds on itself, I view it kind of with a hierarchical model, similar to mathematics. How each say, suppose you're in like middle school each each year, the math all builds on the math that you learned in the previous years. Right? I think AI is kind of going to build in a similar way, the initial kind of directions and influences we put into it now are going to reverberate into the future. And so I do think it's really important that Christians are building in the space that we're putting our data and our ethics and our understanding into some of these patterns that are going to be replicated into the future. So I don't know much how that relates to tower and Babel, but I do think it's good that we put our fingerprint into it if it's going to happen either way. And as I touched on earlier, we just have to trust on the Holy Spirit to guide us if we're not supposed to be doing that.

Connor Mahoney 23:04
I know Ian dropped, jumped up on the speakers panel. So if you want to jump in here, you're welcome to. But I brought up the tower of Babel specifically, just because I just in conversations on Twitter, most Christians that maybe would not be techno optimists, or at least techno skeptics. A lot of them are going to point to that example. They do. So I agree with you all, but like, I'm not entirely sure, like applications, obviously we can talk about, I mean, even father Ray pointed out there was obviously an explicit command there that that that project was disrespecting. But there are, I think there are parallels, to some extent, particularly when we're talking about AGI and we're talking about its potential to replace humanity, that that has people concerned, that may be parallel something of the Tower of Babel story there we're building a technology that maybe we need to be very careful about how we build it, or, you know, we need to maybe have some safeguards on it. But because we're in the e/acc movement, right, we we particularly talk about not wanting to have some of these AI safety guard rails, and why that's actually not productive to development. And I'm not, I'm not giving my point of view here. I'm just kind of giving you guys a landscape of what I'm seeing the... how I'm seeing the conversation develop on Twitter. So I think it's relevant, because I think we need to be pushing a conversation that encourages more Christians to join this this space, more Christians to be building because over the past few 100 years, I think Christianity has taken a step back and has kind of opposed a lot of projects, for even some of the reasons that father, the same concerns that father Ray brought up with the industrial revolution and how some of these things in the Enlightenment maybe explicitly set them up, themselves up, as opposed to the church's vision of the of the world. And so because of those reasons, Christians maybe think that science, or a lot of technology is kind of the domain of anti Christians. And so they don't participate. And we'll talk about building the future. If we don't participate, then who's building the future? Non Christians, right? So that's really, I guess, my my fear in the space. So I want us to help encourage more Christians to get involved. And to do that, we need to, we almost do need to be e/acc. So soul engineer says I think e/acc needs Christianity, not the other way around, but I actually do think Christianity needs elements of this techno optimism message, and it's already there. It's not like we need to add something to Christianity. The message is already there. We just need to articulate it. So I'm just hoping these spaces can help us do that. And I know you have your hand up there singularity hack, so please join in.

0xJustice.eth 25:50
Yeah, I think the analogy of the Tower of Babel is amazing. It's fantastic. And there's nuances there, right? Because one, the line that sticks out to me is when God is communing within himself, you know, the Trinity, and he says, if we don't stop them here, I'm paraphrasing, then there's nothing they won't be able to do. Basically, when you confuse the languages. And the effect of this, AI will effectively destroy any barrier, language barriers, real time communication throughout the whole world instantly, right? And even far more than that. So it is comparable. And I'm not even sure I like the term techno optimist. I mean, I see what it's getting at, but it's almost like saying this, like, has the internet been a net good or bad for the world? If you you know that's a, that's a nuanced statement. You said, Well, of course, it's been good. Well, it's also been used for human trafficking and all kind of terrible things, pornography, all this stuff, right? And so, like the same technology that makes the free energy with with nuclear also makes a nuclear weapons. And so we would be naive to think that this is going to be universally good. It's going to produce the most dystopian, strange things. But the core question, though, to come back to is, does it even make sense to talk about, should we be, quote, unquote, cautious, or should we slow down? There is no slowing down. It's happening. It's kind of like discussing like whether we should allow the tornado to come this direction. It's coming. The conversation has to be about positioning, maneuvering, because the only people who are talking about slowing down or whatever they have to, by definition, endorse totalitarianism, violation of privacy, searching out data centers, bombing, these are the crazy people who are talking about, oh, we need to control this, control the narrative. And for the Christian at a spiritual level, at the deepest level, life, is war. It's war within your spirit. It's war in the world. And as you've seen recently with the botched deployment of Gemini, the AI is going to arrive. It's either going to be a antichrist, woke COVID monstrosity, or there's going to be competition among different voices, you know, synthetic AI voices that mitigate against those, those dangers, you know.

Father Ray Davison 28:17
again, just taking the techno skeptic realm in the room. How would you get 20th century totalitarianism without the rise of radio and television for centralized government to control things? You know that, IA, error that we're talking about that is a tool of totalitarianism, rather than a a defense of it.

0xJustice.eth 28:39
Oh, okay, so you're saying that the tool is the very means by which you get totalitarianism, not a a thing against it. I would say this. You could say it's it's both and, and it's coming for on the evil side, and so you better have it on the freedom side. So just right, like right now, you know, you have state run media, they're pushing forth a certain message. And if you don't have other channels, you know, if you don't have the open marketplace of ideas and the ability to to express voice and say the hope is the resurrected god man, then you, you've you've been destroyed. Okay, and so I think that's one of the reasons why there's such an attempt to control this technology, is because, like the internet, like the printing press, it's a loss of control over the narrative where information is freely available. Now you're not just getting one statistical report on CNN. You're literally having access to the data. You're being able to interact with it, the statistics, the real data, what's happening, and it's very scary to basically a regime governed by the Prince of Darkness, you know.

Ian Huyett 29:50
Connor. One thing that I might say about the Tower of Babel is, I think, the sort of knee jerk Tower of Babel comparisons when we're talking about techno optimism or a futurism sort of prove too much. However you want to interpret that specific story and the ethical application of it. You know, when someone, for example, says, well, we shouldn't focus on space exploration because that kind of detracts us from the immediate needs of our neighbor, and we need to focus on the here and now and not the far away. You know, that same argument would have led the Greeks to not leave the Aegean, would have led people in the Old World to not sail to and discover the new world. There's really no kind of rational principle you can use to delineate this expansion from that expansion. There's no rational principle that you could use to say, you know, well, further technological development would be bad, but contemporary medicine is good, right? These are all really arbitrary lines, and I think the only, in terms of what we should do in the here and now and what our ethical obligations are, the only rational line that I can think of for Christians to draw is to say, if there is technology that can be used in a certain way, which overrides aspects of our created nature, that God created as good, which overrides our, you know, bearing of the imago dei, which are anti human. You know, one aspect of our created nature that God created as good is human variety, right? So, yeah. I mean, in a sense, I think you could make a compelling argument for if we use technology in a way that eliminated all language, insofar as God created different nations and languages as a positive good, that would be a bad use of that technology, and Christians should participate in the conversation to kind of do what we can to prevent that from happening. But the technological development in and of itself is never going to be unethical when it can be used to serve the least of these to improve people's lives, to make all things new and to put all of creation under our dominion.

Connor Mahoney 31:55
Yeah, great points, guys and and I am reminded too just again from a previous conversation, actually the first conversation we had with with Bayes. I thought one thing that was super interesting was, when we were talking about, I guess, techno optimism, or even just future optimism in general, the Christians in the space were the ones who were ultimately optimistic. You know, we have, we have this, this vision, this Christian vision, of, this eschatological vision, really, of ultimately a future where we win right, where, where Christianity expands to overtake all of creation. And God has this plan, predestined, preordained. So because of that, we ultimately do have, and I think even you singularity hack, I think you pointed out that Christianity has this, or maybe it was Albert I forget at the beginning, that we are optimistic and and we have very intentional reasons to be. And Bayes particularly, and I'm not, you know, I'm not, I think he's actually a smart guy, and I've appreciated conversing with him, but I have to go back and clip the space, because he basically said, Well, I'm he's not so optimistic. He's more of a realist. He's like, Well, the technology is going to develop. We can't stop it, you know, it just is what it is. And that's not ultimately an optimistic message, is it? It's just kind of a, it's a realist message. And so I think the Christians in the space, you know, we have actually something positive to convey to the world, and we need to, we need to do that. So, Dan, I don't think I've spoken to you, but you just unmuted.

