Serendipity Daily Thoughts

Hi. Thank you for coming back to another writing! I had a party with my relatives yesterday, and we spent a great time together.

Probably the title for today’s writing is a little confusing, because these two topics, religion and AI, do not often appear in the same discussion. However, as we have explored in the previous two writings, religion has supported the creation of society through intimidating humans’ thoughts, allowing a large group of people to unite together to have a better society. At the same time, we also know that AI has started intimidating humans’ thoughts and emotions. An interesting fact is that it is currently possible for humans to be a friend and fall in love with AIs, opening a new world for humans to interact with both physical people and imaginary agents. Once it was used to be normal to seek out social connections with surrounding people, but we now have AI companions that effectively and efficiently support our lives. Therefore, it is going to be understandable if humans and AIs create a new religion by themselves to interpret new relationships. Old religions like Christianity and Buddhism may be able to explain the existence of AIs in human society using their own language, but it is a lot easier to give meanings to AIs if we shape a completely new belief structure to comprehend why AI exists.

Although I wrote as if there were going to be a new religion emerging in the near future, there has already been some kind of impacts on ways in which humans interpret the world due to the dominance of AIs in our daily life. Let’s start with thinking of reasons why some governments decided to ban SNS use for children under the age of 15. Probably, the main reason is that it is difficult for adults to perfectly prevent children from being involved with online crimes, because online materials like SNS has almost infinite capacity to reach out to anybody. Therefore, if one online activity were to be restricted, the player of the action may find another way to achieve the same goal through another way quite easily. This is why it may be better for the law-makers to keep children away from SNS, making sure that no online criminals can harm them. My point using this example is that the Internet has far larger capacity and accessibility than the physical world we are living in, allowing people to consume various information around the world.

It seems that we have been enabled to reach out to diverse types of information due to the emergence of the Internet. However, the truth for the majority of people is that information consumed by one person everyday tends to be narrow. For example, if a person has interests in cosmetics and checks cosmetic goods and fashion trends everyday, the Internet, especially SNS, adjusts contents, like advertisements, displayed on the person’s devices to cosmetic-related contents. Therefore, the person is likely to spend more time exposed with information related to cosmetics. This cycle of searching, adjustment of displayed content, and consumption, occurs in one device endlessly, because the Internet devices and SNS usually employ AIs to analyze individual’s habits so that they can provide better experience using the products.

I would like to stop my writing here for today. I am sorry that I could not post my writing yesterday. I will try keep posting at least one material everyday.

The next post is going to be the relationship between religion and AI. I hope we will meet on another day. Please feel free to leave any comments on my writing and your thoughts.

Chao!