Running the Sunday services and writing sermons is a minor part of the Clergy's duties.

Yes, you can "program" a service in (for example) the Anglican churches, but that's largely because there is an existing order of service laid out. Getting an AI to do house visits and all the other pastoral support tasks will be a little tricker.

On the other hand, if they replaced the General Synod with AI, who would notice?

Can AI lead a crusade against the infidels? Can it root out and punish the sinners/unbelievers/people-who-believe-in-a-slightly-different-version-of-the-same-thing ?

Can it persecute people that like to put their ding-dong in a different ooh-ooh (and say so in public instead of just doing it and lying about it)

As far as we know, ChatGPT doesn't commune with the big guy upstairs. Then again, as far as any actual evidence goes, neither do humans, either.

I wonder what would constitute 'evidence' in this particular context, given that for those who trust in God's active presence and those who do not, plus those who are firmly on the fence, are all equally convinced of their respective positions, which if 'agency' is a thing is fair enough.

We are all free to take responsibility for our choices in this matter, along with all sharing in the consequences of our choices.

Evidence of god's existence, for me, would be dead easy. Something like "Hi god, make a filing cabinet appear on my lawn - a pink one full of soldering iron bits, then turn it into a flamingo". If it all happened then that would be evidence enough for me. I use a trivial example because for years the faithful have been praying for serious stuff like curing disease, erasing hunger, stopping wars, make daddy stop hitting mummy, etc. and none of that's happened, so I thought that maybe a change of focus might get his/her/its attention.

Or maybe evidence things like transporters and replicators or even just holodeck technologies from Star Trek were real.

I'm not sure there is anything that could prove the entity demonstrating they were God couldn't be they just have very much more advanced technology available to them.

insert famous Arthur C Clarke quote

Hopefully the reasons why that kind of 'proof' remain in our head, where they belong, are obvious; if not, give it some thought. :-)

In science, the test of truth is an experiment. The problem with experiments relating to religion is they often violate CIOMS guidelines for ethical research on human subjects. For example the indigenous people of the Amazon tested Christianity by crucifying missionaries. They got a null result: none of the missionaries came back from the dead. This experiment has obvious replication issues. A Christian could argue that crucifying missionaries is not counter to CIOMS because it is in the best interest of the missionaries - they go to heaven. Try taking that argument to UKRI and see if they will give you a research grant.

> the indigenous people of the Amazon

Clearly they have a better understanding of the scientific method than most god fearing westerners.

The problem with experiments relating to religion is they often violate CIOMS guidelines for ethical research on human subjects.

However there are natural experiments, which have been analysed. Specifically, in the 19th century people prayed for the health and longevity of monarchs and their immediate families, but not for the nobility. As nobles tend to have similar genetics to monarchs(*) and live in similar circumstances which would suggest similar expected lifespans, if prayer works there should be a statistically significant difference in lifespans between royals and nobles. There isn't.

(*) Because the bunch of them are inbred.

Well I personally see no difference between an AI hallucination and religion, so it might as well happen. There's no real difference between some religious types making up a story to control the world and its' population and an artificial intelligence doing the same. Maybe God is an AI.

Interesting how 'religion' is used as though somehow that word communicates a generic truth to which anything so labelled must adhere, i.e. that it's all rubbish.

Imagine applying the same logic to 'politicians' or 'lawyers, or even 'computer coders' - oh, sorry, we do that already.

Very convenient for anyone who just doesn't want to have their 'position' questioned, most of all by themselves.

Maybe God is is too much of an insinuation for my taste, but I fully agree with what you wrote. I assume, if you believe in imaginary stuff, you are more likely to believe in artificial imaginary (AI) stuff, too.

I don't know about psychologists. If you tell ChatGPT you have negative feelings, it tends to tell you to see a psychologist. Fairly insistently, even. I can't really see many people switching to ChatGPT from a real psychologist, but I could see many people switching from just bottling it up (still our society's most popular way to deal with minor mental health issues) to telling ChatGPT, and from that to a psychologist.