Dan Bunker 33:29
Hey, how you doing? Can you hear me clearly?

Connor Mahoney 33:31
Yes, I can. Please.

Dan Bunker 33:33
I'm from Australia. I'm from Brisbane, so it's the northern part of Australia. I'm a CEO of three tech companies in Australia. We run one of the largest virtual tour companies in the country, where we fly drones through like, you know, leading universities and schools. I'm a Christian. I've got a family of three kids and wife, lots of fun. And honestly, I'm just real honored to be in this space, guys, because I think a lot of this stuff's really being led out of America. Currently, I've really seen a huge turning point where, you know, basically, ever since twitter got bought by Elon Musk, freedom of expression, and this whole e/acc movement has kind of sprung up out of that, and everyone's trying to build an optimistic future. Like I was, sort of, I don't know what you guys were like when you grew up as a kid. I'm, I think, 32 now, and my whole childhood was being brought up in this sort of doomerism right in school, where we taught about, you know, climate change, you know, had a global financial crisis. It's just been Doom, Doom, Doom, and doom. And it's exciting to see, you know, basically millennials, Gen Z, and and just people in general go, You know what? It doesn't have to be this way. Let's just freaking send it. Let's build rockets. Let's, you know, 10x our energy output with vision. It's exciting. And I think, you know, Christians have a huge, played, a huge role to play in it. Like, if you look at the Catholic Church, you know, and all the stuff that it did. And through all the, you know, middle centuries, you know, we're the ones that built the hospitals. We're the ones that invented, like you went to the local cathedral to learn how to do better agriculture. So the embracing of technology is, yeah, definitely a God given thing. We were instructed to subdue the earth, not in the sense of, let's just burn everything. You know, we've got to be good stewards, right? And I think I've also started to notice even people who were really staunch atheists that I went to, like when I went to uni with where we would debate all the times whether God was real, like we had that huge, you know, new atheist thing with Richard Dawkins for a while, and everyone's saying God's dead. A lot of those people have been actually talking to me recently, saying that Christians are the only ones left with any hope or optimism. And it's just really interesting. There's a real switch happening in the world right now. And I'll be honest, I'm really excited, because, you know, like, you can all of a sudden, like, you know, it was AI technology, and e/acc is about democratizing everything. So all of a sudden, you know, a 10 year old can start doing Disney films with the new, you know, open AI Sora, like, that's incredibly exciting. I'm also a filmmaker as well. So, like, there's just so much technology. I think ultimately it is a fundamentally a good thing. Yes, there is a risk you can turn into a tower of Babel, particularly with like apps, like 11 labs, where all of a sudden everyone can speak a foreign language with their own tone, like, there's obviously lots of risks, but I think, fundamentally, I agree with you Connor, with, you know, the whole idea of, you know, we as Christians need to lead the space come, together, articulate the risks, articulate the benefits, and, you know, pray for each other, and really, you know, take the ownership and lead the space going forward. So yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Connor Mahoney 36:43
Thanks. Really appreciate it, Dan and real quickly before we continue the conversation, but I appreciate you brought up that you're Catholic and father Ray, he's actually Anglican, so we have a bunch of Protestants here. Vincent, he's also Catholic.

Dan Bunker 36:55
I'm actually Pentecostal, sorry,

Connor Mahoney 36:59
Oh, I'm sorry. Fair enough.

Dan Bunker 37:03
You know, in a sense, like, if you look at the broad church, right, in a sense, we are all, yeah, Christians, right. So, so when I refer to the Catholic Church, like that's, that's what we were, really, until the Great Schism with the Reformation, right? But you know, you look at, fundamentally, from 300 ad to what 1600 AD? The church was the center of everything, and it's where you went to it was like your Twitter. It's where you went for innovation. So we need to come back to that place.

Connor Mahoney 37:31
No, totally. And that's basically what I was going to say, is, I mean, even our last space, we had, we had Orthodox... So the space was opened in prayer with a Catholic. We had soul engineer and Carlos, who were both Orthodox, speaking, I'm Protestant. We had a number of other Protestants on board. So we actually have an extremely ecumenical movement here. And I mean, I don't know if everybody understands, like, why I harp on that, but I think that's so important too, that we need to pull all Christians on board with this message. And if we have anything to contribute to e/acc. I think ultimately it lies in that, that Christianity has this unity message, and we need to unify the human machine to build this future that we, this effective future that we desire to see. So that's kind of another aspect of this message that I think we really need to push hard. I know Albert has his hand up. Vincent just joined and has been unmuting. Let's go to Vincent first and then jump to Albert.

Vincent Casey 38:23
Yeah, just a short comment on what you were saying. But I've had it explained to me in the past that it is almost an insult to Christ to not utilize the gifts that He has given you. Yeah, so just do the stuff that you're good. I guess that's all. Thanks.

Connor Mahoney 38:45
Go ahead. Albert.

Speaker 1 38:47
Yeah, I just want to chime in real quick on the Tower of Babel stuff. I don't want to go too far off topic, but I want to give my kind of view on that from what I've understood reading that narrative in the Bible, and I read the Bible, by the way, in a very symbolic way. I think a lot of it is symbolism. But to me, what the issue there was not that humans were all speaking the same language, rather that they were united in trying to, quote, unquote, reach the heavens, or, in a way, make themselves equivalent to God, or even to become God. So I think God's dispersion of languages and confusion of languages was not something that's more so a divine decree, and it has to be that way forever. Rather, it was just a tool utilized at the time to prevent something like that happening at that moment. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with getting to the point where humanity is all speaking one language, whether that's accomplished through technology or through education. So I just wanted to chime in my viewpoint there.

Connor Mahoney 39:45
No, I appreciate that, and 100% so I actually, I mean, I put a couple tweets out, but again, with this message of Christian unity, what we're doing with the church, it's fundamentally, if you, so you said symbology, some christians would call that typology, but there's, there's definitely a lot of typology going here, and particularly with the Tower of Babel, you have to realize the the inverse of the Tower of Babel, the division of humanity, the division of the language, is ultimately unified at Pentecost, at the institution of the church, when, when the apostles at that time, communicated in languages that all understood. And so fundamentally, what the church is doing is we are uniting all of humanity through time. And it's obviously a project that has taken at least now 2000 years, and there's still yet time, time to go, but that's what that's what a mission is here. And if we do, if we can unite all of humanity, imagine what we could accomplish, right? And that's accomplished through the church, through Christ, and that's a beautiful message, and that's the kind of message that we need to be we need to be pushing here. So I appreciate that Albert. Justice. Go ahead, and I'm not going to change the topic, but I am going to throw another tweet on the board, particularly if we're going to talk about Tower of Babel. I think maybe this is an example of a tower of Babel moment that we might need to answer as Christians go ahead, Justice.

0xJustice.eth 41:06
Yeah, I would say to to one, plus one what Albert was saying about the breaking down language barriers, I think the nuance there is to say that humanity was seeking to assert itself as equal with God. And then his his response was to say, hey, we're going to slow this because we're not dealing with an unfallen, you know, species. We're dealing with a species where what pours forth from his heart is corruption and enmity with God. And so the idea is like you have to slow this capability down, because when you have a at its core, fallen and corrupted thing, if it has unlimited ability, it's a scary and dangerous thing. And so all that to say that I don't see anything morally wrong with unifying language, but it does represent an interesting possibility, and something that can't be forgotten, is, what are the consequences now, when you do have, you know, our species unified with greater power than they've ever had, let's say, in the next five years, what that looks like, with AI, no language barriers and all this, right? Like, what does that look like? And based upon your eschatology, your view of end times, most people would say, well, things kind of get worse and more heated in this war between the claims of Christ and the claims of the you know, sinners, right? And so, you know that is a hot, hot issue. You know, I just want to add two little points on here I think are interesting, and that is the creation of AI was inevitable. And I think there's something cool here where God made man in His image. And the ultimate, like one of the biggest acts that man does in his dominion, is to create synthetic agents in his image. And so there's an inevitability to this thing, which is profound. But then on top of that, I think what distinguishes maybe some people's view of e/acc and Christianity is we know we're not creating our own savior in in this entity, right? Our Savior is God. And so there's a, there's a distinction there, but at the end of the day, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so there's, there's nuance in that.

