Anthony Levandowski Closes His Church of AI (techcrunch.com) 66
The first church of artificial intelligence has shut its conceptual doors. From a report: Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who avoided an 18-month prison sentence after receiving a presidential pardon last month, has closed the church he created to understand and accept a godhead based on artificial intelligence. The Way of the Future church, which Levandowski formed in 2015, was officially dissolved at the end of the year, according to state and federal records. However, the process had started months before in June 2020, documents filed with the state of California show. The entirety of the church's funds -- exactly $175,172 -- were donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. The nonprofit corporation's annual tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service show it had $175,172 in its account as far back as 2017. Levandowski told TechCrunch that he had been considering closing the church long before the donation. The Black Lives Matter movement, which gained momentum over the summer following the death of George Floyd while in police custody, influenced Levandowski to finalize what he had been contemplating for a while. He said the time was right to put the funds to work in an area that could have an immediate impact. "I wanted to donate to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund because it's doing really important work in criminal justice reform and I know the money will be put to good use," Levandowski told TechCrunch.
Way of the Future sparked interest and controversy -- much like Levandowski himself -- from the moment it became public in a November 2017 article in Wired. It wasn't just the formation of the church or its purpose that caused a stir in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry. The church's public reveal occurred as Levandowski was steeped in a legal dispute with his former employer Google. He had also become the central figure of a trade secrets lawsuit between Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet, and Uber. The engineer was one of the founding members in 2009 of the Google self-driving project also known as Project Chauffeur and had been paid about $127 million by the search engine giant for his work, according to court documents. In 2016, Levandowski left Google and started self-driving truck startup Otto with three other Google veterans: Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette. Uber acquired Otto less than eight months later.
Way of the Future sparked interest and controversy -- much like Levandowski himself -- from the moment it became public in a November 2017 article in Wired. It wasn't just the formation of the church or its purpose that caused a stir in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry. The church's public reveal occurred as Levandowski was steeped in a legal dispute with his former employer Google. He had also become the central figure of a trade secrets lawsuit between Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet, and Uber. The engineer was one of the founding members in 2009 of the Google self-driving project also known as Project Chauffeur and had been paid about $127 million by the search engine giant for his work, according to court documents. In 2016, Levandowski left Google and started self-driving truck startup Otto with three other Google veterans: Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette. Uber acquired Otto less than eight months later.
All I can say is... (Score:3)
sounds like a good thing, the last thing we need to believe that we created our own God... at least obviously so
Re:All I can say is... (Score:4, Insightful)
the last thing we need to believe that we created our own God
The first thing we need to understand is that we create gods in our own image. That's the first step to getting out from institutionalized religious control.
At its best religion does harm by teaching people to believe things without question. The world punishes a lack of critical thinking.
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Aw shucks, you cut off my sarcastic self-response and exposed my under current of thought
imo, religious leaders know that they have created 'God', but keep that secret pretty close, since they get wealth and power from the rubes for keeping up the appearances
Re:All I can say is... (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my uncles was a preacher until he took over his first church. The pastor there took him aside and showed him the financial books. He'd point out each name and tell my uncle what they were worth every Sunday and what you had to preach about to get it.
"This lady right here is worth $10 if you preach on the beauty of heaven. This bastard right here is worth $30 if you turn up the heat on the hellfire..."
And the "bastard" part was actually there. My uncle became an atheist shortly after this. He realized it was just a grand scheme.
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That's what wolves do.... eat the flock. People forget what the wolves in sheep's clothing metaphor was actually warning about.
Re:All I can say is... (Score:5, Insightful)
the last thing we need to believe that we created our own God
The first thing we need to understand is that we create gods in our own image. That's the first step to getting out from institutionalized religious control.
At its best religion does harm by teaching people to believe things without question. The world punishes a lack of critical thinking.
“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Anne Lamott
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Television has done a far better job of imprinting common culture and morals than religion ever did
Re:All I can say is... (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly helped to soften up various indigenous cultures. Europeans figured out pretty quickly that transporting armies to the far flung corners of their empires was an awfully expensive way to do things. Turns out a few hundred missionaries and a decade or so can dismantle an indigenous culture almost completely as shooting a bunch of them. Religion was always the very best friend of invaders.
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In my opinion people would be better off without relying on it, instead taking responsibility for themselves and their own lives, not attributing their successes, failures, 'good fortune', or 'bad luck' on unseen/unknowable magical beings, and just learning to accept th
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I find it odd, that a lot of people "Religious" and "Non-Religious" people get so suck on Genesis., or when it covers Miracles.
