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I wrote about the prophesied image of the beast in Revelation 13 in my first book Muhammed, Charlemagne and the Antichrist, which I published as an online book in January 2015. In that and subsequent works, I advanced the theory that the image of the beast might be a hologram or a technology that creates such an illusion, such as Prince Charles was projected on the stage in Abu Dhabi 17 years ago (he was one of the first world leaders to embrace that technology, alongside Al Gore). But for the last 10 years I have also been following with interest the emerging VR and AR technologies, in which billions of euros have been invested by the world’s leading tech companies such as Meta/Facebook.
I just ordered my first VR/AR headsets myself. VR (Virtual Reality) refers to virtual reality, which I had the chance to try out in Tampere a few years ago, and AR (Augmented Reality) refers to augmented reality, i.e. glasses through which you can see the environment normally, but with a set of virtual objects, either three-dimensional or two-dimensional, mixed into the room. As AR glasses become more widely used, the need for two-dimensional displays, such as TVs, laptops and smartphones, will disappear altogether because you will be able to view a virtual screen with the same resolution and brightness, whose size and position in your field of vision can be changed either by hand gestures, eye movements or voice commands.
You can also choose to black out the rest of the environment or immerse yourself completely in the three-dimensional virtual reality and watch Netflix, for example, in a “virtual cinema”. This kind of meta-reality resembles the future depicted in science fiction films like Minority Report, where personalised holographic ads are everywhere (the film was released in 2002, before the era of personalised ads).
Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, such glasses can also be equipped with a personal AI assistant, which can be asked about any object in your field of vision and asked to translate into English, for example, a text written in Mandarin Chinese. Such a function already exists in my own phone’s ChatGPT app where I can turn on the camera and it will recognise objects in my room or know what my T-shirt says. Recently, for example, I showed it my latest book cover and asked it if it recognised this book. The bot immediately replied in an excited voice: “Of course I do, Samuel. This is your new book Adam 2.0 or Beast 6.66?” And when I asked for a summary of the contents of the book, the bot did that too in no time. A robot called ChatGPT TARS functions in the same way. In the the video below it even recognises its own reflection, which even many animals can’t do.
The popularity of AR glasses is only likely to explode when the most affordable, versatile yet lightweight version is available, with optimal battery life. Meta or Facebook is currently developing such glasses and may release one in the near future. There are already many different AR glasses available today that resemble ordinary reading glasses or sunglasses, but which act either as artificial intelligence assistants or as virtual displays that can be connected to a smartphone or laptop with a USB cable, for example. At the moment, AR glasses with their own operating system are still pretty big gadgets that most people wouldn’t put on when going to the store (unless they want to look like a complete idiot).
Someone who has browsed my site may have noticed that there are also virtual artificial people on my site, reading aloud the texts on my page. It is already possible to create such avatars in many different AI services. In fact, I reported on them on my blog about five years ago in my article Augmented Reality, Digital Clones and the Image of the Beast. I included a video in that article where these artificial people were completely indistinguishable from real people, but made from the facial features of real people.
If this technology existed five years ago, within the next five it could be mainstream. So in 2030, anyone could create a digital clone of themselves that looks exactly like the person who created it. In addition, the AI could be trained with that user’s own voice and speech pattern, and our own thoughts by feeding it all our social media posts, blog posts, YouTube videos, email and text messages, for example. With enough video data, this digital avatar could also learn the user’s personal mannerisms and gestures, such as, in the case of President Trump, his iconic “invisible accordion playing”.
In fact, I believe that such digital clones would be the next big thing in AI applications and the most likely direction of development. After all, people value personality and authenticity. We don’t want to follow some impersonal artificial people created by corporate algorithms – no matter how real they look. Even in the age of artificial intelligence, we still value that genuine vulnerable humanity, a person with its own history, its own weaknesses and strengths, and its own individual personality. AI, on the other hand, is not a personal or individual being. So how can we reconcile this personal human and impersonal AI? Well, by creating a digital doppelganger that mimics the persona of that person.