Connor Mahoney 43:30
Yeah, Ian, you can go ahead and pipe in here. Also, Speaker listeners, if you want to speak, please just request. I know we're talking about memetic language, and I've been trying to get Oli on board. So if you want to join you, I know that's that's really your bread and butter. Please. Please join. Anybody who wants to talk, just send a request. Go ahead. Ian.

Ian Huyett 43:49
I just wanted to play devil's advocate on the language thing. I don't necessarily have a super hard and fast view on this, but this is probably good to explore a little bit, because we, were all kind of agreeing on everything up until this point, I'm inclined to think more probably than not, it'd be bad if everyone spoke the same language, and that that might be at least some aspect of the Tower of Babel story. And I would say, kind of as a matter of baseline principle, I mean, every time the New Testament kind of talks about differences between men and women,It usually, you know, especially Paul and the epistles, usually justifies them by reference to, you know, some, the metaphysical order, or the fundamental nature of the created order, like God himself is interpersonal, is a variety of persons. And so therefore it's inherently good that men and women are different and embody this interpersonal nature of the metaphysical order of the Godhead, or if the created order, there's these deep differences embedded in creation and variety is good. Uniformity is bad. So I think if you kind of extend that theme, you can see why it'd be inherently good to have different languages, different cultures, different nations. And you can see this on an intuitive level, insofar as you know, Albert was talking earlier about it's beneficial to have employees. Certainly one reason it's beneficial is that you get a variety of perspectives. And maybe you're more likely to get a variety of perspectives if you have different cultures, you're more likely to have different cultures if you have different languages. I mean, even just anyone who knows a couple of languages knows you do kind you're forced to think in a different frame of mind when you speak in one language instead of another. And so there's probably just intuitively, some inherent benefit to having people kind of think in different frames of mind as a result of speaking different languages. And that's probably an inherent good. And the last thing I'll say on that is, I mean, you can sort of see in historic anti Christian movements, in Marxism, especially, opposition to Christianity, tends to involve seeing uniformity as a positive good, and having a desire to sort of deaden and flatten everything and make it monotonous. And tends to see Christianity as bad because it upholds human difference and variety. So I think you can sort of sense spiritually there that probably if something is moving us closer to uniformity, it's value negative, although, again, I don't necessarily have a hard and fast position on that, maybe there's an exception for language, and it'd be a net benefit if we all spoke just the same language, but I'm inclined to think probably not.

Connor Mahoney 46:28
Yeah. Albert, go ahead.

Speaker 1 46:31
Yeah. So, you know, I'm not inherently against there being multiple languages. I actually do tend to agree that it's good to have differences. I think we've kind of, with the age of the internet, we've kind of moved towards a sort of monoculture, if you will. So I do like having the variety and diversity. I guess what I'm more excited about is the dissolving the need for or dissolving the language barriers. I should say it's actually funny that this topic is being brought up, given what I'm currently working on in the AI space, which I referenced at the start of this space. I'm working on an AI app that uses AI to help bridge this kind of gap between the original Hebrew, the original Aramaic of the Old Testament, and the original Greek of the New Testament. There's a lot of nuance and differences in these languages that aren't captured in English, and unfortunately, one of the issues when we translate the Bible into English is there's a lot of words, for example, in Hebrew that will have kind of multiple meanings, and they allow for multiple interpretations, and it gives more depth to a sentence. And then when we translate to English, we don't have a synonym that also has those multiple meanings, and so we just have to pick one. I can give an example just off the top of my head. You've all heard the phrase that you should fear God, and the original Hebrew for that word, fear is a, it's a complex word. It means fear, but it also means it can mean Revere, and it's like to hold and sovereignty, you know. So you might picture like someone trembling and bowing before a king, you know? And so that's something that a native Hebrew speaker gets to understand when they read the Scripture. Someone reading in English, who's forced to deal with the translation, well, they just get one of those interpretations, and it's whatever the translator decided. And in this case, it looks like we went with the word fear. And this leads to a lot of confusion with English speakers, where they think, why should, you know, especially non Christians, they'll hear something like that, and think, why should I worship or love a God that I have to fear? And it's, it's an issue of the language barrier. So I do think AI plays a really good role in helping kind of bridge that gap, and I think it is a good thing to bridge in some cases.

Connor Mahoney 48:37
I like having a little bit of disagreement. And originally Zy was going to be, was going to be our controversy on the panel, but he might, he still might pop in a little bit later. But yeah, so we definitely, I know we all kind of agree on this message, which is helpful too, because in the last few spaces, they were a little bit bigger, and we had a lot of non Christians in and so that kind of became the focal point. So I'm kind of glad that we're able to talk here among a lot of a lot of great Christians, and kind of nail down our viewpoints on this. To your points, Ian, I think it's I think it's interesting. I do think that there is, there's an aspect of what it means to be the image of God, where we have to look at the picture of of the Trinity and how there are, there is one being one God, but yet three persons, and they maintain their distinctness while being one. And that's something that we image in humanity, where we have in the church, specifically as the body of Christ, as one body, where we become the church, yet we still remain, maintain our distinctness. And so how exactly that looks, I mean, that's obviously can be up for debate. I'm inclined to think particularly with language, because the division of language was instituted at the Tower of Babel purposely to separate humanity. I'm inclined to think that needs to unify in the future. I don't know. I mean, maybe I do think it's somewhat interesting. Some of the points Albert brought up that there might be a way that we can still maintain separate languages, but we can... We definitely need to, I guess, increase our communication in a way that's going to help us, to help us unify. And I think that's particularly important because with e/acc, you know, they're very.... they like to talk about the techno capital machine, and how this is going to help us propel us, to accelerate us into the future. And as great as capital is, as great as you know, that can be a coordination mechanism, ultimately the best coordination mechanism to me, and I think hopefully to many Christians, is the church. That we can unify on one vision that's articulated to us in the scriptures and articulated to us by God. And I think that that coordination mechanism is ultimately what's going to accelerate us into this effective future that we all imagine. So the more we can kind of communicate that I think it's going to be great. Okay, well, maybe that, if anybody wants to pipe in there with some comments there, but otherwise, I did throw up this on the board. And I, like I said, I didn't brand the spaces e/acc specifically. So I know there's a few people. Father Ray is still here. He probably doesn't even know what e/acc is. It stands for effective accelerationism. And it's this tech optimism movement that's kind of catapulted into the Twitter conversation in the past, I don't know, year, year and a half. And so a lot of the conversation has started about Christianity's compatibility, specifically with some tenants of e/acc. And the funny thing is, I mean, there aren't really a whole lot of tenants of e/acc. It's kind of an open, it's kind of an open conversation, what e/acc really means. But there are elements of e/acc that might consider themselves post human Well, there's transhumanism. So we can talk about maybe what that might mean. But I think more interesting specifically, is this conversation of post humanism. And obviously that's incompatible. I mean, maybe some people, somebody would disagree, but I would say that's incompatible with Christianity, especially as we talk about humanity being the image of God, we need to articulate a pro human message. So maybe, if we're talking about building an AGI that's going to be post human, maybe that's an example of a quote, unquote towel of babble, bad technology. And if that is the case, do we need to do something to prevent that? Do we need to? How do we need to shift the conversation? I mean, and ultimately, how can we, how can we talk to Christians and explain why, you know, we're not building a post human AGI. Anybody have any any thoughts there? Okay, well, Oli just okay, go ahead. Justice. Oli just joined too. So why don't you jump in too.