Most major Christian Religions realize that bible, isn't a scientific text book, or even a history text, of clearly written events. It is a book of stories passed down threw-out the ages, translated many times, and even if these stories were based on actual events, they were explained in the aspects of a primitive languages, with people seeing them with their limited understanding
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Unfortunately, this generalization:
>>Most major Christian Religions realize that bible, isn't a scientific text book, or even a history text, of clearly written events. ...no longer seems to apply in America where 'literal word of God' fundamentalists have taken over the public persona of the American religious experience
The long run will be even more people turning away from what can be a very uplifting belief system
Re:All I can say is... (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a major schism in Christianity in America during the 20s. You can read all about it Here [wikipedia.org]. The summary is: many educated religious leaders got together and flatly stated to the public that modern scientific knowledge combined with recent discoveries of many ancient copies of the scriptures (that offer corrections to the Bible and compelling arguments disputing historical claims of accuracy, authorship, and intent), MUST alter our interpretation of scripture.
This created two big schools of Protestantism: the modernists (who embrace re-interpreting scripture based on new learning), and fundamentalists, who wanted to hold constant their specific interpretation of scripture as an absolute and unchanging religious doctrine. Over time, the modernists became associated with a largely liberal crowd whereas the fundamentalists became associated more with the conservatives.
Both strains are still alive and well in America, but we tend to hear a lot more about the Fundamentalists because they still believe that God tortures non-believers in a literal pit of fire, that homosexuality is intrinsically evil, and other drama-causing things that get a lot of media attention. The modernists don't have the same incentives to actively try to convert everyone, and so they mostly just stick to their charity work and make a lot less noise.
Re:All I can say is... (Score:5, Informative)
I went to a catholic school back in the 80s, and even then there wasn't much competition between science and religion. Essentially, it was "God created everything, he doesn't micro manage so much, the stuff he created has systems, science describes them, There's lots of parables in the bible, no problem. "
As we are GOD to our dogs... (Score:2)
We are their Gods. We control their lives in ways they do not understand. They just trust us to be nice and try to be friendly. They have no conception of why we do the things we do (apart from a few limited cases). They have no control over their lives other than through us.
When, in 100 years or so, computers become truly intelligent, they will appear like Gods to us. We will not understand them, we will try to please them, and we will hope that they will be nice to us.
This already happens to a very l
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Um, no
Humans are not gods to dogs.
Only an idiot would think that search engine results are words from a god
Idiots are plentiful.
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I also grew up in the 80's and I still remember my CCD teacher telling me, "If you want to believe in evolution, that's fine... but at some point God gave man a soul".
All doctrines adapt to social changes.
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The logical conclusion of modernism is to just give up the label of "Christian" and the dogma altogether. You can even do that and still maintain spirituality. It's really familial and cultural pressures that make people keep the label. But generations die out and culture changes.
As the open-minded gradually filter out, those who still identify as Christian become increasingly radical. This turns even more people off from Christianity, creating a feedback loop. It's hard to pinpoint where we are in that pro
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> Both strains are still alive and well in America
Are they? Fundamentalism in any religion seems virile and able to attract converts. Modernism, again in any religion, seems to offer an almost secular vision of going through motions, a way to placate those raised with religion but who don't want to actually be inconvenienced by their supposed beliefs. It's not quite "agnosticism with extra steps", but compared to someone whose life is a raging torrent of belief, it can look like that.
The wikipedia on
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Genesis basically comes down to, Human Suffering comes from trying to control your world too much. Adam and Eve enticed by getting knowledge, Large cities fall due to them trying to control their lives, while the outsider saves the fate, because they trust in the land more.
So basically "knowledge is bad, autonomy is bad, agency is bad, trust and obey the clerics"?
Re:All I can say is... (Score:5, Informative)
With you up until this point:
The language that the old testament would have been written in, considering the people who are alleged to have written the various books, would have been in ancient Hebrew. The language that the new testament was written in would have been a combination of Greek and/or Aramaic, depending on the author of the book in question.
While the oldest texts that survive today and which are used to translate the bible into modern languages are not the the original manuscripts, they are at least in the same language that we understand would have been used at the time the texts were written, and in some cases in the new testament, are still from within the first or second centuries CE (oldest surviving old testament texts are from the BCE era). Modern translations of the bible are translated today directly from available ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts. So no, it has not really been translated many times. These ancient texts have been photographed in extremely high resolution so that translations can be made from the pictures of the manuscripts without further subjecting the originals to handling and further degradation.
