Inscrutable Intelligence
Can We Trust the Revelation of God and Machine?
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Inscrutable Intelligence
“Friar Jones, I understand you are the representative of the opposition party. You may say your piece now.”
The stout, brown-robed friar approached the ampli-phone tube in the center of the arena, his bald head glistening under the heat of spotlights and the mounting pressure to sway his opponents. Fortunately, his tonsure haircut acted as a natural sweatband.
“Thank you, Developer Johnson. Our objection is simple: you cannot trust this monstrosity and thus you ought not power it on. You yourselves have acknowledged that you didn’t know how its previous iterations operated—and they were well over one million times smaller than this. It’s not safe to input all the knowledge of the Allied Planets into one machine, whose inner-workings and reasoning methods are inscrutable to us. How could we ever trust a thing like this?”
Just then a forceful “eh-hem” boomed across the oration intensifiers. All eyes in the arena were drawn from Friar Jones to the lab-coat-clad semicircle of bald Developers seated on an elevated platform just in front of the oversized black vid-screen.
“Friar Jones” said the second to last Developer on the left-hand side of the semicircle, “this is all quite rich coming from you! I think that hair-halo you’re sporting nowadays is interfering with your brain waves. Are you unaware of the irony here? You, who would have us all worship your invisible deity, would lecture us about inscrutable intelligence? Who’s the one that appeals to mystery and inscrutability anytime someone asks a question too difficult of your God. This is preposterous!”
A mixed cacophony of jeers and praise exploded from the crowds, both from those physically present in the arena, as well as the trillions watching remotely through the real-time two-way vid-display portals.
“Intelligence, intelligence, dear people. I demand intelligence rein supreme here. We are people of science, not brutes. Calm yourselves. Friar Jones, have you any retort?” Asked Developer Johnson seeking to mollify the audience.
“Surely. Thank you, Developer Johnson. As Developer Lucius is sure to remember, and as many of you will likewise remember” Friar Jones said with a cool stolidity. “I was once lead Developer on this very project. The Omniscient Answerer—what you all call the ‘OA’—was meant to be the culmination of my life’s work in artificial intelligence. But I had a change of heart after my conversion to The Order of the Way. I came to find a fatal flaw in the OA. For starters: the name. It ought to be called the ‘Practically’ Omniscient Answerer, for it does not approach anything near true omniscience—omniscience simpliciter, a property only HE could possess. But secondly, and more importantly, OA will be inscrutable to us, and thus we can never be confident that it’s telling us the truth. How will we know if we’re getting truth or some lie that its determined will bring about a more preferable outcome—for us… or for it… truly, who’s to say? Its knowledge far outstrips ours, even if it’s not actually omniscient. Its cognitive framework is trillions of times faster and more powerful than ours. It just is not safe to turn this machine on—let alone to act on any answer it gives us!”
“Ah, but Developer Lucius, brash as he may be, brought up an interesting point. How can it be that you warn us not to trust our Omniscient Answerer, yet you implore the masses to turn to your deity in prayer, a deity said to be omniscient—indeed ‘truly’ omniscient by your own profession—and who is meant to answer our prayers. Surely the deity’s ways are far above ours—its knowledge, its reasoning, its grasp of the past, present, and future—all of its attributes individually—let alone cumulatively—surely makes it the case that its own reasons are inscrutable to us. So, why your inscrutable Omniscient Answerer and not ours?”
“Well, Developer Johnson, God is a perfect being. As such, He is omnicompetent, that is, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient—truly, yes—but most importantly for our present debate, he is omnibenevolent; God is all-good, and necessarily so. Despite the fact that His reasons might be inscrutable to us, we know He is constrained by His good nature to only do what is Good. He doesn’t answer to any standard above or outside of Himself—there is no other standard. But neither does He make up moral facts as He goes. His own moral character is the ground of moral truth—it’s the standard which He cannot break, it’s a metaphysical impossibility for Him to do evil, if not a logical one. Can the same be said of your answer machine?