0xJustice.eth 52:51
I think just just as the Christian has to balance the tension between humans having an innate glory and dignity and being in the image of God. And this, the terrible tragedy of the fall, and the fact that from the center of fallen man's heart proceeds darkness like it's a crazy thing, and you look out into the world, you can see the, all the properties of both of those. It's, it's very in the same way that same kind of viewpoint has to be applied to this technology, right? And so, like, there will be no limit to the perverse weirdness that's going to come out of this. And it would be, it would be incredibly naive for us to not kind of see that and extrapolate that out at the same time. We have to say, well, this is how all technology works, like what is, what is a good usecase here, and to preserve and double down on that. And so I think there's value in both. And it's almost too simplistic, because I posted an article I wrote a few months ago called everything you want to hear about the future of AI relationships. And, you know, someone could, someone could read that and be like, Oh, well, you must be against. I'm like, No, it's inevitable. I'm just saying, like, this is what is going to be part and parcel with that package, you know, and definitely agree with you, like there's no, you know, post human is a concept. I mean, it is an aspiration, but it's kind of like their, the pursuit of immortality in this world. It's it's unattainable, and it's one thing that Christians save ourselves from wasting cycles on and pursuing something that, you know, it's just not a part of a possibility within this particular time space, you know,

Connor Mahoney 54:49
Yeah, and, I mean, I'm actually kind of inclined to agree with you. I mean, I don't think post humanism is even a possibility in this, in this future, in this world, and so in e/acc language. I don't think that there needs to be safe guards to prevent us from achieving post humanism, because I just don't think it's a possibility. Rather, I just think it's a waste of time. It's not, quote, unquote, effective. It's not effective accelerationism. if we're going to achieve post humanism. I don't think an AGI is going to replace humanity. You know, it's a tool that can propel us into a greater future.

0xJustice.eth 55:21
You know, one of the craziest examples, real quick, of current day post humanism is, consider this kind of paradox and tension, non Christians believe, hey, we are kind of accidental mutation from apes over millions of years, and we're just animals. Okay, this has nothing to do with the Creator or anything like that. But at the same time, from that same mind share comes people who say, actually, just by sheer will, we can actually change our gender. And so right there you have, on the one hand, saying we're merely animals. We're merely biological, nothing more. And at the same time, the idea that we have such a power that just by will, we can change. And so you have this, this tension, even in a fallen mindshare, between these two contradictions, of a fight against a god, and also, like the inability to deny our own kind of transcendence as being more than animals. You know.

Ian Huyett 56:25
Justice, a quick question for you. When you talked about us not attaining immortality in this world, of course, there, you're excluding the new heaven and the new earth in which we will, you know, have been delivered from biological death. All things are made new. I see the traditional understanding of the new heaven and the new earth as a future state of this world. So this universe is actually made new. It's, we're not just in sort of a non material or platonic world. Were you kind of excluding the new heaven and the new earth there because you see it as an immaterial reality?

0xJustice.eth 57:02
No, no, I'm 100% with you. I'm just saying we're not gonna We're not on the spectrum right now. We're like, oh, we found the discovery. Now we live 800 years and we don't die. It's like, Listen, this whole thing's gonna play out where Jesus comes back, he makes the new heavens and a new earth. He restores, he judges the wicked unto death. We're resurrected into immortal bodies, and we build on Earth. And in all the ways that we fall short now because of moral peccability and noetic effects of sin, like all that's taken away and so, so I am in 100% agreement the way you just described it. Yeah.

@LesaunH 57:40
Hey, um, I've loved, I've been here a moment, but really loved listening. You know, I will say I I'm not, like an active Christian, I wouldn't want to say that I'm not Christian and that I do, you know, look towards Jesus and Christian theology and other things for my like sense of, you know, existence or something like that and so... and yet, at the same time, like, I haven't really, kind of really fallen into like faith in a way where I would kind of claim that I'm Christian. And I've considered doing that and joining some church or whatnot, but I am a futurist, transhumanist, and strive to, or desire to be post human and and I do also, though, like reject some kinds of post humanism. There's, there's a sense of like transhumanist as like, wanting to leverage technology to improve the human condition and to kind of advance as a species. And that can be seen as like, trying to increase our health, cognitive, cognition, emotion, capabilities, like, increase just our kind of beings towards, like, kind of greatly enhanced states that are beyond the current human being. And I I see those things as, like, kind of technologically possible and and I guess I would wonder, like, in your guys's mind, what... I guess I would imagine it's something about, like the fallen state that, with we're all fallen, like that we cannot achieve kind of heaven on earth, that divine intervention in order to kind of, yeah, reach greater states and. And yet, for me, I I definitely see, like, the technological possibilities of of, I mean, our doctors and our entire medical establishments already, you know, increased our lifespans dramatically. And I think if you look at the current like simulated biology, technology, like CRISPR, mRNA, vaccines, all of these, these kinds of directions and possibilities. It's hard to say that we won't cross the threshold where we really do conquer kind of the biology and yeah, so I guess I just wonder, like, why do you guys... would you guys think that we, we can't leverage technology to kind of escape the worst parts of the human condition? And why, why do we need Christianity to do that? Thanks,

Connor Mahoney 1:00:29
Yeah. And maybe you can just clarify for me real quick. So I think you said you strive towards post humanism, but then what you're describing sounds to me like you want to improve the human condition.

@LesaunH 1:00:38
Yeah, yeah. Just to clarify there, there's kind of two kinds of post humanism, or post humanism, it contains a whole host of different concepts, and often it's confused as anti humanism is, is a form of post humanism, or like post humanism, where we create an alternative species, but I'm very much a speciest, but also I desire like post.... One form of post humanism is seen as like the transhumanist goal. Like the goal of transhumanist Transhumanism is for humans to become post humans, but in that process, still a desire to for some, some people who strive for that, to kind of cherish some aspects of our humanity, and still would want to claim we're human, but just would claim that we have post human capacities along the lines of health, cognition or emotion or other other kinds of capacities.

Connor Mahoney 1:01:32
Okay, I'll throw it to Albert, since he has his hand up, but I will just say I didn't... I think that this trans human, transhumanism, post humanism conversation would actually be good to happen maybe sometime in the future, if we have the right speakers for it. But it's... the languages are so vague, and obviously you clarified exactly what your position is. But there's other people who define these terms differently, and so it's it's just not a very easy conversation. I don't think there's anything necessarily. I don't think Christians have a problem with improving the human condition. So, so I don't think that.. even we've talked about striving towards immortality in the sense that we're striving towards ultimately eradicating human disease and human suffering, like that's a Christian goal. So, so I don't think there's incompatibility there. Let me throw it to Albert, though, and see what he wants to say. And then Ian.

Albert Renshaw 1:02:24
Yeah, well, I guess I'll start by defining what I understand these terms to mean. Real quick. To me, transhumanism has been this kind of idea that humans evolve beyond our current state, typically through you could say technology, if you're thinking of like a cyborg, where we're integrating tech into ourselves. You can also talk about a genetic way of doing that, where we're modifying our own genes. And in fact, we already do that to some extent. Whereas post humanism is more so, ascending beyond what it even means to be human. These are things like uploading your consciousness to a digital realm, for example. And then yeah, there's perhaps the even further extreme, where there's no humanity at all. We're just talking about synthetic consciousness. I don't believe that Christianity is incompatible with transhumanism. I don't know that it's necessarily something God wants or doesn't want, but our Bible actually does teach that we do reach a state of, well, it doesn't explicitly say transhumanism, but I don't know any other way to interpret it. In our final book in the Bible, Revelations, there's a verse revelations, 9:6 and it says something along the lines of, and this is talking about, by the way, in the End Times. This is in the future. It says something along the lines of, in those days, humans willl long to die. They'll seek death, but they won't find it. To me, that means, that reads as if we achieve some form of, on earth or in this realm, immortality, and it actually seems to imply that we not only achieve a sort of immortality, but one in which we can't even opt out of it. I don't know how you accomplish that without transhumanism, personally. So I do think that it is almost expected. I'm not going to say necessarily whether a Christian has a viewpoint of whether it's good or not, but I don't think that we necessarily don't believe it's going to happen. Now, when you talk about why Christians might think that that is not something that can be sustained long term, I think even physicists would probably agree that you end up with something like the heat death of the universe through entropy, and so you inevitably die no matter what. Whereas immortality, in most Christian's minds probably means living truly forever. And that's something that can only happen either in the spiritual realm or in this realm if God Himself changes the laws of physics, or does some other means of that. So that's, that's probably where I would fall on that.

Connor Mahoney 1:04:47
Okay, there's a lot of people who are going to want to jump in on this conversation. Again, I'm just going to say that, I really... the language here is just so, it's so it's hard to really define. So I think some disagreements are really going to be about language. But. Yeah, Ian had his hand up. I want to go to Ian, and then I'm going to go to Father Ray, because he's popping in here. And then I've talked a few times to this account. I don't know who's on the account, but Christian transhumanism. I'll let you speak. But please Ian, go ahead.