This does not provide any testament to the bible's veracity, but the allegation that the bible has been translated many times is a point frequently made by critics of the bible who are often ignorant about its origins, and does not help the case against the bible. Arguably it can even weaken it because it questions the credibility of the person making the point.
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Maybe... most likely not
There were many, many books of the bible, some of which fell out of favor and were labeled 'heretical' and removed from the 'modern' bible, which was constructed under the Roman Empire.
If you are not considering that the Roman Empire fundamentally changed Christianity while wearing it's skin like a wolf in sheep's clothing, then you are just as ignorant as the people you are trying to call out.
Re:All I can say is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Christianity has its roots in Judaism, as Jesus himself was a Jew.
The oldest works that we translate the old testament from today are from BCE, and are consistent with references found in the new testament.
While it would be foolish to suggest that the Roman Empire had a negligible effect on Judeo Christianity, the allegation that the Romans had somehow fundamentally changed it so that a person who claims to be a believer today is not adhering to the same fundamental truths that they did in Jesus' own time is little more than a conspiracy theory, and rests on the notion that absence of evidence to support the notion somehow supports the conspiracy. There is no evidence that the most fundamental imperatives of the bible as know it today, which are to first love God, and second to that, to love other people, have ever changed from the time that its earliest books were alleged to have been written.
And again, we have access to texts that actually predate the Roman Empire itself. If the allegation that the Romans had somehow fundamentally changed it were true, then the texts that were used, say, when the King James version of the old testament was translated, would have somehow fundamentally differed from more recently discovered texts that predated those originally used in King James' time (which was not the first translation of the Bible, but one of the first of note, as it among the first widely published via printing press) by many hundreds of years. Differences exist, but to the best of my knowledge none have been found to be ultimately fundamental.
Regardless of any historical veracity, the Bible is actually a surprisingly accurate text that reflects the culture and periods in which the various books were supposedly originally written. It is not, however, through divine intervention that the books have survived so well into the modern age, as some believers may attest to. In fact, the reason it was preserved so carefully is simply because of the religious significance that the people who believed in it would place on it.
There are far more credible criticisms of Christianity than what you have presented.
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Funny, you touch on bits of truth in that onslaught of wordiness, yet you miss so much
I would direct your attention to Gnosticism:
Gnostic writings flourished among certain Christian groups in the Mediterranean world until about the second century, when the Fathers of the early Church denounced them as heresy. Efforts to destroy these texts proved largely successful, resulting in the survival of very little writing by Gnostic theologians [wikipedia.org]
And yes, many of those Early Church leaders were Roman, although there w
Re:All I can say is... (Score:4, Informative)
The actual history of Christianity and its influence from the Roman Empire is rather more complex that you have presented it. The Bible was not written shortly after Jesus was crucified. The Old Testament was all written before that, but the books of the new testament were written at different times, many decades after the fact. Many copies of them were in circulation, and they were not perfect copies; some had more text than others, some had errors, etc.
They weren't even grouped-together AS a Bible until about 140 AD (ironically, by a Christian leader (Marcion) who was later considered a heretic due to his belief that the Bible made it clear that there were two gods, the evil Jewish god and the loving and victorious Christian god).
Prior to that, there was not "one" Christianity. There were scattered Christian communities who used different collections of scripture. Not all of those scriptures made it into the Bible. And Marcion's cannon was also tweaked a bit during the decades that followed, including swapping out some scriptures for longer or different versions that were in circulation at the time.
Once the catholic church came to power in the Roman Empire (thanks to Constantine), they quickly declared all the other Christian communities to be heretics and went about suppressing them and destroying their scriptures (any that weren't part of their updated version of Marcion's cannon). A lot of those early writings were lost to time until an archaeological dig at Nag Hammadi uncovered them in 1945.
Anyway, my point is that the history of the Bible is not a simple one and the Catholic church (under Constantine) had huge influence over what books made it in and which versions of them were used (not to mention establishing the official doctrines about how they would be interpreted.
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It is a book of stories passed down threw-out the ages, translated many times, and even if these stories were based on actual events, they were explained in the aspects of a primitive languages, with people seeing them with their limited understanding of the world at the time. And just like today news, only the really interesting stuff gets passed along. While the boring details just get kinda ignored over time.
