Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come never saw this coming.
The transhumanist popularizer and pseudo presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, claims that “AI Day” will soon replace Christmas as the world’s most beloved holiday. From his piece in the Huffington Post:
One thing is for sure, to the human species, the birth of an advanced artificial intelligence will become far more important than the birth of Christ.
Christmas, if it survives at all, will be relegated to just another commercial and cultural holiday that superstores and big business thrive on. Meanwhile, reasonable people will celebrate AI Day, the real moment in history the savior of civilization was born.
Bah, humbug!
Sorry, Zoltan, if Christ is Who Christians claim, nothing is more important than His Birth.
But even without faith, the spirit of Christmas fulfills a universal human need that for at least one day of the year, we are all accepted with unconditional love–a yearning for acceptance so deeply imbedded in the human heart that millions of non-Christians and atheists celebrate the holiday with joy and gift-giving.
The most powerful computers and sophisticated software we could ever invent are mere lumps of coal–sterile and devoid of deeper meaning. No human technology can inspire the joy, love, warmth, and hope that the theological and secular meanings of Christmas shine into the human heart.