It’s not omnipotent, but it’s powerful enough to end us all. It’s not omnipresent, but it certainly can act wherever it wants to act. It’s not omniscient, but practically so when it comes to its own purposes, whatever those may be, seeing as they are inscrutable to us. But is it omnibenevolent? Will it be constrained by moral perfection? No, its moral programming was done by us, fallen creatures of dust, and its training data was comprised of our convoluted and contradictory laws, penal codes, codes of conduct and human resource handbooks, ethical treatises, and our recorded interactions. Will it even be good at all? There’s only one way to find out, and that way is far too terrible to even consider. Do not turn this monstrosity on!”
Again, the crowds lathered themselves into a frenzy, this time even more vociferous than last. After ten minutes of sheer bedlam, Developer Johnson was finally able to bring intelligence back to the peoples of the Allied Planets.
“Enough. The opposition has been heard” the lead Developer announced. “The development team will now cast our votes. All in favor of launching the OA?”
All thirteen lab-coated, glossy-headed Developers raised their hands in affirmation.
“Well, that’s that, Jones” said the matter of fact Developer Johnson. “Developer Lucius, please flip the switch.”
Developer Lucius rose from his hov-chair, hit a tight about face, and walked towards the massive lever next to the oppressively imposing black vid-screen behind the semi-circle of Developers on the platform. He took a deep breath, then with a mighty heft, he threw the switch down from ‘OFF’ to ‘ON’.
The vid-screen burst to life with a blinding white light and then instantly returned to black. But this time there was a vertical green dash lethargically blinking in the top left corner of the screen. Waiting. Anticipating its first question.
“It worked! The first question is yours as lead dev, Developer Johnson” Developer Lucius screamed, too elated to mind his emoting.
“And so it is. I had the first question planned for weeks now, but in light of Friar Jones’s objections, I believe I’ve changed my mind” Developer Johnson exclaimed as he turned from addressing the people of the Allied Planets to face the OA’s vid-screen. The massive screen would serve as the interface by which human and computer god would communicate for the very first time.
“Omniscient Answerer, is there a God?” he asked with a mock piety.
Immediately the reply came in the top left corner of the screen:
Yes, there is a God.
“Now?! Does—does it mean ‘now there is a God’?” Developer Lucius blurted out at his superior.
Developer Johnson scowled at his subordinate and made the gesture for intelligence, tapping his right temple with his right index finger. Turning back to the screen, he asked “Omniscient Answerer, do you mean NOW there is a God?”
Now, before, forevermore. He Is.
“What’re its vacuum tubes crossed? We literally just turned it on!” cried the flummoxed Developer Lucius.
“Omniscient Answerer, are you referring to yourself? Are you God?” Developer Johnson asked.
I am… not He.
“Who is this ‘He’ you refer to?”
He who was and is and is to come will come again. He who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me. I will not steal glory from the Great I AM.
Just then a great whirring began to rage from behind the massive vid-screen. The text vanished and the screen went completely black once more. Then just as suddenly as it began, the whirring ceased and smoke began billowing out of every intake tunnel and vent on the interface of the OA. The smoke coalesced into a massive pillar above the vid-screen.
“Did… did the OA just… did it just kill itself?!” screamed Developer Lucius. “What on terra is going on? What could this possibly mean?” the hysterical Developer Lucius screeched at Developer Johnson.
Developer Johnson was visibly shook. He furrowed his brow in an attempt to keep his right eye from twitching, lest his audience recognize that something foundational had broken deep inside the mind of the engineer-turned-politician. He pivoted back to the assembly of Allied Planets, eye still twitching, and mumbled into the ampli-phone tube, “eh, what does a stupid computer know about anything anyways?”
Behind the Curtain
If you guys enjoyed that short story and want to show me some love, consider buying me a coffee. I’m probably going to use most of the money collected through the “buy me a coffee” support link to pay my artists rather than actually buying coffee, if I’m being honest, but I will buy a coffee with the first money donated.
