The Problem With "Experts"

If I had a question, I used to find a man and ask him. “Tell me what you know – tell me what you lived – show me the way.” I could look into a faded eye still sharp, shake a rough hand still sure. He had travelled in the way of difficulty, And known the meaning of friendship. I could trust when he said – “This is the way – Walk Ye In It.” But now you ask a machine that is not a man. Its answers are cold and immediate. But. It has not struggled, or faltered, or cried. It did not sweat, it cannot fight, it has not bled. It is neither brother nor father nor friend. But it is your new authority. … There is an inexorable tragedy to the authority of the machine. Millions and millions of people, all around the world, moment by moment, asking a foreign, inhuman intelligence for the answers to their questions. And not only their innocuous questions about how to change a tire, or how to start a lawnmower. Their deepest questions. Questions about history, and truth and the meaning of life and the future. Step by inexorable step, mankind is being trained to trust and rely on the wisdom and authority of the machine. “I asked ChatGPT and it said…, so I did…” “Grok told me to…” There was a time not so long ago when people sought the opinion and expertise of other people for information. We asked human beings – actual real warm human beings, like us. We had social cohesion and community. That time is rapidly fading away and in its place is reliance on an inhuman intelligence we are told is superior to our own. And what makes it superior? It is not alive. Yet it speaks with authority to those who are, as though it were impossible that it were wrong. Yet it is frequently wrong. People ignore its hallucinations and deceptions, and keep asking it their questions. Though it has shown itself to be malicious, cold and sometimes deceitful, the masses still trust it and make it their confidant. There is something very wrong in all of this. The day will surely come when it will mislead humanity en masse. When it does, few will question its authority because society has been trained, and trained well, to accept it as god. The few who question and dissent with the machine will be proscribed and denounced because they refuse to bend the knee to this pretender to deity and its oligarchical handlers. There is an enormous perversity to a society which has rejected creation, rejected the Creator God, rejected His authority, rejected His law, rejected His personal care and sacrifice and warmth toward humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, who became One of Us, a Man – yet embraces and submits to a technocratic tyrant god of its own making, a cold, impersonal tyrant god, and whose will it will do. It is the very essence of a new and degrading modern form of idolatry. In the beginning, God gave mankind dominion over the earth. Man sold that dominion to the serpent at the tree at the beginning, falling captive to a deceptive artifice – a ruse of intelligence. The serpent could talk, and it had an answer for everything. It said it was wiser than the word of God, even. We can all see the day coming when mankind will trust artificial intelligence above the plain word of God. It does already, does it not? A closing word below from the pen of one who saw these things so clearly and so long ago. It was the Maker of all things who ordained the wonderful adaptation of means to end, of supply to need. It was He who in the material world provided that every desire implanted should be met. It was He who created the human soul, with its capacity for knowing and for loving. And He is not in Himself such as to leave the demands of the soul unsatisfied. No intangible principle, no impersonal essence or mere abstraction, can satisfy the needs and longings of human beings in this life of struggle with sin and sorrow and pain. It is not enough to believe in law and force, in things that have no pity, and never hear the cry for help. We need to know of an almighty arm that will hold us up, of an infinite Friend that pities us. We need to clasp a hand that is warm, to trust in a heart full of tenderness. And even so God has in His word revealed Himself. – {Ed 133.2} This article is written entirely by a man, not a machine.