Ian Huyett 1:05:13
Well, just to quickly mention something Albert said there about the heat death. There's, you may or may not know, there's this entire kind of early 20th century Christian theological concept of the Omega point, which is fundamentally about humanity, through its agency, co participating with God, defeating the heat death. Tielhard de Chardin was kind of- the heat death was really almost the main crux of his theology- he's kind of working around and responding to the heat death. And that's sort of where this idea of the Omega point came from. But I just wanted to answer Lesaun's questions. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that, but you're... to answer your first question. I would say no, there's absolutely no reason that any Christian would oppose remedying any aspect of the fall. I think that, any consequence of the fall, we have a moral duty to do everything that we can to mitigate or remove it, and that's how Christians have always behaved throughout history, doing everything we can to contribute to medicine, to science, to all kinds of infrastructure that improve human well being. And there isn't any end point there. I think as long as we're not deconstructing aspects of our created nature that are positive goods specifically ordained by God as good, then we're moving in the right direction. If we're combating suffering, and we're we're helping the least of these, and that includes, you know, combating degenerative aging, coming up with any remedies that we can for any illnesses that exist as a result of the fall. And your last question was, why do we need Christianity? And that's a big, big conversation, obviously, but I'll just kind of throw out a few poorly formed thoughts in no particular order. And one is that Christians, who are futurists, have a meta ethic that secular futurists don't have. So you know, secular futurists will ultimately, even though it can sound like they're speaking in terms of moral mandates and moral duties, ultimately they'll fall back on sort of their personal taste, you know, the Beff / Connor debate. Ultimately, you know, Beff would make these kind of big declarations of moral duty and cosmic mandates, and Connor would press him on certain specifics, and Beff would ultimately say, you know, well, this is kind of my personal preference, which is really the best that a secular person can do. But Christians have an account of why we have the moral duties that we have, and that has tremendous practical consequences as well. I mean, in terms of who's more likely to succeed, the group of people who thinks that they have an objective moral duty and a cosmic and divine mandate to succeed, or people that just have kind of a certain set of personal tastes? I think history answers that question basically on every page. Look at just in recent history, Afghanistan, the US, spent trillions of dollars, in effect, creating this, you know, artificial first world military structure and middle class, and it fell apart in just a couple of days because it was confronted with sincere religious belief. So it, in practical terms, religious belief and having a meta ethic makes a tremendous difference. And, you know, just historically, I mentioned Teilhard a minute ago. Teilhard was a futurist and talked about subduing the universe and making matter serve consciousness well before the vast majority of thinkers that secular futurists today reference, even before JD Bernal, he was he was writing down basically all of his key ideas in World War One. And then even before that, going back to the late 19th century, before any of the secular futurists were even alive, Nikolai Fyodorov was talking specifically about, we have a God ordained mandate to fill the universe and colonize every planet in the universe. So you can just see how Christianity has, in fact, historically led to these futurist positions before secular people even arrived at them. The American philosopher of religion, Eric Steinhardt, if you don't want to take my word for this as a Christian, said that, and he's himself an atheist, but he said, Look, all secular futurists have basically taken historically Christian ideas and de-sacralized them. So that's kind of what's happened historically. And I think that historical pattern is an argument that shows the philosophical importance of having a meta ethic, and that people who have a meta ethic are actually going to succeed in changing the world.

Connor Mahoney 1:09:40
Father Ray, if you want to go ahead and jump in. Okay, might be tied up at the second. Let's go to Christian transhumanism.

Micah Redding 1:09:52
Hey guys, thanks for having me on. I'm Micah Redding I'm the executive director of the Christian Transhumanist Association. So, I just, as someone who does think Transhumanism is is a worthwhile term for Christians to use and so forth, I thought I would chime in. I totally agree with what Ian was saying about the history of this. In fact, Teilhard de Chardin was one of the first people to use the term transhuman and transhumanity, and he's talking about humanity and in its relationship with God, which is, is this kind of process of transcending our kind of fallen human condition to the transcendent human condition of Christ, right? And this is the kind of origin of these terms. Julien Huxley wrote the forward posthumously of Teilhard de Chardin's, one of his books. And so basically, "yeah, this is what we're trying to take as secular people. We're trying to figure out a secular version of this." And Julian Huxley is the one kind of credited with kicking off the secular, transhumanist movement in modern times. So this is, this is a very long history of Christians involved in this stuff, going back to Francis Bacon in the 1600s writing about science as the mission of God and longevity and so forth as coming out of this. And I think these terms like transhumanism, transhumanism and post humanism, kind of have to be reconfigured when we understand the biblical concept of of what humanity is. At the 2019, TransVision conference in London, a sociologist named Steve Fuller stood up and said, "Transhumanism is always about the image of God," and and I think that's, that's right, it's, it's that question. And when we ask, what does that mean in the biblical story? Right? That's humans living to 900 years, is part of what it means to be human, and is anticipated in Isaiah 65:20 as coming back in the future. So I think a lot of people would call that post human. If you were human living to 900 years, and you know, all this kind of stuff, but in the Bible, that's just humanity made in the image of God. So I think, yeah, that's all within the purview of what Christians are called to do, and have historically understood themselves as being called to do.

Connor Mahoney 1:12:33
Thank you for that. And I think father Ray might be on again if you want to pipe in. Can you unmute Father Ray?

Father Ray Davison 1:12:46
Sorry, I've had to restart my phone twice because the spaces cut out already in this conversation.

Connor Mahoney 1:12:51
Twitter space... Twitter spaces is like that. Anyway, we can hear you. Go ahead.

Father Ray Davison 1:12:55
Okay. Thank you. No, the, there was a original, I missed how revelation 9:6 was meant to apply here, my immediate reaction to again, as you all are talking about transhumanism, can mean many things. The fundamental point of the Christian faith is that God was incarnate as a man, that the second person of the Trinity, took on human flesh, and in so taking on human flesh verified the goodness of the created order, verified the goodness of of matter itself, I, and so to denigrate matter is one of the great errors and one of the, indeed one of the great heresies of the first few centuries of the church that that was that was rejected as as fundamentally incompatible with the truth of, not only the incarnation of Jesus taking on human flesh, but the resurrection itself, that Jesus was resurrected in the body. So a view of using technology to transcend the human form. That's that's incompatible with scripture. Now, what was said about using technology for the betterment of mankind, undoing the fall. I personally, I tend to, I tend.. That's very true, I tend to prefer the language of continuing the work that Adam was commanded to do in the first place, that Adam was commanded to tend the garden and to turn the whole earth, not just the Garden of Eden, this particular place, but that the whole earth would be cultivated to the glory of God, and that whatever we do technologically is part of cultivating the earth. And of course, expand that to the entire... to the solar system, to the universe. That mankind is to expand the kingdom of God to to the outer limits of knowable space. But that's that is definitely part of part of our calling in doing the work that Adam was called to. Not only, not only an undoing of the fall, but because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are able to take up the gauntlet, take up the responsibility that was given Adam in the garden. So those are my responses to the comments that were made as I was on previously.

Connor Mahoney 1:15:36
Appreciate it and singularity hacker. Go ahead.

0xJustice.eth 1:15:41
Yeah, just real quick. I want to say, you know, I think God pretty, you know, the Bible pretty explicitly saysafter the fall that... that God prescribes the average length of man and shortens it, and and it's not totally different than what we have now. And so I look at that, and I say, I don't have any reason to think that we're going to... 200 years, right? So that kind of influences my thinking. There on another point, the questioner, you know, who kind of brought this up a few minutes ago, his original question, there was an aspect of it I didn't think we totally touched on. And he said, "Well, why not make a heaven on earth, right?" And, you know, why can't we do that? And it made me think of Thomas Sowell's a conflict of visions, fantastic book, and he talks about how seemingly disparate political views actually unify under one or two views of man, and those two views are the constrained view and the unconstrained. And what's crazy is, when you look at the unconstrained view, the idea that man is infinitely pliable, and you know, you can, like, maybe educate evil out of him, and it, really, evil and errors exogenous of man. It's not coming from him. You know, you end up with people who, if you look at people who actually believe they could make paradise on earth, these are the people who were basically murderers of millions and hundreds of millions of people you know, and really you know, to come back to the question of like, why do you need Christianity? It's because this is, because, as Jesus said, sin doesn't come into a man by eating a certain way, but it flows from the heart. And the claim of the Bible is that there is only one person who can fix that malady, and it's the resurrected God Jesus. And so that's the hope there. He's the only one, the one who's God and man who can address the core thickness in the heart of man, and that's why we're looking for the resurrection and the Paradise, and only he can bring it that way.

