I rewatched the 90’s classic film Terminator 2 – Judgment Day. The film is set in the 2020s and deals with very topical issues, such as a self-aware artificial intelligence that has declared war on humanity. Well, maybe not so topical yet, but such a future has been seriously feared for at least a couple of decades by many internationally renowned science writers and technologists such as Elon Musk. No serious AI expert would claim that today’s language models that generate images, videos and text are self-aware AI. Nor their fear is that AI will become self-aware as it evolves into so-called general artificial intelligence, where it becomes as intelligent as a human, and general super-intelligence, where it transcends human intelligence and transforms itself into some kind of omniscient and omnipresent “god”.

We cannot even understand the mechanism and source of consciousness in the human brain, much less replicate it in machine learning neural networks. And increasingly computationally powerful computers cannot magically induce consciousness in the machine’s “brain”. The idea of self-aware computers is ultimately based on a very materialistic view of the world, which also sees man as a mere algorithmic machine without the soul/spirit that God breathed into him when he was created. The fear of the experts has rather been that such a super-intelligence – self-aware or not – would be beyond human understanding and control, and would begin to achieve its goals even at the expense of the survival of the human race.

For example, a super-intellect AI with the beliefs and goals of fanatical environmentalists might reason that the quickest and most cost-effective way to stop climate change is to destroy the human race and civilisation because humans are the biggest polluter on the planet and the primary source of greenhouse emissions. And if the nuclear launch codes of all the world’s armies or all the world’s autonomous weapons would be under the power of that super-intelligence, then the vision of the Terminator movies could literally come true. However, hypotheses of such an omnipotent super-intelligence are, at this stage, still mere science fiction.

However, artificial intelligence is now part of everyone’s vocabulary, whereas 10-20 years ago it was only known in Hollywood science fiction films. The origins of AI research go back to the 1950s and for this reason it has also been a common theme in Hollywood and science fiction, where new areas of technological research are often closely followed. Below is ChatGPT’s response:

Science fiction is often right in its predictions about technological developments because it is often based on existing scientific and technological trends, which it then takes forward and imagines their future applications. Sci-fi writers observe current technological and scientific advances and consider their possible trajectories. Science fiction also encourages thinking “outside the box”, which can lead to new ideas and innovations. This ability to see beyond the present and connect existing technologies to new contexts allows science fiction writers to anticipate future inventions and their impact on society.

In other words, both draw inspiration from each other, science fiction writers from the developers of new technologies and the developers of new technologies from science fiction writers. In this sense, science fiction is also an example of a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Not all Sci-Fi portrays technological progress as a negative or dystopian thing, but the Terminator films are one of the most famous examples of this dystopian genre. The films have many parallels with the Book of Revelation. Part Two begins with a description of how three billion people perished in an apocalyptic nuclear war in what the survivors called, in biblical terms, the “Judgement Day”. This was followed by a new nightmare: self-aware artificial intelligence program Skynet’s war on humans, which waged war against humans with autonomous weapons and Terminator humanoid robots designed as killing machines.

At the end of the film there is also a description of the hellish lake of fire into which these killing machines are condemned. The director of the films, James Cameron, also known for his film Titanic, may have deliberately referred to the Book of Revelation with this imagery. In the fictional timeline of the films, a nuclear war was fought in 1997 and the first killer robots are produced in 2024, and in the opening scene of part two they wage war on humans in Los Angeles in 2029. As for the development of humanoid robots, Cameron’s timeline is not that far from reality, with the world’s first industrial and domestic humanoid robots being put on sale this year. Below is one of these fellows, although it doesn’t look nearly as scary as the red-eyed, super-tough killer robots of Cameron’s films. However, the agility and balance is top notch compared to the clumsiness with which such humanoid robots moved just 10 years earlier.

Boston Dynamics’ dancing robots from a few years ago were also good branding for those who fear the emergence of humorless and violent terminators.

The Ameca robot, on the other hand, is not quite as agile and swinging as its counterparts above, but it is all the more expressive and talkative.

