Luke 19:39-40
39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”
40 “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
The Pharisees were known for their pretentious nature. In public, they were known to put forth a holier than thou image while in reality; were just using religion as a mask to have an easier time being bad. With time they came to believe their own lie and had effectively self assigned a moral high ground.
At the time, the two verses were nothing but cryptic to the common man; still are. In my opinion, Jesus gave these complex lessons so that he could leave that crowd with some thought assignment handed out whilst safely going missing within the ensuing confusion.
Let’s take a crack at it now that the guy was crucified for being more famous than the priests were. Cracking open a rock and you’ll be surprised to find out that most rocks are quite similar in nature. They mostly contain silicate minerals. Rocks in off themselves account for 95% of the earths crust. By weight, a computer is mostly silicon. The processing components are mostly gold and need I mention what material that is?
As at writing this; one of the most lucrative careers to be in is software development. A piece of software is made up of a bunch of algorithms which basically boil down to affecting how the silicon components within a computer interact. If you think that silly then picture this; these rocks run your life!
The background of it all has been efficiency. Computers, just like tools, were created to enhance what a human could do. In other words, a force multiplier. With an excel document one can perform complex tasks within seconds, faster if a program was written for that particular purpose.
Inefficiency, earns you losses. Who ever is more efficient gets to charge a lower price for the same profit margin while expanding market share. It’s in nature to be competitive just as it has been on being efficient. In the real world however, we have also introduced in efficiencies.
Human attention span took a dive just as screen time increased. We have slowly outsourced our thinking to machines and that is not efficiency; it is laziness. Our hate of effort is astounding. Back office tasks are slowly being automated. It is safer have an emotionless robot do customer care than an unpredictable human, right?
If this were perfect, then most of us would be out of jobs. This goes to say that the rocks are not there yet in replacing us but they are well on their way to. Fraud detection for example; involves synergy between artificial intelligence and human supervision. Both learn from each other. It has worked for banks so they have since stuck to it.
A worrying trend would be that of regenerative text generators. As at writing this, they have been all the rage but a quick heads up is in the name. Regenerative means it generates from other sources; conversations similar to yours. It will sound like any other human but if every human uses it then any human will sound like any other human.
When this happens, new data will only come from those outside of the system. Our reality is what exists outside of our creations. Look around, do you see God? If all you do is look down on that screen; how will you ever remember to appreciate your existence? Will you ever praise him if you don’t appreciate the small miracles?
At some point; the computers will teach us how to look into and around our surroundings. Machines will be taking us back our creators and that’s when the stones will be crying out!