Connor Mahoney 1:17:51
Yeah, and I mean, again, that's why we're having these spaces. We're having these spaces because, like you said, non Christians who are essentially trying to bring a paradise on earth. And I'm not talking about people who are working in medicine and obviously developing great tech, but people who have a vision of of humanity and of the future that is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. Well, it's just not true, and it's not going to work. That's why we need the Christians here. So I'm super happy that we're able to have these conversations. And just to give, maybe briefly, a little bit of insight into my thinking, transhumanism, it's like such a loaded word. And obviously, as we've talked here, I feel like we're all basically saying almost the same thing. Like, if we're going to define transhumanism in this way that that has obviously a lot of historic Christian background. Why would we reject that? We want it, right? But again, because the word has developed in time, and there's this secular aspect to it, so many Christians... I mean, maybe you guys haven't, don't, aren't in the same circles that I'm in. But if I throw transhumanism out there, you know they're gonna choke. So that's really what scares me so much about the word, and what I kind of think e/acc, because it's undefined, it's almost a more useful world in the space. But obviously there's some negative aspects to e/acc. I mean, that's really, that's really where my thinking is. I don't reject the Christian aspects of quote, unquote, transhumanism. It's just that the word is so difficult to define. So okay, a lot of people, I don't know, who put the hand up first Ian or Albert. Albert, go ahead, and then we'll jump to Ian.

Albert Renshaw 1:19:31
Sure thing. And I just wanted to talk and touch on. And you know, I'm probably my words are going to maybe trip over each other a little bit, because the thing I want to express right now is more of a feeling, rather than something I've concretely thought about a lot and put to words, but I'm going to try to answer the question as to why it is beneficial, or even possibly necessary to have Christians involved in this movement, Christianity involved in this movement of futurism. My thinking goes like this. Whenever you're dealing with tech that completely changes the whole shape of the world. There is inherently built into it a sort of fingerprint of humanity that is based on the designer's principles and ethics and morals. Okay, so when you think about the modern world, that the West kind of built a huge portion of that, a majority, I would even say, is influence based on Christianity. Christianity was certainly the majority in a lot of these regions, thanks to Catholicism, the majority in a lot of these regions where innovation was occurring and Christians have a unchanging moral framework that we have to abide by. This is God's morality in a sense, and it's described in the Bible for us, and it doesn't change. So one thing we're seeing now in the west with the embracing of atheism is that the people that are most staunch, and I'm not going to say this is everyone, I'm not classifying everyone, but I am talking statistics here. And so the people that tend to reject Christianity and reject God, I'm not talking about the agnostics, but the true atheists, they are faced with a dilemma where they have to create their own moral framework. And not only do they have to create their own moral framework, it's not allowed to be God's framework. Otherwise, they're agreeing with the thing they've rejected. And I think we're seeing some of that play out now, especially in America, where a ton of what society considers is moral and good is something that is new and manufactured by man. And it's being, it's, it's, it's at ends and at odds with God's morals described in the Bible, which is the traditional morals of the West. And so we're seeing a lot of decay from what we've normally held as like normal life, good life. Just look at Gemini, for example, Google's latest LLM release. It's, It's insane how much what would traditionally be considered immoral, fingerprinting I'll say, is placed into that and that's because it's taking in this new, this new framework of morals and ethics that have been constructed by man, and these are ultimately doomed to fail, in my opinion, long term. But even if you don't believe, in my opinion, you can just look at the history of the West and see nations where Christianity was was in majority. I'll say the innovations all led towards kind of moral principles that I think we all agree with inherently, yes, we have the Spirit of God in us. And so that's that's my opinion. I guess obviously a lot of people are going to disagree, but I think that's my opinion, where it's the moral duty of Christians to be involved in building this. AI is going to spread across the whole world. It's going to be in every single facet in the future. And so if we can't get our ethics and morals kind of built into that framework from the start, well then what is going to fill that space, you know? And it's going to be these human constructed morals and ethics. And those have so far been disastrous, in my opinion. And I think a lot of people agree with that, even if they're not Christian. But you know, I'll leave that to each individual.

Connor Mahoney 1:23:07
Yeah, Ian, go ahead. Jump in.

Ian Huyett 1:23:08
Strongly agree with everything Albert said. A quick question for Micah. Micah, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. I really strongly agreed with the premise of what you said just a moment ago, that according to a biblical view of humanity, living to 900 years, is encompassed within you know what it means to be created humanity, and that's not, as you pointed out, that's not transcending humanity according to a biblical view of what it is to be a created human being, right? So that's not transhumanism, quote, unquote. If that's the case, I mean, am I wrong to think that you have sort of staked your flag to the view that what we ought to support as Christians is transcending humanity? It seems to me that that's what Christian transhumanism means.

Micah Redding 1:23:57
So what I hear you asking is, does transhumanism mean transcending humanity? And I think Scripture uses humanity in both a negative and a positive kind of way, right? There's, I think Paul says in the New Testament, you know, if you bite and devour each other, you are merely human. And so there is a sense in which we are transcending our humanity in partnership with God. And there is another sense in which our humanity is unlimited and infinite because it has been taken up into God and the person of Jesus, Christ. And so what I understand transhumanism, in this context, or Christian transhumanism, to mean, is that we are exploring the range of of what it means to be human, made in the image of God, which is I think much broader than we have maybe considered. We know that, like, like we were talking about, that could be 900 year lifespans. It could be other things. We know it can be like the humanity of Christ, which can ascend into the sky or appear and disappear from from locked rooms, this kind of stuff. All of that is potentially in our future. And so we're talking about transcending humanity as it is now, in partnership with God, but not transcending... humanity in the sense of leaving behind the... our history, our connection to, you know, to the created order, to the incarnation of Christ and so on.

Connor Mahoney 1:25:54
Okay, I'm not, I'm not really sure where to direct the conversation from, from there. Again, I just, I struggle with these, the language, I guess, and so I'm a little bit sometimes, I'm a little bit lost in exactly what we're saying all the times. who unmuted?

Dan Bunker 1:26:12
I did, sorry?

Connor Mahoney 1:26:13
Yeah, if, if you wanted to jump in, I can throw it to you. I will just say, though, again, to Albert's point. And I think kind of the way this conversation is going, like I do, just see these technologies inevitably developing. Like Albert said, AI, AGI is going to spread through the world. And so we have to come to terms with that. But I also think that Christianity is inevitably going to spread through all of creation. Therefore, if Christianity spreads through all of creation, and we build these technologies that that maybe help us embody what it means to be human in stronger and stronger ways, therefore the technology is good, right? Because if, if Christianity is our end point, then the technology that, if it's, if the technology is truly inevitable, it can't be incompatible with Christianity. We have to reconcile that. So, and I want to get more people on to have this kind of transhumanism conversation. I don't know if we're entirely equipped to, you know, to dive too deep into it, but I do think maybe the largest aspect of controversy is going to be on this concept of substrate independence, if we're going to somehow transcend the biological form of humanity. You know, that might be a topic of controversy. I just don't know if we can really dive too deep into it. But I appreciate your your points. Micah, and I have, I can't really say I have anything... I disagree with anything you've said so far. Dan, why don't you go ahead and jump in?

Dan Bunker 1:27:43
Yes, I have a question more for everybody. Would we also agree that say transhumanism would also be us transcending bodily form? You know, when we start using Apple vision pros and like, we have an AI tool we've developed for schools, where you can literally just scan a website and we import all the data, all support user bases, into one single, you know, AI chat bot. Like, we could effectively do that for St Paul or Jesus, right? And you can just talk to AI Jesus, like, where's, what do you guys think of all that sort of stuff? Because, like, you could effectively like, if anyone's spending time on the Apple vision Pro, like, you can do FaceTime, right? And the people in the in the chat look kind of weird. They look sort of semi real, not really that real. But this is the worst it'll be. If you think about, even our conversation we're having right now, where we could all effectively, like we could build, like, a massive 16 chapel, right? And then all of us in this chat room could be sitting in there having a chat, like we are there in real life, like, I feel like the virtual worlds that will be built in the next three years will start to compete with the real world. And is that transgenderism, and sort of what, just yet curious for us to... is that... What do you guys think of that?

