Israeli Academic Claims A.I. Could Write a ‘New Bible’ in a Few Years

Harari is a historian at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has sold over 20 million books worldwide on issues such as technological disruption and ethical questions about science and technology.

At the Lisbon event, he shared that “Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century. The Printing Press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it. But it did not create a single new page. It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this or that.”

He added, “A.I. can create new ideas, can even write a new Bible.”

The academic also claimed that humans wrote ‘holy books’ historically, not a deity or deities. But future holy books could be written by non-human entities, which could evoke religions that are “actually correct.” He further said this could be a reality in a few years.

The historian is married after a civil ceremony to an entrepreneur Itzik Yahav, and the two men co-founded Sapienship – a social impact company advocating for global responsibility. 

A.I. has dominated media attention recently after pioneers in the field warned against its progress.

The New York Times reports that 350 experts in the field, including engineers and researchers, have signed an open letter via the Centre for A.I. Safety. The letter says: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Signatories included Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic and Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI. Two so-called ‘godfathers’ of A.I. development, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, also signed the letter.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter and the CEO of Tesla, Inc. and other companies, has also expressed his worries about A.I. He has even asked how many years it will be until A.I. wipes out humanity. Yet he is reported to be developing his own A.I. language system.

The recent focus on A.I. is derived from the development of ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of independent conversations with humans. Some experts are concerned that A.I. will develop quickly and pose a threat to human existence.

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Yuichiro Chino

Christopher Eyte lives with his wife Céline and three children in Swansea, Wales, UK. He has worked as a journalist for many years and writes his own blog (hislovefrees.life) encouraging others in their walk with Jesus. He became a Christian in February 2002, after a friend explained God’s amazing grace!