Thomas Friedman (pictured) wrote a column for The New York Times, back in late October of last year, one major purpose of which was to urge a vote for Kamala Harris for president. The Times titled Friedman's column as follows: "A Harris Presidency Is the Only Way to Stay Ahead of A.I." As we all know, the events scheduled for tomorrow - the inauguration of a new president who is not Kamala Harris - make clear that the nation failed to take Friedman's advice.
I am not highlighting Friedman's October 30th column to focus on its "political" recommendation. Rather, I want to highlight the following observation to make another point:
We have become Godlike as a species in two ways: We are the first generation to intentionally create a computer with more intelligence than God endowed us with. And we are the first generation to unintentionally change the climate with our own hands.
The problem is we have become Godlike without any agreement among us on the Ten Commandments — on a shared value system that should guide the use of our newfound powers. We need to fix that fast. And no one is better positioned to lead that challenge than the next U.S. president, for several reasons.
Those who regularly read my blog postings will remember that I keep saying that "We Live In Two Worlds." We live, most immediately, in the world created by our own, human actions and activities. Ultimately, however, we live within and are totally dependent on the "World of Nature," which I also frequently call "The World God Made." If you are uncertain about what "World" that is, here's a peek:
The purpose of making the distinction that I repeatedly seek to draw between "Our World" and "God's World" is to remind us (humans all) that we are NOT "God," or really even "Godlike." Our main mistake in life - so often made - is to think that we are. We think so because we do, in fact, "create" the world in which we most immediately live. Our ability to act, and to do something never thought of, or done before, provides us with great power, indeed. We are "creators." We are "destroyers." We like to call our powers "Godlike," but our human powers, not unlike the "artificial" intelligence upon which Friedman focuses in his column, are not ultimately creative. In essence, they are derivative. They depend upon, and come from, that World that was here before any of us arrived, and into which we have been, most mysteriously, born.
Within the preexisting reality we inhabit - God's Creation, giving it that designation to make the point that we didn't, ourselves, establish the world upon which we are ultimately dependent - we get to apply our human powers to create something "new," but new only in that what we create are innovations that ultimately and completely depend on the "Creation" which was not our own.
That old expression, "there is nothing new under the sun," actually does describe the nature of human "creativity." The statement comes from the Bible, by the way.
This New Year of ours, just getting underway, will provide us many "political" challenges (and opportunities). It also poses what might be thought of as a "theological" challenge. Let us first consider Global Warming. Unless we radically change what we are doing, it increasingly appears that we will cause such massive disruptions within "The World That God Created" that human civilization, and maybe all human life, and maybe all life, will be extinguished.
In addition, just so we don't forget this, we absolutely need to reconfigure our understanding of how to live together, "sharing all the world," as John Lennon and Yoko Ono put it. If we don't figure that out, it seems ever more likely that we will end our human reality in a paroxysm of nuclear war.
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