The natural world, though broken and incomplete, still is a reflection of God’s nature and power (Rom 1:20). And so, an attack on it is an indirect attack on him. By reality I mean everything that exists in the created order including the cosmos, physical laws, physical elements, angels, humans, and the animal, plant, and microbial kingdoms, and actually much more that we are unaware of.
We are witnessing a massive assault on reality itself. But how could an attack possibly be successful against something so immense? How do you attack reality? What does it mean: ‘Lies attacking what is real’? If it were possible, such an attack would require an unimaginable scale and a sufficiently long timeline. That is precisely what we see.
In the last two hundred years or more, the world has successfully overlaid and masked the natural world with an alternate, man-made, artificial reality that obscures and draws attention away from the given. For example, in most of the western world, man now spends most of his time in man-made, indoor environments and finds himself increasingly separated from the true sources of his food and drink and shelter. These now go through a thousand processes that he does not understand, and as a result, cumulatively affect him in profound ways. This masking effectively alters our perception of reality. Most of us, for example, don’t know where or how we get our most common provision – water. All we know – and for most of us, all we care about – is that the water flows from the tap and that it looks and tastes like what we have come to believe is water.
Kosmos, the Greek word for ‘world,’ is where we also get the word cosmetics, which serve as an overlay, an ornamentation. That’s not meant to be a slam against cosmetics themselves, but it shows how, when cosmetics are overused or are laid on so thickly, they can effectively change a person’s appearance until she becomes unrecognizable.
Over the past two hundred and fifty years, the natural world has been transformed and terraformed by at least four major movements:
- industrialization
- electrification
- digitization
- personalization
These major shifts have ebbed and flowed into and built on each other so that they have become increasingly transformative over time. The sequence itself tells a powerful story, describing how material reality itself, including ourselves, and how we see it, is being fundamentally transformed until it does not resemble the given, natural world at all.
A disclaimer of sorts: It may sound as if transformative movements must in themselves be bad, but that’s simply not the case. God commissioned Adam to take dominion over the earth and part of that dominion was to build structures to take proper responsibility for the created order. In other words, God meant for Adam to use and develop the natural world. But the reason these movements turned out bad is that they were infected with sin – the inherent evil of man – and were empowered by dark forces. Man rejected the natural world’s given-ness and its inherent God-giving glory, warping it rather to glorify man as god.
Here are the four movements:
1 Industrialization. Machine-mediated mining, manufacturing, textiles, etc started approximately in 1760 in Great Britain. This period disrupted families, towns and cities, produced oppressive child-labor, powered factories and sunk people into filthy working conditions. It blackened and polluted city skies and streets and lungs and laid the dirty ground work for the three revolutions that followed.
2 Electrification. Sometimes referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution, electrification started with theoreticians like Volta, Ampere, Faraday and Ohm in the early 1800s, but flowered later when those basic ideas took form in things like the electric motor, transformer and telegraph. These inventions literally electrified the world, changing the contours of the world’s cities and towns and villages. Rural electrification in America finally rolled out during the 1930s until power companies built and connected a monolithic, nation-wide electric grid. That grid, that we take for granted today and that shapes so much of our daily lives, makes possible so much of what we do and think. Many don’t know that the first cars were electric, but then the industrial oil barons reached back with their massive wealth to fund the design of oil and gas-burning cars and then funded the major road-building networks that would increasingly fragment society and eventually make necessary our hyper-mobile world. And now we could not imagine life otherwise. Some of us actually think it perfectly normal.
3 Digitization. The digital revolution followed hard after electrification. The age of the computer began while rural America was still being electrified. Binary systems grew in power and reach over time. They’ve conceptually existed since ancient times, but the application of using streams of ones and zeros (the on or off state) started in earnest in the 1930s. These endless streams can be received and decoded to represent practically anything – letters and words and pictures and video streams by using increasingly dense silicon chips to electronically store and display and route those binary digits.
Fast-forward to today when we have Eniac[1]-like computers in the palm of our hands. Digitization – the fragmentation of ‘analog’ things: time, conversations, images, film, tasks, messages and practically anything at all, enables us to virtualize all those things on a screen (or in the air with holograms), and in real time. In other words, digitization creates an alternate and virtual reality that becomes so powerful that it competes and wins over both the natural world and the built-industrialized and electrified world.