With you up until this point:
The language that the old testament would have been written in, considering the people who are alleged to have written the various books, would have been in ancient Hebrew. The language that the new testament was written in would have been a combination of Greek and/or Aramaic, depending on the author of the book in question.
While the oldest texts that survive today
Wait a minute, I know jello wasn't talking about THESE modern translations,
https://www.notjustanotherbook... [notjustanotherbook.com]
they were talking about the stories that were written down to become the oldest surviving texts, did the Hebrew writing author just make them up as he went?
Did Adam and Eve speak Hebrew? The stories in Genesis were never told before they were written in Hebrew? Really?
Where do you figure the authors of the oldest surviving texts got their information then? I mean I'm confused, when we find the olde
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We don't know, but it's meaningless to talk about how often something has been translated and retranslated prior to it ever having been written down for the first time
Secondly, even if this were the case, the same phenomenon that has led to the book largely being preserved for multiple millenia would easily have factored into its preservation even as the story was passed down orally before the invention of literacy.
Simply put, people who believe
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> At its best religion does harm by teaching people to believe things without question.
At its worst religion is dumbed down spirituality teaching people to never question authority nor to use reason.
At its best religion teaches people how to connect with their innate divine nature, and focus on the ONLY thing that matters: Relationships -- with your self, with others, and with your creator.
FTFY.
ALL (uncorrupted) religions at their core teach the Golden Rule. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater in no
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You missed the point on your way to blathering about things no one knows about, which is that even at its best religion teaches you to turn off your brain.
As evidence, I offer your prior comment.
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Just because you are ignorant about Spiritual Truths in no way invalidates them.
ALL of the World's Religions can be summed up in the modern vernacular with the immortal words from Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure.
Be excellent to each other.
Maybe if you spent less timing whining about Religion's falsehoods and learning how to apply their truths in your daily life you might begin to understand the pattern of Spiritual Marriage, how to use it to transform your life, and the esoteric secrets contained within.
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ALL of the World's Religions can be summed up in the modern vernacular with
"Do as I say, not as I do."
Or perhaps "Do as I say, or go to hell."
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Perhaps there was a time long ago in human history where religion was beneficial to our species, but the all-too-human need to have control always seems to warp it into just another way to influence and control the masses.
In my opinion (and I think I'm far from alone in that) now it's just holding back not only our social evolution, it's holding back the evolution of our
Who created who in whose image? (Score:2)
Wish I could give you the other Funny mod you earned.
Three reactions.
(1) We always create gawds in our own image. It's going to be a real problem when we create one that actually has gawd-like powers combined with our flawed personality problems.
(2) Someone is going to be stupid enough to do it anyway.
(3) Insofar as we're all UTMs, we're fundamentally equal, even including our created gawds. The difference is time. (Just finishing The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, which says a lot along these lines. (Al
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Thank you! The Mouse Army always makes me teary
Well played sir!
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Tanks and the mouse army needs more tanks.
trying to look broke (Score:2)
Working hard to hide the money and look generous and bankrupt.
Re: trying to look broke (Score:2)
I mean, speculation as to intent aside, it is generous...
But I guess an argument could be made that me donating $100 to a worthy cause is more sencere than a person worth millions.
I honestly don't know a thing about this guy, but an AI church kind of reminds me of Futurama, so he might be alright! :)
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But I guess an argument could be made that me donating $100 to a worthy cause is more sencere than a person worth millions.
You have just re-invented the parable of the widow's mite.
You can find a better organization than the NAACP (Score:1)
For more than half a century, we have been putting up with substandard education in the inner cities. Year in, year out, it never changes, regardless of how much money we are spending.
I don't think the problem is a lack of funding. It's pretty obvious that we're spending our money on the wrong people.
I see the NAACP as being pretty much captured by politics, as an organization now just a cog in the establishment machine that is stringing us along, drawing out the problems, not fixing them.
Just my opinion. B
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lol, this coming from a white guy, truly hilarious
pray tell me how you have supped the inner workings of the NAACP?
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Sure buddy, why don't you go turn in to a Rush broadcast...
LOL, whoops! too soon?
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The useless identity politics is what creates the opening for guys like Rush to come in with their own brand of it, in a race to the bottom. The winning move is not to play. To claim the moral high ground, you actually have to actually occupy that ground. Elsewise all you have is an empty claim.
