Feb 20, 2024

Suppose 10 years from now - AI conversation partner

During the weekly Bible Study via video meeting the idea of interacting with each other but interacting with one or more AI services came to mind: wandering and wondering about meanings, comparisons, seeming paradoxes, word roots and so forth. Human participants have a reserve of personal experiences, a learning curve of meanings early and now and ones to aspire to in the future. On the other hand, having a facsimile "conversation" with the vast reserves of an AI database of other people's words and findings has some merits, too; maybe not lived experience, but filtered pieces of others' lives, for example. Seeing others demonstrate fruitful ways to build productive phrases and question syntax when engaging with an AI could soon lead to more and individuals and groups interacting with the giant but also imperfect services/agents of Artificial Intelligence, of which there were about 800 AI projects in late 2023 for various purposes and scale around the planet, at least 800 that are known of.

Looking at the Word Cloud illustration here, it comes from pasting the 'Bible' section of the Wikipedia article on Hermeneutics. It puts some of the words into visual form: bigger or more centrally placed is for pieces of the text most numerous (not necessarily the most significant; quantity over quality). By presenting something in a new medium or arrangement, sometimes new responses come to mind. Similarly, when working with an AI there is a chance of hearing a familiar reply but in a slightly different frame of reference or accenting different parts of the solution than is usual. As a result, a person posing questions or asking for responses from the AI to one's own assertions and summaries can turn up new perspectives in a rapid and wide-ranging way.

Supposing that the video meeting of the weekly Men's Bible Study could jump ahead 10 years. Maybe interacting with an AI would be completely normalized and the interchange between mortal creatures would thereby gain wider scale and more detailed cross-linkages than they draw in 2024 without the benefit of an A.I. to comb the digital cosmos. In the end would this augmented way of seeing, imagining, and knowing God lead to a more durable, stronger, and many-sided relationship witih God; or, indeed would it lead to the reverse – weaker and more easily broken linkage to knowing God and facilitating his will to be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

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