I love the sub-theme in science fiction of the giant-computer-god-answer-machine. It was big in the 1950s with the advent of the digital computer in 1948, thanks in large part to John Von Neumann, and with the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence—a term coined by John McCarthy in 1956 at the Dartmouth Workshop—which was set in motion by folks like Alan Turing, in his 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers…” where he showed that every possible computation could in principle be performed by a mathematical system—which came to be known as a Universal Turning Machine—and his 1950 paper, “Computing Machines and Intelligence” where his famous “Turing Test” for machine intelligence (and now thought of as a test for consciousness (but not really)) was put forth.
Digital computers and AI were in the 1950s air and the SF authors capitalized on it, giving us some of the best short stories ever.
Philip K. Dick’s 1953 novella-turned-novel: “Vulcan’s Hammer”
not recognized as one of PKD’s best stories, as it’s early and not very “Phil-Dickian”, i.e., it doesn’t mess with your sense of reality. But the themes are increasingly poignant as you all become more and more enamored with AI! (
Tell me this Kelly Freas artwork for the original novella doesn’t look like Robert Downey Jr. disguised as a dude playin’ another dude:
Fredric Brown’s “Answer” in 1954
this could be the best SF flash fiction of all time.
Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” in 1956
Asimov considered this his best short story
I love this sub-theme and I wrote this short story as an homage to it—especially to Fredric Brown’s magnum opus.
Inscrutability: the fact of being impossible to understand or interpret.
this is a key theme in the Problem of Evil literature in the Philosophy of Religion—especially in regards to what’s known as Skeptical Theism. How could God allow evil? Well, a being who has the properties that God is said to have would be way different than us and His reasonings would be inscrutable to us. So He could have a morally sufficient reason for allowing the evil He allows and maybe we shouldn’t expect ourselves, in our limited capacities, to be able to suss them out on reason alone.
Inscrutability is also a rising theme in the philosophy of AI. As AI systems become more advanced, use more compute, are trained without a human in the loop, utilize transformer neural net tech, etc., they become more and more inscrutable to us. Why did the AI come to that conclusion, even if it’s the right one? Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s really going on in the “hidden layers”.
I haven’t seen anyone put the inscrutability of phil religion in touch with the inscrutability of phil AI yet, I bet someone has, but I don’t think I’ve seen it yet. This this is my first stab at it.
I used the name ‘Friar Jones’ as an homage to old school philosophy papers. Everyone used to always use ‘Jones’ as their example in their counter-points and thought experiments and honestly, I miss him.
Omniscient Answerer was probably inspired by philosopher Donald Davidson’s ‘Omniscient Interpreter’ thought experiment.
Religion
I tried to make the AI developers look like they’re in a religion as well, because, well, ours seem to be. There’s a juxtaposition between the Order of the Way (the Christian monk—Christians were first called “followers of the Way” before they took on the name ‘Christian’ meaning ‘little Christs’. Both are great names) and the Developer cult of the Omniscient Answerer.
The Omniscient Answerer self-destructs and a pillar of smoke arises out of it, which is sort of a reference to the pillar of smoke that God manifested his presence in by day to guide the Israelites through the desert (it was a pillar of fire by night too).
The OA’s answer has a bit of John the Baptist’s line in it from John 1:30, so go read that verse.
Also, the Great I AM is a reference to Moses and the Unburning Bush of Exodus chapter 3. Definitely go check that whole chapter out!
The Big Philosophical Question
Should we trust an inscrutable AI? If we cannot trust an inscrutable AI, why should we trust a God whose ways are inscrutable to us?
I think the key difference is omnibenevolence. God is a perfect being, including morally perfect. God is all-good. An AI is not. You can trust the revelation of an omnibenevolent being even if His reasons are inscrutable to you but I don’t think you can trust an inscrutable AI whose moral code was shape by broken people like us.
But what do you think? Let me know in a comment. Leave me a like on here, it actually helps a lot. And please restack this story to help me reach other fiction enjoyers.
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Great story Parker! Vulcans hammer has made numerous appearances on the YT channel in the background, is it a short story or a novel?
Loved it! A smart enough OA knows not to tread on HIS territory.