4 Personalization. Here in 2018, we are just now entering this fourth revolution. Each of the previous three revolutions flowed into the next; each successive revolution built on its predecessor. Now digitization extends the virtual thing to the virtual being. Digitization has made everything endlessly malleable and potentially manipulatable. Any real thing could be made a virtual thing that could then also exist on a screen. But now those virtual things are taking on their own kind of intelligence and virtual being.
The massive data collection effort (with its attendant perpetual worry over privacy) enables and guarantees the near-complete virtualization of ourselves. This will make possible the blending of digital assistants and humans. We already see that now with the smart phone being carried everywhere and where many people see that life effectively cannot be lived without it.
In 2011 Apple introduced Siri, the first intelligent ‘digital assistant.’ Siri could answer rudimentary questions, but was still fairly ‘dumb.’ Other similar products followed, but then in November of 2014, Amazon rolled out the first Alexa-powered device, the Amazon Echo. This ‘digital assistant’ could answer questions too, but could also – with the help of home automation – turn on lights, order pizza, play music and learn to anticipate our needs. They basically act as household servants that perform a host of intelligent services. Not counting the smartphone, which is itself essentially a robotic device, Alexa is the first successful mainstream robot, though Amazon is careful not to call it that. Instead it euphemistically refers to it as a ‘smart speaker.’ In fact, all manufacturers of these devices curiously call them that.
Pundits and prognosticators have studied and discussed artificial intelligence (AI) for decades, but it now seems that AI has finally reached the mainstream. AI-powered programs and devices and systems are now exploding in the market place and threaten to take over a significant amount of service industries. Where digitization virtualized the ‘thing landscape’ – clocks, pictures, films, maps: now, personalization is poised to transform the ‘people landscape,’ that is, us, who would otherwise run those virtual systems. Reality is now about to go through another major change – this time a reversal. Now we will start to see an endless stream of driverless cars, kiosks, and customer service chat-bots. The digital, virtual world is set to run its own world, with us as its optional servants.
McKinsey Research estimates that as much as one-third of the United States workforce could be unemployed by 2030 due to various forms of automation.[2]
That takes us up to the present, but this march on reality would be incomplete if I didn’t mention a fifth movement. That movement is still nascent, but all the seeds for its full development are here.
5 Hybridization/Dehumanization/transhumanism/post-genderism. Will personalization make humans obsolete? redundant? unnecessary? To some degree, yes. But like all movements, these forces roll out unevenly, partially. Pockets exist, even today, of native aborigines that remain practically untouched, even by industrialization. The Amish have also managed to maintain their 1800s-subculture in the midst of modernity. So yes, personalization will effect many people, some to be replaced, but others to be tempted or even forced to enhance themselves so as to interact directly with AI systems. In some circles, hybridization is now being promoted as transhumanism. Whether by silicon, genetics, exoskeletons, brain chips, nano-bots, psychedelics or some unknown device or process, people will seek this ‘salvation of man.’
We simply cannot fathom what will then be considered ‘real,’ that is, if God ever allows it to get to that stage.
To summarize then, industrialization amplified and transferred much of our human physical power to machine power. But the machines were still dumb and needed our intelligence to run them. Then electrification automated and remotely powered those machines, making them even more powerful. But digitization came along and started to build intelligence into the machines, as well as virtualizing and democratizing them. Now personalization is starting to empower the machines themselves to do everything a human can do and more. This completes the circle, effectively erecting a different, alternate and substitute reality powerful enough – if not for God’s salvation – to overtake humanity itself. This is the diabolical, parallel new creation that rivals God’s salvation in Christ.
This alternate overlay affects us deeply and colors the way we think and live in ways we cannot fully understand. Political, economic, educational, medical, scientific, religious, financial and technological systems have captured the common man. Just as the natural world – wild, numinous and powerful – first affected man for most of history and prehistory, so now the overlaid, artificial world affects modern and postmodern man. In this section we will confront this false reality. We will dive into the aspects of how this transformation, this attack on reality, is now happening.
[1] The Eniac computer was one of the first computers whose bulk filled whole rooms.
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/one-third-of-us-workers-could-be-jobless-by-2030-due-to-automation.html captured on 23 Oct 2018.
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