A Brief History of Sins

Seems that after clarifying the fate of black holes to a slightly less dismal gray, the impressive mathematician Stephen Hawking has looked through his telescope and turned its focus from the origins of the universe to the future of mankind. What he discovered caused him to declare that man's search for ever increasing artificial intelligence poses the greatest threat to humanity. He compares it to an arms race where the very technology that we hope will liberate us will strip us of the purest essence of human identity.

In every age. century, decade and year the thinkers of the world will proclaim that something is the biggest threat to our very existence. The cries predicting the end of humanity predate the pharaohs, continued through royal divine investiture, permeated the formation of republics, democracies, and tyrannical regimes; and through it all humanity has managed to thrive. But these warnings serve a valid purpose to promote a wiser use of progress.

Whenever these cries of worry predict that we will meet our doom because of the dangerous possibilities of new inventions and technologies, I find comfort when I evaluate the risks against a classic summary of human folly: The Seven Deadly Sins. They are greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony and wrath.

Greed: Computerized stock trades are executed in faster than human fashion to make the rich richer because they can.

Sloth: We look to our smart phones, tablets and computers to make our lives  easier as we pursue leisure and avoid work.

Pride: The battles between Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Google confirm that it's not enough to choose the right, but the need for others to be wrong.

Lust: Let's not limit artificial intelligence to the confines of sex. In the modern age of assisted lust we seek pleasures anywhere they might be found and we often want them for free.

Envy: My own experience, and I try to avoid the power of marketing, exposes the tendency to want the next best thing yesterday. But in modern envy we need to get that thing before our neighbor rather than from our neighbor.

Gluttony: As I just purchased a laptop for my son, we are approaching twice as many computing devices for every person who is in our family. I dare not stop and count, in case we have already done so.

Wrath: When our greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony go unsatisfied, or if the artificial intelligence sputters or fails, beware the anger of that man or woman.

So it may seem that Mr. Hawking had a little more insight than what I originally presumed, except for one thing. These sins are the very things that make us simply human. The great thinkers have perceived a quality of existence that extends beyond the limits of these basic wants and desires. I fear that the race toward artificial intelligence merely guarantees the continued embodiment of humanity unless we are willing to jointly repudiate these tendencies and collectively work to rise above.