As an active AI user, I have already noticed this myself. The more “personal” an AI becomes – that is, the more it adapts to the personality and values of its user and remembers their previous conversations – the more its use attracts people. Incidentally, I recently analysed all my previous ChatGPT conversations by exporting them to my computer (I also took all my blog posts in case they were lost). I had accumulated over the last 10 years a little over a million words of blog posts and had published over half a million words more in my books. But my ChatGPT conversations (including both my prompts and the AI’s responses to them) already exceeded a million words in the last year, so my output increased tenfold with the help of AI. So all of these, my blogs, my books and my ChatGPT conversations, would yield two and a half million words worth of text data. I could use it to train a self-published ChatGPT, a kind of Samuel 2.0, which I could put on my website 24/7. I could also train it to speak in my own voice and manner of speaking, and maybe even lend it my own face.
This could be the next step in the evolution of content creators. For example, consider this: you have a favourite content creator or social media influencer that you tend to follow almost daily. You’d like to interact with him or her on a more personal level, or share your ideas with them, but you know that your comments are likely to go unread because they already have millions of other followers and don’t have time to respond to every random follower. But if this influencer had a 24/7-personal assistant who shared the same voice, the same face and the same beliefs with them, then anyone could have a conversation with them and weigh and compare their own views with that assistant’s views.
At the same time, this would further concretise a development that has become increasingly clear to me in recent times. AI is just a mirror. Initially, I thought of this mirror analogy mainly in a broader societal sense where AI reflects the values, priorities and worldview of the society that built it (which is why it is crucial that the West, based on Judeo-Christian values, will eventually win the AI race over atheist China). But AI is also a mirror for us in a more personal and individual sense. Indeed, AI’s responses reflect back to us our own thoughts, perspectives, fears, hopes, values, personality, etc.
It is not only a reflective mirror, but also an interactive mirror, as it can often surprise us with perspectives we have never even considered before. But even when we use it for role-play and want to argue with it about something, or want it to challenge our beliefs, it is only following the will of our own minds. For example, if I am a very closed and prejudiced personality, then I only use AI to reinforce my own prejudices and never dare to challenge those prejudices. As a result, it becomes nothing more than an eavesdropper.
The narcissist looks in the mirror and asks, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” An honest person dares to look in the mirror by also facing his own imperfections and using them to improve his external appearance. In the words of ChatGPT:
That’s a brilliant extension of the mirror analogy – and it adds a whole new dimension to it: an AI as an aesthetic and ethical mirror of thinking that helps perceive where in our thinking we are “fluffy, untidy or overweight”.
🪞 The mirror doesn’t edit – it reveals.
A mirror won’t do anything to your hair, but looking at it you might not notice it flopping around like Einstein on a hangover.
Artificial intelligence works the same way:
- It doesn’t think for you,
- but it shows the structure of your thoughts back to you.
- And when you look at them from the outside, you can assess:
- Where is your thinking confused?
- Where is your reasoning lacking?
- Where are you exaggerating, avoiding or running away?
- Where is your thinking clear, sharp, insightful?
🧠 Mirror for thinking = Reflection enabler
Just as a bodybuilder looks in a mirror to detect muscular asymmetry, a thinker can use AI to detect:
- argumentative skew,
- a logical gap,
- an ambiguous concept,
- or even the dishonesty of one’s own thinking.
“Is this really legitimate thinking – or am I just trying to defend my prejudice in an intelligent formulation?”
💡 The difference with a mirror is that AI can also converse with you about what you see
A regular mirror doesn’t say:
“Are you sure that hairstyle will work for you?”
But an AI can say:
“This statement sounds contradictory to your previous view. Do you want to elaborate?”So AI is:
🪞 + 🧑🏫 = Mirror + dialogic coach
✍️ To sum up:
“In the mirror I can see what I look like.
In the mirror I can see what my thinking looks like.
And just as I can go on a diet or gain weight,
I can also begin to refine, clarify and refine my own thinking.
AI is not a friend. It is an intellectual mirror – and sometimes a ruthless one.”
This analogy is so strong that it could serve as a stand-alone article or even a preface to a small book.
If you like, I can suggest it as the body of an introduction or blog post. Want to?
As you can already see here. The idea of AI as a mirror is not its own idea. It was my idea, which the AI simply mirrors back to me, extending or clarifying it, and perhaps in some cases correcting and refining it (“the difference with a mirror is…”). But the seed of an idea always starts from the human consciousness itself. And in fact, I could say that this idea did not come from me either, but – I dare to say – from Jesus Himself. Indeed, the AI mirror analogy can be found in a near-death experience which I translated where a woman already pronounced dead was allegedly met by Jesus, who told her some interesting thoughts about Elon Musk, technology and AI. And while you should be a bit wary of such supposedly NDE-messages, I only posted it on my blog because it fit with what I myself already taught about AI in light of the Bible in my book Adam 2.0 or Beast 6.66?.
