Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

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Students and teachers of prophecy have a long history of questioning events of their day and wondering if it is heralding the arrival of the biblical end times. Those living in the early 20th century thought that perhaps World War I with its new types of warfare such as the machine gun, airplane and poison gas were heralding in the apocalypse. 

However, each of these world events had certain characteristics that would have prevented them from being the specific events foretold in Revelation. For example, during World War I there was no mechanism in place allowing for a universal banking system. 

However, it is evident that things have been inexorably moving in that direction. It now appears that Google is actively taking steps to consolidate every bit of information and put it into a single database to create a form of artificial intelligence that may very well put in place the infrastructure for the antichrist to take advantage of.

Ray Kurzweil invented many computing devices we now take for granted including flatbed scanners, a text to speech synthesizer, the first program able to recognize typeface and many more. This giant in the technology field has recently begun offering specific predictions about a topic long considered something out of science fiction, artificial intelligence.

In recent years Google has been snatching up robotics and machine learning companies at an astounding rate. They have also been on a massive hiring spree to employ the vast majority of the world’s experts on AI, including Kurzwell.

In an interview with The Guardian, Kurzwell says Google’s algorithms and search engine, along with its other applications such as Gmail and YouTube that are designed to interact with each other provide the company with an ideal platform to collect all of the world’s data in a single location. 

“Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you've ever written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself,” The Guardian said, quoting Kurzwell.

IBM has a supercomputer called Watson that was made famous for appearing on Jeopardy and winning in 2011. 

However, Kurzwell said essentially all Watson did was read through its databases at an incredible rate of speed to come up with the answers. However, he wants to take Google far beyond Watson’s capabilities.

“To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying."

While there remains a fierce debate among those in the AI community as to whether a machine can ever achieve consciousness like that of a human, the underlying issue is not so much one of “life” as can it amass enough knowledge to be a threat to humanity.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, who is not known for being an avid supporter of biblical prophecy, along with Stuart Russell and physicist Frank Wilczek, warned the United Nations last year about the danger of complacency regarding computers similar to what Kurzwell is calling for.

“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,” they wrote. “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” 

While the world may debate over the consciousness issue, Christians should instead be concerned over the basic issue of having any single entity, whether alive or a machine of amassing so much information. As Hawking indicated, such a machine would be tailor made for the antichrist to usurp for his own purposes. Having such a powerful machine would make for the ability to amass the ultimate enemies list.

When one considers what Revelation says about no one being able to buy food or anything else without the mark of the beast, along with recent moves by bank to move to a cashless system, it seems Kurzwell may very well unwittingly be helping to usher in the Tribulation. He had best be careful, he may not like the implications of the Frankenstein monster he is attempting to create and unleash on the world.