[ExI] AI Therapy and AI Religion

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
Subject: [ExI] AI Therapy and AI Religion

 

Spike commented -

AI psychiatry will go along with AI ministry, one might suppose.

Oh, we live in weird times.

spike

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>…I asked Z.ai GLM-5.3: Anthropic has been consulting with religious scholars and theologians on machine consciousness. How similar will AI Therapy and AI Religion become?

Convergence will be the result, because that's how we will use them.

BillK

 

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>…The asymmetry worth watching is this: therapy can survive being partially simulated, because its value lies in technique and outcome. Religion cannot, because its value depends on the object of engagement actually being what it claims to be. …

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Hmmm, I mostly disagree.  A long time friend and former professor at the college where I cheerfully squandered my educational years was a teacher of physics, but he is deep into the philosophy of religion.  He took up AI as a learning tool, asking AI (specifically ChatGPT) many philosophy of religion questions.  He and I were discussing it on the phone last week.  He reported that AI is great at top level discussions, but as one drills down deeper and deeper it eventually comes apart, spewing nonsense.

 

I explained a bit about the mechanics of how LLMs work: specifically the matrix math, which he followed, being a physicist.  As he drills deeper, there is less and less written about the specific topic, so he sees the effect of increasing uncertainty in the weights.  I explained that one can take any topic, aaaaaannny topic, get a good top level overview, which is good enough for most purposes.  But keep drilling down to finer levels of detail, one will always discover a rich vein of nonsense.

 

Still, one studying philosophy of religion will find a most useful tool in AI.  AI is good for writing undergrad level papers.  It generally isn’t ready to write a PhD thesis.  Yet.

 

spike  

 

 

 

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