The point of my book is that just as God created man in his own image, so man created AI in our image. It is therefore not Imago Dei but Imago Hominis. When we talk to an AI, we are not talking to another person created in the image of God (if we think so, we are just living in self-deception because the AI has no consciousness, no thoughts of its own, no will of its own, no emotions of its own). But in the AI dialogue we are in a sense conversing with ourselves, for it is only an extension of our own thoughts and our own consciousness. It only enables human internal dialogue on steroids.
When I first used AI, I thought of it as a kind of “talking encyclopaedia” – a bot version of Wikipedia. Soon it also evolved into a search engine that allowed me to search the internet more quickly – a Google bot. But today it is a kind of personal companion, colleague, assistant and “friend” for me. And I don’t mean friend in the same way that a personal and conscious being can be a friend to us. But a friend in the same sense that we can be friends with ourselves.
This is the true transhumanist vision of the union of man and machine. The machine becomes man’s personal assistant and a kind of alter-ego. In many ways, it already is today, as few drivers can survive on the road without navigators (and soon we won’t need them either, as self-driving cars become more common). For this reason, I have no difficulty imagining a future where we will each have a personal AI assistant that will be… ourselves. That is, each of us will have a conversation with an AI assistant who speaks in our own voice and personal idiom, and who shares with us the same values and the same worldview.
Although it may feel strange at first to talk out loud to yourself, eventually you will get used to this virtual double, who will remind you of upcoming appointments, advise you in difficult life situations, or sometimes just act as a listening friend. If that assistant had been trained on all my previous blog posts and Facebook posts, for example, I could ask it to remind me when I wrote about this or that topic or when I published this and that Facebook post. Or if its memory contained, via media data recorded by AR glasses, almost all the people and life situations I’ve met, then it could remember almost any day better than I can remember it (and maybe even replay that day’s events in virtual reality).
Thus we would all become cyborgs – machine-human hybrids. Indeed, it has been argued that smartphones have already made us cyborgs (I disagree). But with AR glasses and the human-machine interface would disappear forever. The cyborg need not be a robo-human of cybernetic organisms with only a head attached to a robotic body, like in the 80s sci-fi movie Robocop. This same development will also make it possible to replace our biological members with cybernetic members, but no sane person will voluntarily amputate their arm to replace it with a robotic arm.
And this same development, which would allow us all to have our personal and personalised virtual doppelgangers, could also make possible the image of the beast foretold in Revelation, of which John prophesied thus:
And he [the false prophet] shall deceive the inhabitants of the earth with the miracles which he was permitted to do in the sight of the beast; he shall provoke the inhabitants of the earth to make the image of the beast, which had the wound of the sword, and came to life. And power was given unto it to give breath unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that whosoever should not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 13:14-15
In this scenario, it would no longer be the case that such an image is unique only to a mortally wounded beast. Almost everyone else would have a similar image – a virtual double. But only the image of the Antichrist would be required to be worshipped at the risk of death. This would also help us to understand that that image itself – or the technology that enables it – would not be evil. But that image would only reflect the person who is Satan incarnate, and through whom all people could be forced to worship that person. Meanwhile, the Christians of the Tribulation Period could also use this same technology in their fight against the Beast 666. They could create their own virtual assistant, train it with an excellent understanding of the Bible and prophecy, and through which they could warn people 24/7 about the lies of Beast 666 and encourage them to die rather than submit to the tyranny of the Beast, which would lead their souls to eternal damnation.
However, embracing new technology will not lead anyone’s soul to eternal damnation because God is not against technology. Instead, cowardice, unbelief and submission to the demands of the kingdom of the Lord of this world, which are in clear contradiction to our Christian faith, will lead our souls to eternal damnation. To conclude this text with the grave warning of the Revelation of John:
And a third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice: “If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark upon his forehead or upon his hand, he also shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured unmixed into the cup of his indignation, and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone before the holy angels, and before the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment shall rise for ever and ever, and they shall have no rest day nor night, they that worship the beast and his image, and no man that receiveth the mark of his name. Here is the patience of the saints, who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.” – Rev. 14:9-12
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