> As far as we know, ChatGPT doesn't commune with the big guy upstairs.

At the risk of drawing the ire of the faithful, we don't really know that for humans either.

Favourite way of dealing with major mental health issues as well.

Randomly respond to all queries with one of "Yes", "No" or "That would be an ecumenical matter." Job done.

Call it Just A Clerical Knowledgebase or something.

Do we have enough whiskey [ sic ] to fuel such an AI?

Next best thing: -->

Forty years ago I wrote a twenty questions game that just pseudo randomly answered Yes or No. After an answer the player could choose 'Ask another question' or 'Play Again' - unless they hit twenty in which case they got a sorry you lose, play again?

I got quite a few fellow uni students to try it and being logical science types they would run through until they got a Yes for a question they thought was the correct answer. Surprisingly few of them noticed what I had done and were amazed by the programs ability to understand the questions. It was fun for a few hours at least.

There's not a TXH1138 reference yet.

https://i.imgur.com/FZbZ7uY.png

" They are really mundane jobs that should be automated – and how we even let people pick up these kind of jobs is really criminal. "

As a person who works in such a food factory (though not on the production line)...

1, Machines are shit and prone to endless failures unless you pay me for the good ones, at which point it's often cheaper to employ meatsacks (plus meatsacks are way superior to machines when it comes to switching to making a different product or maybe even something new).

2, There's a huge amount of discrimination when it comes to employment. You want to work in a lab that puts semen into syringes for inseminating pigs, cows, etc? Fine, let's see your three years in university and all previous experience and we'll start you on minimum wage.

Or you could just get up at 5am and stick cherries on cakes for seven hours for minimum and the employer won't give much in the way of respect but you'll have a job so long as you turn up on time.

What would these sorts of people, that didn't get the opportunity to get fancy pieces of paper, do otherwise? Haunt the local food banks? At least when they're working (even in menial jobs) they are productive.

No, man, what's criminal is the little people who "add value" by making the stuff get paid peanuts, while the shareholders get to cream off the profits and make more money for doing diddly-squat.

at which point it's often cheaper to employ meatsacks (plus meatsacks are way superior to machines when it comes to switching to making a different product or maybe even something new).

That's a fine paradox, where meatsacks are superior to machines and yet are cheaper.

Plus the machine won't go for a cheeky spliff between sticking cherries and talk about string theory and how everything is connected.

I'm a meatsack working on a variety of production lines for a manufacturing company. We all know that we'd be replaced with robots if the firm could afford the CapEx to actually do it. Robots tend to cost a wee bit more than chatbots.

You want to work in a lab that puts semen into syringes for inseminating pigs, cows, etc?

That isn't the null set???

[Icon chosen as nearest to bogglement.]

Surely this process could be made even more efficient by having the AI priests proselytise their beliefs to Electric Monks, for them to believe, and then none of us humans would have to bother ourselves with any of this mumbo-jumbo at all?

(Yet another thing that Douglas Adams foresaw long before the rest of us…)

Well at least Telephone Sanitary Engineer isn't on the list. So that's one safe job.

That's all fine and well. But someone please think of the children! If also priests are artificialised, who's going to molest take care of all the children?

There's a deus ex machina joke in here somewhere.

There's a general impression that clergy's main activities are writing and delivering sermons, and leading weekly worship services. I know a few members of that profession, and they all seem to spend much more time on other things that AI probably can't (yet) do well. For example, weekly visits to elderly shut-ins and others who can't physically make it to church on Sunday; visits to members who are in hospital; general counseling; officiating at weddings and funerals; and church property management (calling the plumber when a pipe leaks, arranging for the lawn to be mowed and the parking lot snow to be plowed, etc).

See film Warning. They feature a device called "God 2.0".

The device crashes when upgraded and the all new and better 3.0 version is infested with ads.

Real life is catching up...