And Figures has excellent reasoning skills and the ability to communicate in a way that sounds very human.

I myself was very much inspired and influenced in my own eschatological research career by Finnish author Teijo-Kalevi Lusa’s books, which I read at the age of 15. In his 2004 book Lopun ajan salaiset kansiot (The X Files of the End Times), he wrote:

Mechanisation is spreading to all areas of life. The development of robotic technology has also brought back the old horror that machines are becoming smarter than humans. At some point, robots will become self-aware and self-sufficient individuals and begin to evolve independently of humans. Eventually, machines will rule the world. Science magazine 12/2003 published a shocking article in the section “Wild visions of the evolution of machine intelligence. Robo sapiens”. Here are some key ideas and facts from the article.

Bill Joy is a leading US information technology expert and former president of Sun Microsystems. He believes that as early as 2020, computer intelligence will reach the so-called technological singularity, the point where they are as intelligent as humans. In ten years’ time, machines will be far more intelligent than humans. The key question, according to Joy, is what will be the role and significance of humans when they are no longer needed? Most people become literally redundant and power is concentrated in the hands of a small technological elite.

The undocumented part of the population is a burden and a burden, and may be disposed of, for example, by chemical sterilisation. Eventually, machines will also displace the elite. Machines are already so intelligent that they can do without their masters… The robots themselves begin to produce an increasingly sophisticated generation of machines, learning from each other and designing their own work. Humans may even be destroyed. Bill Joy calls this development commercial evolution, where the main thing is to make a quick profit in the market. As IT inventions quickly generate profits, more and more resources are being invested in their development. Their development is accelerating without anyone monitoring it or even considering what it might lead to. Joy has therefore suggested that an international ban on the development of technologies “beyond a certain level” should be considered.

Another great IT guru, Ray Kurzweil, has formulated the so-called law of accelerating returns. According to this law, knowledge begets profitable technology, which in turn begets more knowledge. In this way, a self-sustaining and accelerating process is created. Kurzweil also believes that in 20 to 30 years, computers will be more intelligent than humans and will create their successors without human help. However, Kurzweil is much more blue-eyed about developments and does not see the future as bleak as Joy does. He believes that sooner or later humans and computers will merge. There is no danger of AI taking over when you integrate it into your own body. As the old saying goes: the best way to survive your enemies is to ally with them!

The pace of development is accelerating, and no one is putting on the brakes. People are under the spell of technology. And few are aware that this development is leading to an anti-Christian world state and the worst surveillance society in history. I believe that if the return of Jesus is delayed and humanity makes it to the 2020s, we will live in a very mechanical and apocalyptic world, reminiscent of the Terminator films and similar haunting visions of the future. An interesting detail, by the way, is that Terminator 2 – Judgement Day is set in 2029. In this science fiction scenario, man has almost destroyed himself and the machines that rule the world.

Recently, I found a science fiction novel among my papers that I had written as a teenager in 1985. I had forgotten that I had written such a story and reading it now, years later, I couldn’t help but be moved. I saw the film mentioned above and only discovered the short story I had written when my book The End of the World 2028? was published in October 2001. The title of my book, of course, has nothing to do with these science fiction productions, but I had arrived at the year in question by following four independent lines of research (see the first chapter, sub-chapter Prophetic Year 2028). In 2001, the Danish prog band Royal Hunt released a CD called The Mission. Known for their serious and intelligent approach, this album tells a future-oriented story about the fate of planet Earth and humanity.

The imaginative narrative takes the listener from the beginning of the millennium to 2026, in a hauntingly supernatural end-of-life world. IT gurus Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil, quoted above, also place their terrifying visions of AI development and machine rebellion in the 2020s. Many traces lead to the 2020s. This decade features strongly in various speculations about the future. Scientists warn and science fiction stories paint pictures of the future. All these examples are prophetic signals in their own right. When there is silence in the church of God, then the stones cry out.

