While I agree with some of your other points, I’m not sure about this:
It’s hard to imagine anything more like the definition of a petty tyrant than wiping out nearly all of humanity because they didn’t act as expected
We shouldn’t be too harsh until we are faced with either deleting a potentially self-improving AI that is not provably friendly or risking the destruction of not just our species but the destruction of all that we value in the universe.
I don’t understand the analogy. I see how deleting a superhuman AI with untold potential is a lot like killing many humans, but isn’t it a point of God’s omnipotence that humans can never even theoretically present a threat to Him or His creation (a threat that he doesn’t approve of, anyway)?
Within the fictional universe of the Old and New Testaments, it seems clear that God has certain preferences about the state of the world, and that for some unspecified reason God does not directly impose those preferences on the world. Instead, God created humans and gave them certain instructions which presumably reflect or are otherwise associated with God’s preferences, then let them go do what they would do, even when their doing so destroys things God values. And then every once in a while, God interferes with their doing those things, for reasons that are unclear.
None of that presupposes omnipotence in the sense that you mean it here, although admittedly many fans of the books have posited the notion that God possesses such omnipotence.
That said, I agree that the analogy is poor. Then again, all analogies will be poor. A superhumanly powerful entity doing and refraining from doing various things for undeclared and seemingly pointless and arbitrary motives is difficult to map to much of anything.
Yeah, I kind of realize that the problems of omnipotence, making rocks that one can’t lift and all that, only really became part of the religious discourse in a more mature and reflection-prone culture, the ways of which would already have felt alien to the OT’s authors.
Taking the old testament god as he is in the book of Genesis this isn’t clear at all. At least when talking about the long term threat potential of humans.
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever “--
or
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
The whole idea of what exactly God is varied during the long centuries in which the stories where written.
While I agree with some of your other points, I’m not sure about this:
We shouldn’t be too harsh until we are faced with either deleting a potentially self-improving AI that is not provably friendly or risking the destruction of not just our species but the destruction of all that we value in the universe.
That.… is a surprisingly good answer.
I don’t understand the analogy. I see how deleting a superhuman AI with untold potential is a lot like killing many humans, but isn’t it a point of God’s omnipotence that humans can never even theoretically present a threat to Him or His creation (a threat that he doesn’t approve of, anyway)?
Within the fictional universe of the Old and New Testaments, it seems clear that God has certain preferences about the state of the world, and that for some unspecified reason God does not directly impose those preferences on the world. Instead, God created humans and gave them certain instructions which presumably reflect or are otherwise associated with God’s preferences, then let them go do what they would do, even when their doing so destroys things God values. And then every once in a while, God interferes with their doing those things, for reasons that are unclear.
None of that presupposes omnipotence in the sense that you mean it here, although admittedly many fans of the books have posited the notion that God possesses such omnipotence.
That said, I agree that the analogy is poor. Then again, all analogies will be poor. A superhumanly powerful entity doing and refraining from doing various things for undeclared and seemingly pointless and arbitrary motives is difficult to map to much of anything.
Yeah, I kind of realize that the problems of omnipotence, making rocks that one can’t lift and all that, only really became part of the religious discourse in a more mature and reflection-prone culture, the ways of which would already have felt alien to the OT’s authors.
Taking the old testament god as he is in the book of Genesis this isn’t clear at all. At least when talking about the long term threat potential of humans.
or
The whole idea of what exactly God is varied during the long centuries in which the stories where written.