Connor Mahoney 1:29:08
Go ahead. Albert,

Albert Renshaw 1:29:10
Yeah, so you brought up some great questions. I personally actually view the prefix trans, to me more like transitional human. Obviously can be interpreted either way, in the Latin. But I view it as a spectrum, where we're transitioning from our purely, I'll say, Earth or dust state, to adding more Earth and dust onto that. Now we're never going to escape that. We're made in the image of God, through our spirit, our souls. So everything else is dust to dust, so to speak, even if we extract silicon and try and get away with it that way. It's a great question you bring up, though, with the Apple vision Pro and whatnot, and this is a classical debate of you know, we already have cell phones on us at all time, and we're connected to the internet, and we can kind of speak telepathically in a sense, by sending text messagesm are we already on that spectrum? Unknowingly? I would argue yes. I think we're in a constant state of transhumanism ever since the invention of technology. I don't think it's inherently a bad thing. Now I'm personally a little conflicted when it comes to post humanism. I personally don't think I would go down that route. But as for transhumanism, I do think we're all already, in a sense, transhumanist. And I think Christians are also going to have a lot of, they're going to have to face a lot of internal conflicts that are a result of their own understanding. And so we're going to have to turn to the Bible and look for a framework for a lot of this stuff. But it's interesting, you brought up the example of humans being in a VR space, perhaps listening to Jesus speak a parable or something, or maybe even interacting with him. I actually have a friend who created a LLM app. I think it's called Cristo AI, and I was against this when I first heard about it, because it was, it just rubbed me the wrong way. But he explained it, it's essentially an AI that assumes the role of Jesus. Now this isn't to say anything, you know, heresy or whatever, that it is Jesus, but rather a tool for people to talk to something and see what the perspective and interpretations would be through that framework. And I believe it even references Bible verses as it brings that up. So you know, it's not claiming to be God per se. Even still, I felt a little uncomfortable with it, but he shared with me that he's actually had a few atheist friends who used it, or I should say, agnostic friends who used it, and have converted to Christianity from that tool and from having those conversations with the LLM pretending to be Jesus. So and, you know, it's funny, humans are told to try and portray Jesus as well. So when I think about it, through that framework, he's actually created a device that's doing some of the commands that we're supposed to do. So initially that rubbed me the wrong way. And then once I heard of the fruits that it bore, I was actually forced to kind of think about it a little more and maybe change my mindset. You know, I'm not sure where I fall still on that, but I think more and more things like that are going to pop up where Christians are going to initially be rubbed the wrong way. But as we can go back to the Bible and kind of think about how we're supposed to properly think about these things and what the truth are. I think we'll hopefully change our mind on a few things, and the main goal should be spreading the message of the gospel. So that's, yeah, that's what I wanted to say there.

Dan Bunker 1:32:38
I'd probably just add to that, but I think maybe to make people somewhat happy with it is maybe Jesus could just bring up Bible verses that would almost be universally accepted. I think maybe the the boundary line, lots people probably agree with would be crossing line would be if Jesus starts just free balling, you know, different words that wouldn't necessarily like, there's a risk, obviously, that the AI could just start talking nonsense, right? I actually told this to my dad last night. He's an elder at our church, and initially he sort of, he said. I said, look, the reality is, you know, within a couple of years, you know, VR and AR will be so prevalent, like there will be AR VR churches, right, and and the place will look amazing. And just like, we're having a conversation, like, I'm in, you know, down under Australia, it's what, nine o'clock in the morning here, and you're, you know, mostly in the US, like, it's incredible. We're connecting over the internet. And I just see, like, the connections, we're accelerating at such a pace that we're 10x in every three months at the moment, in terms of speed of development, if anything, everyone, humanity, is just getting drawn closer and closer together, where we almost just become almost, you know, seconds away from anything. Like it's, I think the church needs to be really ahead of this. Because I think, as you said, like, It's going to freak a lot of people out, like, even, I'll speak to my wife about it. Her cousin does a lot of work in missions in India. And if you look at like, the Eleven labs tech, where they recently, like, you can literally live dub someone's voice, keep their tone, like even language will be non existent. I think in 10 years. You know what I mean? Like, you could literally just speak to someone, and you're speaking as if you learnt their language natively. Like some of the technology coming is just absolutely awesome. I think, yeah, I guess the danger is obviously where we can obviously use the wrong way. Like, what would be your idea of how to use it fruitfully?

Connor Mahoney 1:34:39
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how excited some people are going to be about virtual reality churches, specifically. It's funny though we have, I have a podcast, and we, we've mainly been a blockchain podcast, but ever since AI popped off, and then some of the tech we've, we've kind of done the gambit. Virtual Reality, AI. Yeah, and we did have a, we had a character on who was talking about some virtual reality projects that he was working on in the church. And there was, that was definitely... that was a controversial point in our podcast. I think particularly with some of these, we have some Catholics here and father Ray is Anglican, some that are a little more deeper into sacramental theology. And this is kind of my question too, especially when we're talking about transcending humanity. If you're imagining uploading your consciousness to the cloud, how does that square with with sacramental theology? How are you receiving, you know, the Eucharist, in that that state, I think that. I think that's where Christians are going to maybe question exactly what this really means. So, for example, virtual reality churches. I think it's great that we can, we can do live streams, and we can, you know, communicate, and we can, I think the internet is a great coordination mechanism, and in many ways, actually images what the church's goal ultimately is, which is to unite humanity. Right? The more we can kind of promote these coordination mechanisms of the internet and of capital and of the church and unify humanity. This is good. But specifically when it comes to churches, I do think there's actually something fundamental to Christianity which requires us to gather in person with fellow believers in the material world, if you will. You know, and I don't really have all my language. Maybe I don't even have the thought totally developed yet, but I think there's, I think there's definitely something there. I don't see anybody's hand up, but if anybody wanted to jump in and maybe, okay, so I did see that, Scott, you joined the speaker panel, and you haven't had a chance to introduce yourself yet. So why don't you go ahead and and jump in and tell us. Tell us what you do in the space if you won't mind, and then go ahead and join the convo.

Scott Scharl 1:36:55
Hi, guys. I'm actually one of the Roman Catholics, I guess in the chat. I'm, I don't do anything particular, I guess, in the in this world, except that I work for a software company with customers all over the world who use our our product called ifttt.com. We've rolled out some AI features, kind of using some of the open AI stuff recently, and it's still fairly rudimentary, but I've been very interested about this discussion ever since our company kind of started to make that push. But instead of thinking about... So, I'm not really a gamer. I'm not somebody that spends a lot of time on Discord stuff. I have a lot of friends who are, you know, now, nowadays, since college and stuff, I'm 33 but I have friends scattered all over the country and stuff. So I do keep in touch virtually with a lot of people, but I have, recently, in the last year, made friends with people who are in my new church since I moved to a new town. And anyway, what I'm saying is, instead of thinking of it as a requirement for people to gather, Christians to gather in person and worship and support each other, don't we enjoy that? Don't we want that? Are you? Anyone who's who's been commenting on this stuff? I'm curious to know, do you enjoy the idea, at least conceptually or in reality, of a virtual reality church? Do you get enjoyment out of the idea of hanging out with friends in a virtual place? Don't you like sitting together, touching your friends, shaking their hands, you know, touching their shoulders, grabbing them, you know, eating with them out of the same, you know, dish like gathering together for food, smoking cigars together, like I don't even know whatever it is, those are things that I find rich and enjoyable and meaningful, much more than the time I spend, you know, staring at the screen, obviously. So I just don't, I just wonder, esthetically alone, what are we giving up if we're, if you know, if we're, I'm making kind of a very Luddite argument, I guess, which is perhaps boring to you all, but, but point is, I I'm curious as to it. Does this seem exciting and enticing as much as some of you have have led on or, yeah, I'm not sure. Just curious to know more thoughts on that, and then, yeah, I'm just, I'm just curious about the idea someone mentioned, this is inevitable, therefore we, we should. It should be something that we should pursue. I do believe that was a good point to say, like this is coming, or people are gonna at least try. Somebody's gonna try. Maybe Christians should, should make a stand on it, or be involved in it, or try to influence it. And I see that argument, but I also know, I don't know the famous quote who said it, but somebody said, there's a writer who said, you know, sufficient some certainly advanced technology starts to appear like magic. And I know that things like witchcraft are definitely prohibited for Christians. So is there a point where, yeah, the technology, just because it exists, does that mean we need to pursue it? That's all I have to say.

