The other day I compared AI to the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then I was conversing with ChatGPT about a complicated math problem it solved, the quasi-Riemann hypothesis, about the distribution of prime numbers or something else I don’t understand.
The way it was done was more interesting and potentially more impactful than the solution itself. AI connected two previous solutions together to solve a new problem. To people they looked completely unrelated but AI does not have our institutional knowledge or biases. It is in some ways like the creation of Behavioral Economics. Which shows that people would have gotten there eventually, but AI was able to make the connection faster.
That brings us back to the Bible and to a different story from Genesis. AI doesn’t have a language barrier. One day at church a kid asked me what a Korean portion of the hymnal said. I took a photo and put it into ChatGPT, and in less than a minute I had a full translation. This isn’t all that remarkable by itself. Google translate has existed since I was in college in the early 2000’s. What is interesting is it was a photo from my phone and that it was done that fast.
Combine this with the way AI solved the math problem. AI could look through all collected human knowledge and find solutions to problems we thought unsolvable. Cold fusion is the first that comes to mind but there are likely even more. What if there are lost philosophies sitting in a library in Turkey from the Byzantian or Ottoman Empires, and what if when we combine those with our modern philosophies we suddenly end up with solutions that have plagued society for generations.
The lack of language barrier is not but is the tower of Babel. People all spoke one language and all worked together to solve all of humanities problems, and with no problems to face they decided to build a tower to the heavens. God was displeased with the arrogance of man and scattered humanity and gave them all different languages. Now AI can completely restore that unification, at least when it comes to language, and it is both exciting and scary to think about, because what if Cortes and Montezuma had this technology. How would that reshape history?