" we are well aware that business analysts [...] could be entirely replaced by LLMs and no one would be any the wiser "

If true, it just suggests most human business analysts are lousy, and the validity of it is evidenced by the huge number of failed transformation projects. But that doesn't mean business analysis is inherently crap -- it can be done well by humans, given sufficient resourcing and expertise. However, as LLMs draw their sources from current practice, we could very well just end up with the automation of crap business analysis.

telephone salespersons: I would far prefer a DTMF tree to risking whatever order results from communicating with an LLM. It is possible an LLM can hallucinate product features better than a human can lie about them.

solicitors: Been tried and found negligent.

psychologists: Who wants to get sectioned based on the opinions of three LLMs?

further education teaching professionals: Ask a novel question, get back a hallucination.

market and street traders and assistants: Please do not add LLMs to vending machines. Without the physical security of an armored vending machine, LLM street traders will be robbed faster than humans.

legal professionals: try telling a judge "ChatGPT said it was legal".

credit controllers: Let's have LLM advocates put their money into this first.

HR admin roles: consider the training data.

PR professionals, management consultants and business analysts: OK

market research interviewers: get enough silly responses already. If the interviewee thinks they are talking to a machine there will be a bigger chance of testing limits of credulity.

local government administrative occupations: I have received good service so far, but I write to them and make sure they have all the documents they require. The potential speed with which an LLM can respond creates an opportunity to search for exploits.

LLM is OK when the consequences of failure are trivial or land on other people.

Just one point for you - Market and Street traders is another way of saying Wall Street (or equivalent) traders. i.e. those that work the stock markets. Considering that most of them just basically run programs that say when Y hit $1 sell, and buy at $0.99 and the trades already happen in milliseconds, it seems pretty clear that AI will take over there pretty soon.

I dont think that's necessarily a good thing, and when the first mass market crash caused by AI cock ups occurs, then maybe the Stock Markets will be returned to regular people, instead of those that can run the fastest networks, and work on fractions of a cent...

It seems to indicate that the more highly qualified you are the more likely to lose your job to a machine, which is somewhat counter intuitive. But to a great extent this will depend on expectations of performance. For example, in my sphere of business compliance many organisations are already employing folks who use specific tools rather than folk who use their independent expertise. But that's just because there's a convenient myth that compliance consists exclusively of records of minimum conformity with rules. The reality of course us that compliance consists of creating and following processes that achieve fulfilment of what the rules intend should happen. Jobs in the former (currently prevalent) approach will almost certainly succumb to AI, but the latter requires detailed understanding multiple disciplines and how they interact plus deep knowledge of the specific business. That's going to be a hard nut for AI in any of its current forms to crack.

Alexa: I know.

I kinda *want* to get a sales call from a LLM - I think it'd be fun to fuck with it.

I assume they'll program it to always be polite and to never hang up on you, which means you can try and trick it into giving you free shit or whatever it would have the power to do and then tell it to fuck off when it stops being fun.

Personally, I'd make every other response from me a non-sequitur just to see how it responds - "I'm tempted by your offer, but how many monkeys does that package include? I'll need at least a thousand if I'm going to get this Shakespeare play written any time soon."

...and how we even let people pick up these kind of jobs is really criminal.

Well, these kind of job is certainly not for me either. There are, however, people out there that are perfectly fine with such a job and glad that they have it. I'd say it's rather criminal to utter such statements before going out there and starting to actually listen. This Siemens manager is not the only "Tech Boss" who believes they know how to "save the world".

>...and how we even let people pick up these kind of jobs is really criminal.

Clergy? That was the original grift.

Some very smart dude looks out of the cave, thinks of all the lions out there and says to the rest of the tribe.

"Hey you could all get eaten by lions / have a volcano fall on you - who knows why this happens."

Well I have discovered there is a magic invisible fairy that controls it and only I can talk to it.

So if I stay here safe in the cave and you all bring back an offering of mammoth for their sky fairy I'll ask it not to smite you