Connor Mahoney 1:40:12
Well, I see singularity hack has his hand up. I did engage in a conversation with with somebody who probably shares some of your views. A little more Luddite and she, when Apple pro came out, she posted the photo of that, and is like, this is just horrible. It's dehumanizing technology. This, this character, this guy was sitting on a bus, probably New York City metro, with Apple Pro on, Apple pro glasses on, goggles on. And to her that was less than human because he wasn't engaging with the humans who were around him in the physical world. And my take on that is, there's there's a difference. There's obviously good to communicating with humans in physical reality, but we also have to recognize that there's a lot of good that has come from the internet, in the fact that I could even communicate with this lady over the internet who lived, I think she lives up in New York. We would, in a previous time, we would live in totally separate worlds, totally unaware of each other's existence and and I think it's, it's almost foundational to what the church is as a unified, as a global, unifying force for humanity, that we are inventing technologies that now allow us to coordinate with humans across the globe, and, you know, ultimately, probably across the universe. And I think there's a lot of good to that. I also think there's a lot of good to what we do offline, in the in physical existence. So I don't think it necessarily has to be one of the other. And I think it's this. I think there's a mistake to recognize, to not recognize the good that is in both. Singularity hacker, go ahead.

0xJustice.eth 1:41:52
Yeah, I think this is a an awesome analogy that captures, like, like a microcosm of the of the whole situation. And so let's say this is the issue of telepresence, like telepro and or, you know, and virtual worlds and church attendance and.. Again Jesus says as often as you come together do this in remembrance of me. It's like, is that coming together? And, you know, the statement of like, well, don't we enjoy coming together? It's interesting, because it's like we should, and we do enjoy coming together, but we also are very prone to isolate and to not to want to be seen, you know. And like I've, you know. I remember the post COVID, everyone got used to dialing in online, on YouTube, The live stream, or whatever, and then like the pastor saying, "Hey, we're encouraging you to come back, to come back." And it was, it was a long haul to kind of break those patterns because, you know, frankly, it's just easier to sit in your pajamas, on the blanket, on the couch. You know, we're kind of, America entertainment oriented. Serve me. Whatever is convenient for me. And so this is, this is one of those things where the same technology that's going to allow us to beam the good news to people who are shut ins or injured or all around the planet, is also the temptation to say, well, I don't really need to go anywhere, because I get to view it here. And so I think it's, it's the two sides of the same knife, you know?

Connor Mahoney 1:43:23
Okay, well, I don't know if the conversation maybe is a little, is lulling. We don't have to go too long. I think we've done a lot of good with the conversation we've already had. And, you know, we can bring up examples, all sorts of examples, probably all evening, all day, about things that could potentially be negative about technology. But again, I just really think that it's, it's important for us to convey an explicitly positive message for Christians, and I'm glad that we've, we've done a lot of that here in this space, and to maybe, maybe add on to that too, I appreciate that we're able to gather together and maybe talk about some of the dangers of technology. But if that's the focus of our conversation, who are we? Who are we maybe telling to slow down? Well, in this space, we're telling Christians to slow down, right? And so I think maybe sometimes we have the tendency to be overly cautious in Christianity and not really take stock of what we need to do, and that is to build the future. So I appreciate having the discussions about potentially negative outcomes, potentially things that we should be careful about. But if the non Christians are building, we need to be building, you know? So, and there's really no other way to look at that. So if you're afraid of the technology, if you think there's potentially bad use cases for the technology, well, you have to do everything you can, and we have to do everything we can to build a better future. So let's not get too caught up on the pessimistic sides of things. Let's not get too caught up on the fears. Like Alber said, you know, mistranslations, or maybe some biased translations that encourage Christians to fear. We need to consider that we actually have a lot of optimism deeply rooted in the theology of Christianity and in the Word of God, and we need to take, we need to take hold of that, and we need to spread that message as loud and as hard as we can in this space, and the more we can do that, the better outcomes we're going to see. I strongly believe that, maybe some people disagree, but I personally... that's kind of what I've decided my goal here is, is to encourage Christians to to be optimistic and to build the future. So maybe we pass it around. I don't know if some people have some more thoughts they want to kind of add on to that. I know you had your your hand up, Dan, I didn't mean to forestall you. If you wanted to add something to that previous Convo we were having, why don't you go ahead.

Dan Bunker 1:45:47
Oh, good. I was, I was just saying, as we're talking like you said you're in Florida, Connor?

Connor Mahoney 1:45:52
I am.

Dan Bunker 1:45:53
Yeah. Like, imagine if this Twitter space is right, there's like a virtual fireside chat. And you know, when we sign into your hometown, we're on the beach, you know, in Miami, all talking about Jesus. And then you could log into India, and then there's, you know, Christians talking there. Like, you could literally just jump around the world and join different Christian groups. Ideas could spread really fast, like, that's, that's, I'd say, an inherent positive thing. And then obviously you can then bring those cool ideas back to your home church and still have that physical gathering. But, like, we're effectively doing this already right now, but it's just with audio. Like, how cool would it be that we're all able to see each other, interact, and see our expressions and nod and have a, essentially a fireside chat? 24/7 I think that'd be just the coolest thing.

Connor Mahoney 1:46:43
Yeah, 100% agree. You know, I'm and, and I like having these conversations. We're gonna have more of them. I'm gonna try. I think I'm gonna try to do like, every two weeks. And actually, I'm super excited, because I've been talking to this so Ian mentioned Nikolai, so he he actually pronounced the last name correctly I'm imagining, because that's the way Ian is.

Ian Huyett 1:47:03
Fyodorov.

Connor Mahoney 1:47:05
Okay. I call him Fedorov because that's how it's spelled.

Ian Huyett 1:47:09
I promise it's Fyodorov.

Connor Mahoney 1:47:10
I believe you. I do so, and he's a Russian cosmicist, or probably, I think, pre Cosmicist, but a Christian Russian Orthodox thinker in the 1800s that had a lot to say about Christianity and Christian theology, and I think it's so incredible that Christians were thinking about Christian futurism all the way back in the 1800s. So we're gonna have, I think we're gonna try to organize a space maybe in another two weeks. We have Easter coming up. So if I do three weeks, at some point there's going to probably need to be a three week break, because nobody's going to join over Easter. So we either do next two weeks or maybe another three weeks. Talk about Nikolai Fedorov, I still can't pronounce it anyway, and Teilhard De Chardin, another excellent Christian thinker in this space. And I don't know, maybe we can add some more, but maybe those two. I think that might be the focus of the next conversation. We'll see, but I'm super excited to see what they have to contribute to the conversation. Okay, well, Albert and I know singularity hack, maybe he just had to jump off, but Albert was one of my initial panelists, so maybe you want to give some, like, final words and tell us kind of, you know, whatever message you want to leave us with.

Albert Renshaw 1:48:28
Sure thing. Yeah. My main thing is, I just think if you're heading towards an inevitable future, that is we're not going to be able to stop this type of AI progression, you need to be on the optimistic side, and you need to be wanting to put your views into that. If you think your views are honorable, that is. So I do encourage Christian founders to continue to build in the AI arms race, so to speak. And I think it's a good thing. I do think, personally, that the future is going to be beautiful. I'm excited for it. And I also just wanted to say one final thing, if there's any non Christians in this conversation, even if you're listening in the recording later on, feel free to reach out to me through DM if you're interested in Christianity or salvation, or if you have any questions, and I'm sure any of the speakers here would be happy to answer those. I will definitely respond if you DM me.

Connor Mahoney 1:49:20
God bless everyone. Everybody. Have a great Sunday. Have a great week and continue building.