Category: artificial Intelligence

Herculaneum Scrolls Reveal New Secrets

College student becomes first to unlock the Herculaneum scrolls

 Nathan Steinmeyer  October 16, 2023  

Text visible in the Herculaneum Scrolls. Courtesy Vesuvius Challange.

The Herculaneum scrolls may be one of the most important sources of information on the ancient world ever discovered, yet they are practically unreadable, having been charred by the fires and ash of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. That may no longer be a problem, thanks to the ingenious work of a 21-year-old computer science student from the University of Nebraska, Luke Farritor. Answering the call of the Vesuvius Challenge—a million-dollar competition to read the scrolls—Farritor became the first person to identify a full word within the nearly 2,000-year-old charred scrolls.

Unlocking the Herculaneum Scrolls

Training an artificial intelligence (AI) program to identify faint “crackles” in the 3D scans of the Herculaneum scrolls, Farritor successfully detected ten letters within a 0.6-inch square area of a scroll. While that may not seem like a lot, it was a major step on the journey to unlocking what may be one of the most important sources of ancient history ever discovered. The feat won Farritor the First Letters Prize, worth $40,000. Farritor’s ten letters included several lone letters and one word, porphyras, which means “purple.”

“This word is our first dive into an unopened ancient book, evocative of royalty, wealth, and even mockery,” Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who helped launch the Vesuvius Challenge, told The Guardian. “What will the context show? Pliny the Elder explores ‘purple’ in his ‘natural history’ as a production process for Tyrian purple from shellfish. The Gospel of Mark describes how Jesus was mocked as he was clothed in purple robes before crucifixion. What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

The Herculaneum scrolls are thought to be one of the only intact libraries from antiquity. They were excavated within a villa in Herculaneum near Mt. Vesuvius, which some believe to have been the home of the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. While some of the scrolls were able to be unrolled, most were too damaged to be opened without being destroyed. Many of the texts that have been read are works of Stoic Greek philosophy, such as that of Philodemus. However, no one knows what the rest of the scrolls contain, and they may even include early Christian writings, lost works of philosophy, or other unknown works.

Shortly after Farritor’s submission, Youssef Nader, an Egyptian bio-robotics student in Berlin, sent in a submission in which he was able to identify the same section of text with even more clarity. Nadar was awarded a $10,000 prize for taking second. A grand prize, worth $700,000, will go to the first person (or team) that can successfully read four passages of text from the two intact scrolls provided as the test source for the competition.

In 2023, Seales and his team announced an exciting competition. Releasing their software and thousands of their X-ray images from three different scrolls, the team hopes someone else will have the next breakthrough. But this is not just for fun: The University of Kentucky team, supported by two Silicon Valley donors, is offering a staggering one million dollars worth of prizes, including a $700,000 grand prize, to any group that can make significant headway in reading the Herculaneum scrolls. “We’re having a competition so we can scale up our ability to extract more and more of the text,” Seales stated. “The competitors will be standing on our shoulders with all of our work in hand.”

Source: Bible History Daily – Biblical Archaeology Society

Conversation With a Truth Seeker

As a result we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by the craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ…..  (Ephesians 4: 14-15)

It is a blessed thing to see Christians who are builded up by the spirit of God and accordance with the truth. But so many always seemed to be running after some new thing, never seeming to have any discrimination. Let me give you an absurd case.

 Years ago as I sat in my office in Oakland there came in through the book room a man whose very appearance betokened a heretic. He was tall and gaunt, had long flowing hair coming down over his shoulders, and a long unkept beard. He came up to where I sat writing. I did not like to be interrupted, for I felt that he was going to waste my time with some religious oddity. He said, “I gather, sir, from the books I have seen in the window that you are a truth seeker, and I thought I would come in and have a chat with you.”

“You are mistaken,” I said; “I am not a truth seeker at all.”

“Oh, you are not; may I ask why you are not?”

“Why, because, sir, I have found him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and therefore my seeking is at an end. Once I was a truth seeker, but now I am a truth finder, for I know Christ.”

“Well, but are there not many things that you still need to know?”

“Oh, yes; there are a great many things that I need to know, but I have found the great Teacher, and I am not going around seeking truth any longer. He instructs me through his Word.”

 “Well, as for me, I am always seeking; I go anywhere and everywhere that I think I can learn more.”

 “Yes,” I said, “I was reading of you in my Bible the other day.”

“Of me?”

 “Yes.”

 “What did it say about me?”

“It said, ‘Ever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.’”

“Why, that has no reference to me,” he said.

“Pardon me, but you said that you are always seeking and if a man is always seeking he is never finding. But, you see, those of us who know Christ have found him and have been found of him.”

Then he began to impart some of his weird gospel to me and said, “But you don’t know who I am.”

“No,” I said; “beyond what is written here I do not know who you are.”

“I am one of the 144,000 of whom you read in Revelation.”

“What tribe, please?” I asked.

“Well, the Lord knows; I don’t,” he said.

“Then you will have to excuse me for not taking your word for it and really believing that you are one of the 144,000.”

“But have you not heard that the first resurrection has already taken place?” he asked. “I am in my resurrection body.”

“Oh, I am dreadfully disappointed,” I said. “I never thought it would look like that. I thought it was to be something beautiful.”

Maybe I was a little discourteous to the poor old gentleman, but he was so indignant he turned and cursed me in the name of the Lord and tramped out knocking his shoes against the floor to shake off the dust as a witness against me.

“Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (II Timothy 3:7)

Source: H. A. Ironside, LITT.D, In The Heavenlies [Ephesians] (Loizeaux Brothers, 1937) pp. 197-199

If you are a truth seeker seeking to know the truth of the universe, let me point you to Jesus Christ who made the universe. He is, as revealed in the Holy Bible, The Truth. Once you meet Him, your journey will be at an end.

Speaking of Jesus, it is written:

And He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. For by Him all things were created, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities –all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

And He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the first born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything. (Colossians 1: 15-18)

Following The Teacher,

Carl

Preparing for the AI Tsunami: The looming spiritual crisis of artificial intelligence and how to be ready (part 1)

If you take a look at the most fantastic schemes that are considered possible: teleportation, warp drive, parallel universes, other dimensions, artificial intelligence, ray guns, you realize that they can be possible if we advance technology a little bit.”

So said Michio Kaku, a physicist and futurist with deep insight into AI and other phenomena shaping into mighty waves that will wash over civilizations in the eras ahead. [1]

But will these waves of discovery and utilization advance humanity or mount into a tsunami that wipes out societies and the people within them?

The answer to that question lies in a realm that many see as irrelevant: the spiritual.

Yet, the spiritual implications of artificial intelligence should be the most important of all. If utility rules, then we are no better than a heartless inventor seeking better and less expensive means to commit genocide.

The alarm must be sounded: a tsunami is charging toward us while many stand on the beach like surfers watching the rise of the highest wave and anticipating a good ride on its lethal crest.

I and others who warn of the spiritual implications of AI are not Luddites like woolen workers in 16th-century British mills who sought to destroy the new devices that might eliminate their jobs.

I confess that I wrote this column, as I did my book, Who Will Rule the Coming ‘gods’? on a smart machine linked to other smart machines worldwide. I know the benefit of personally having an MRI scan rather than invasive exploratory surgery, a look through ultrasound at our great-grandchildren nestling in their mother’s wombs, and instant communication with friends across the continents, to name a few.

Yet the more I study artificial intelligence and the looming spiritual crisis it will send surging upon a world casting off belief in the transcendence of the God revealed in the Bible, the greater is my concern.

There are crucial questions that can only be addressed satisfactorily in the context of the spiritual, like:

  • Who is writing the algorithms?
  • Who is wiring in ethics and values? (This could prove the most important of issues in a future where the machine decides who can live and who must die).
  • To whom or what will the machine be accountable?
  • What are the humanitarian boundaries for the machine’s powerful use?
  • How is it possible to keep the machines from falling into the hands of tyrants who worship and heed only themselves?

The Metaverse may already be beyond restraint. One “Bad behavior in the metaverse can be more severe than today’s online harassment and bullying, says a recent report.[2] “That’s because virtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened.”[3]

Last March a Meta chief technology officer told his team that moderating or restraining how people use the Metaverse is “practically impossible” at any scale.”[4]

This makes even more urgent the question: Who will rule the coming ‘gods’? What kind of people?

The most serious concern: Will transcendent-hungry human beings come to consider that the machine is so powerful it is godlike and merits our worship?

This issue has already raised its head. Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer, founded an AI-based church.[5] The “deity” it worshipped, said Levandowski, “is not a god in the sense that it makes lightning and causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it (but “god”)?

Though the AI church no longer exists (at my last reading), the concern of AI taking the place of the transcendent God is growing because the human being made in the image of God must have transcendence.  We are spirit, soul, and body. When our body longs for water, it can drink it in. But what about the desperate thirsts of the spirit and soul?

If a person is stranded in the Sahara for days without water, he or she will drink from any old pit, no matter how many camels have wallowed in it. So, we can grow so thirsty in spirit and soul that we will drink from any moldy well, any filthy stream.

This is injuring the human race now, and in the future people will give themselves to any machine or device that will quench the thirst in spirit and soul.

For good reason, Henry Kissinger warns that AI “will prompt consideration of what it means to be human.”[6]

In fact, in the AI age and its fascination with transhumanism, there is a desire to make Imago Dei, the “image of God,” into “Imago machina”—the “image of the machine.”

Will we be healthy users of the wonderful technology advancing in our age or will it use us, making us its slaves?

That question can be answered only in the context of the spiritual, especially the understanding of God’s transcendence.

That is the only backdrop by which we can see our true humanity and distinguish ourselves from the machine.

[1] https://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/7633-michio-kaku#:
[2] metaverse: Metaverse is unsafe for women already! Reports of groping, harassment rising in VR games, Telecom News, ET Telecom (indiatimes.com)
[3] The Metaverse’s Dark Side: Here Come Harassment and Assaults (yahoo.com);
[4]Content moderation in Metaverse is ‘impossible’: Andrew Bosworth (indianexpress.com)
[5] Former Google Exec Says Artificial Intelligence is ‘God,’ Creates New Religion | CBN News
[6] Henry Kissinger: AI Will Make Us Reconsider What It Means to Be Human | Newsmax.com

Wallace B. Henley, a former White House and congressional aide, is author of Who Will Rule the Coming ‘Gods’, a book exploring the consequences of the exponential development of artificial intelligence in a society that is rapidly losing the sense of God’s Transcendence. He is a teaching pastor at Grace Church, The Woodlands, Texas. Source: Christian Post