I borrowed and expanded on these ideas of Lusa’s already ten years ago in my book Muhammad, Charlemagne and the Antichrist chapter 8, which I had entitled Posthumanism, RFID and the Mark of the Beast. In it I connected the techno-utopian visions of the future of posthumanists with the prophecies of Revelation about the mark and image of the beast. I very much shared Teijo-Kalevi Lusa’s more technopessimistic perspective at the time, but today I see it all in a slightly more balanced light. Ten years ago, I would never have imagined that I would one day have in-depth conversations with AI myself and ask it to generate text, images and videos for me. “Skynet” was supposed to be a killer, but it turned out to be a personal assistant to me and millions of others.

So I still believe that these developments in AI and robotics are contributing to the world’s move towards the totalitarian control society predicted in Revelation 13, but I see technological developments today as both positive and negative. Indeed, I see inventions such as artificial intelligence as mere tools of the human mind that can be used for both good and evil. The Antichrist will harness these inventions for evil, but that does not mean that the technology itself is evil. Television and radio can be used to promote both the Christian gospel and Satanism, but that does not make these inventions in themselves good or evil. The same is true of artificial intelligence.

However, in general and in a broad historical perspective, we can view technological progress in a positive light if it increases people’s control over their environment. After all, all technology is essentially a tool created by the brainchild of the human brain to help us survive in an uncertain and hostile environment, and to exercise our God-given control over nature.

In science fiction films like Terminator, technology and humanity are pitted against each other. It is as if technology develops on its own or because a few “mad scientists” develop it for governments. The AI in the films is a force independent of and hostile to humans. This is a common mistake among many who are pessimistic about technological developments. I just had a discussion with ChatGPT on this topic. You can read our entire discussion at this link, I’m just quoting some of my own text feeds for it, and I’m not referencing the bot’s own responses as it just reflects and expands my own views.

Isn’t it also often a flaw in visions of apocalyptic developments in such AI that they automatically pit man against machine? When in reality, as the intelligence of machines increases, so does that of humans. Or at least it’s giving people easier access to information that used to be much harder for humans to access. For example, today language models like ChatGPT can be used to educate and train yourself on almost any subject…

“This can free up people’s time and energy for more creative and strategic thinking.” This is a good point. AI can accelerate people’s ability to think creatively because it makes it easier for them to access an almost limitless amount of information (just as the internet did in the past) and new perspectives that they may not have considered before. AI itself does not benefit from its vast amount of data because it is just a machine that inputs text based on a text prompt given to it. But a human using AI can use it to learn new things and perspectives, which in turn will further accelerate his or her creative thinking.

Indeed, it is a mistake to see AI as something separate from humans, evolving autonomously to become more and more intelligent, independent of humans. AI needs humans to learn new things, and humans in turn need AI to learn new things. It is also worth remembering that while AI has learned from a huge amount of textual data, that data is originally human-generated. In other words, AI represents a kind of repository of humanity’s collective knowledge and understanding, a “library of humanity’s collective brain” through which we can more easily access that collective knowledge. But AI itself does not create new information or challenge existing wrong information or wrong paradigms of the nature of reality. This requires creative thinking by human individuals, which AI can only enhance.

Because if you think, theoretically for example, that AI had already been developed at the end of the Middle Ages, its data would have contained only erroneous information of that time to defend Aristotle’s geocentric worldview. However, a human would still have been needed to correct this erroneous data and worldview. So AI alone could not have revolutionised the history of science.

To this last observation, the AI responded: “This is an excellent and pertinent example of how AI acts as a repository of knowledge and how its limitations become apparent without the active participation of humans. The idea that AI was developed in the late Middle Ages and trained with the knowledge of that time is a good illustration of the nature and limitations of AI…” Often those conversations with that ChatGPT bot feel like a kind of self-talk because it just repeats, expands and restructures the points I already make to it in my text feeds. But at the same time it is a good example that it is not really capable of creative (out-of-the-box) thinking in the same sense as a human, but only repeats the information it has learned during its training process. But, of course, I could also use it to learn new perspectives with text prompts like “present counter-arguments to my ideas X and Y.”