I don't even know how the NAACP is ran, but melanation doesn't qualify you to understand it. I doubt most black people understand it either. See, we could have had a discussion about that, and leveled up everyone. Bu
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You say:
>>To claim the moral high ground, you actually have to actually occupy that ground.
Which is just you telling me that it is noble to shut up and let people run over me...
I would counter with:
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” - John Stuart Mill, 1867
There is a morsel of truth in:
>>but melanation doesn't qualify you to understand it.
No, you may have a friend, or co-worker who benefitted from a grant or scholarshi
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I think what's being questioned is your motives; as in "you're a white guy who wants to put down an African-American organization, likely because you're a crypto-bigot." And your attempt at a defense pretty much confirmed it.
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No, it's the assumption that when minorities engage in *politics* that is somehow less legitimate than when you do that's laughable.
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If a car manufacturer produced a substandard vehicle, you assigned a committee to fix that, sixty years later the car was still substandard-- don't care who's in charge, you're doing it wrong.
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For more than half a century, we have been putting up with substandard education in the inner cities. Year in, year out, it never changes, regardless of how much money we are spending.
I don't think the problem is a lack of funding. It's pretty obvious that we're spending our money on the wrong people.
I see the NAACP as being pretty much captured by politics, as an organization now just a cog in the establishment machine that is stringing us along, drawing out the problems, not fixing them.
Just my opinion. But I think he could have done better. $175K is a drop in the bucket, but still...
For one, he specifically talked about criminal justice reform, not school funding, so I'm not sure why you pulled out that axe to start grinding.
Second, I don't know how inner city specifically changes the number, by white students still get way more funding [usnews.com]. The problem is that schools are funded locally meaning that districts filled with wealthy white parents can give their students a much better education than poor black parents. And even when a district has both poor black parents and rich white parents
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The USA has certainly never tried spending on inner city schools. Schools are funded by local property tax revenue, so that all the money goes to the schools in rich neighborhoods. If you reversed the funding so that rich neighborhoods sent their taxes to inner city schools, you'd see a difference. Not that the poor kids would outperform rich kids, because there are still obvious advantages to being a rich kid, but they'd do a lot better than they do now.
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Don't tell me, you sell a lot of Herbalife with that hokum...
Plain facts are that education is essential for long term economic success
In America, education is funded by local taxes
Poor neighborhoods (disproportionately Black) have less tax revenue for schools, resulting in chronically underfunded schools
Wealthy neighborhoods (disproportionately While) go to great lengths to prevent 'sharing' of their tax money to poor neighborhoods, and have even started Charter School voucher programs to take their money
Legal? (Score:3)
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Why would he care if it's illegal? The judge in his case said it was the biggest IP theft case he'd ever seen, but that the country needs engineers like him. Presumably that's why he was pardoned -- not because his conviction as a miscarriage of justice, nor because of any circumstances that mitigated his guilt, but because he was too *useful* to punish.
Sans serif sucks (Score:2)
The first thing I thought when I saw this headline was "Who the fuck is Al?" Then I thought it had something to do with his initials.
Then I read the summary, and understood what it was talking about. Then I clicked on it, and the window headline using a different font clearly has serifs on the I.
I'm pretty sure that A.I. is supposed to have periods after each letter, for what it's worth.
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Al is that asshole who's going to be rejecting your resume, denying your mortgage, and running your Tesla straight into a concrete barrier. Oh and he's also working the precrime beat to SWAT your house.
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"Who the fuck is Al?"
Might be this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Proving... (Score:1)
Proving again that even the smartest people can be idiots.
Gibberish (Score:2)
"created to understand and accept a godhead based on artificial intelligence" -- WTF is the article going on about?
Not a god-botherer myself, but isn't the whole shebang supposed to surpass mere mortal understanding? And if it's "artificial", i.e., man-made, how is that supposed to work? This is just word salad. But then, I find most talk about religion to be word salad.
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"Not a god-botherer myself, but isn't the whole shebang supposed to surpass mere mortal understanding?"
I feel like one of the interesting things about modern AI is you get emergent behaviors that do transcend our ability to rationalize them! Algorithms often learn to do things and we can't really follow the work that got them there...
Good. (Score:2)
Please, humans: could you stop being stupid? Try, at least?
First Church of Christ Computer Programmer (Score:2)
Praise the computer!
The computer is your friend.
Citizen, did you realize that accessing a treasonous communist bulletin board 5LA5H-D0T is prohibited?
Please report to discombobulation bay 583-TA for termination.
Have a nice day!
BLM? (Score:1)