© 2024 Olga López
© 2024 Urantia Association of Spain
20th Meeting of Readers of The Urantia Book in Spain
Toledo, June 28, 2024
Technological development has experienced exponential growth in recent years, but are humans keeping up with the changes its widespread use is bringing about in all areas? Some studies suggest that the progress of the human mind has been linear, while technology has experienced exponential advancement. Given this situation, what can The Urantia Book offer as an instruction manual for navigating these times of accelerated development, in which we are questioning even the boundaries of humankind?
In this brief presentation, we’ll look at what The Urantia Book tells us about the challenges of modern society (given that its content is approaching its 100th anniversary), first mentioning the most notable technological advances of recent years. Finally, I’ll pose some questions for you to work on in groups and discuss.
The Internet has been one of the greatest transformers of 21st-century societies. For a time, it was limited to computers connected to each other by computer networks, but it leapt into all spheres with the so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT).
IoT is defined as the network of physical devices connected to each other and to the internet, enabling the collection and sharing of data. It has many applications, from the home to industry and even agriculture.
This expansion of the Internet into previously unconnected areas has brought benefits, including greater efficiency, convenience, productivity, innovation, and improved quality of life. But, as with all technology, it also has its darker side if applied without a minimum of ethical criteria: all the information provided by the IoT can undermine people’s security and privacy, in addition to having a significant environmental impact due to the associated energy consumption.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a system capable of performing tasks that, when performed by humans, require intelligence. Unlike traditional computer programs, AIs learn from the data they are fed, along with a series of algorithms that allow them to recognize patterns and rules to solve complex problems.
AI has highly beneficial uses, linked to its remarkable ability to rapidly analyze large volumes of data and its constant availability. However, it also presents challenges, related to its high cost and energy consumption, its technological barriers, and its heavy dependence on the quality and diversity of the data it feeds.
All the technological advances we’re experiencing in this century are leading many intellectuals to question what it truly means to be human, where the line between man and machine lies, and whether there’s a possibility of creating a kind of human 2.0. This is where transhumanism lies, an intellectual and cultural movement that seeks to improve and transform the human condition through the ethical and responsible (at least in theory) application of technology.
For years, we’ve been seeing the potential for improved health and quality of life through implants, gene therapies, tissue regeneration technologies, prosthetics, and more. But, once again, transhumanism comes with legitimate criticisms and challenges, which can exacerbate social inequalities, redefine our identity as human beings, and raise ethical and security issues we cannot ignore.
Although the word “technology” is not mentioned even once in the book (which is understandable, since technology as we know it today did not yet exist when the documents were revealed), it does mention machines, industry (which was the most advanced of its time), and, interestingly, the challenges of modern times. From all these references, we can extract very valuable ideas and lessons for facing the challenges that technology poses to human societies in general and to each individual human being.
In Paper 71, which deals with the development of the State, we are told that, among other things, the evolution of the State involves progress on several levels, one of which is “the elimination of toiling slavery by machine invention and the subsequent mastery of the machine age.” UB 71:8.11. This statement is particularly interesting, for it reaffirms that machines free people from hard, drudgery, but it also implies that we must exercise some form of control over them.
In Document 81, “The Development of Modern Civilization,” these enlightening statements about machines appear:
… The progress of civilization is directly related to the development and possession of tools, machines, and channels of distribution. Improved tools, ingenious and efficient machines, determine the survival of contending groups in the arena of advancing civilization.UB 81:6.20
In the early days the only energy applied to land cultivation was man power. It was a long struggle to substitute oxen for men since this threw men out of employment. Latterly, machines have begun to displace men, and every such advance is directly contributory to the progress of society because it liberates man power for the accomplishment of more valuable tasks. UB 81:6.21
At a time when it is being claimed that AI could lead to the disappearance of jobs, what the researchers tell us in these two aforementioned paragraphs is nonetheless relevant. Throughout human history, but especially since the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, there have been many changes in the types of work people have performed; changes that have forced people to reinvent themselves and have led to the emergence of different, more creative, and less strenuous types of work.
However, the revelators also state that “the violent swing from an age of miracles to an age of machines has proved altogether upsetting to man” UB 195:6.6. And it is evident that this transition has swung the pendulum of humanity from one extreme to the other: from belief in miracles and omnipresent divine acts to denying God and exalting science and machines as sources of meaning and as tools of a future in which religion has no place, being lumped into the same category as miracles, magic, and superstition.
That secular uprising of which the book speaks led to astonishing industrial creativity and unprecedented material progress in Western civilization, but it went too far and lost sight of God and true religion, leading to world wars and the international instability from which we still suffer today UB 195:8.7. “The complete secularization of science, education, industry, and society can lead only to disaster” UB 195:8.13, we need only look back to see what the “disastrous harvest of materialism and secularism” has been, and unfortunately we are not yet free from greater destruction.
The Urantia Book very clearly and explicitly refutes the foundations of that mechanism that still prevails today, with that blind faith that science will solve all our problems, including those that remain outside its scope and that postulate that we are living machines with a brain more developed than the rest of the species on the planet, but with nothing else to assure us of transcendence as humans.
This paragraph from Section 7 of Document 195 is, for me, the answer to all the debate about whether AI can become self-aware and whether it can surpass humans by dominating the world:
The very claim of materialism implies a supermaterial consciousness of the mind which presumes to assert such dogmas. A mechanism might deteriorate, but it could never progress. Machines do not think, create, dream, aspire, idealize, hunger for truth, or thirst for righteousness. They do not motivate their lives with the passion to serve other machines and to choose as their goal of eternal progression the sublime task of finding God and striving to be like him. Machines are never intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, moral, or spiritual. UB 195:7.14
Industrial (and by extension, technological) development has undoubtedly had and continues to have positive aspects. The revelators tell us that “capital and invention the present generation enjoys a higher degree of freedom than any that ever preceded it on earth” UB 69:5.15. They also tell us that “through manufacture and industry man is gradually augmenting the pleasure content of mortal life” UB 81:5.2. But industrial and technological development is not without danger: They also tell us that an overspecialization of human endeavors “will eventually weaken and disintegrate human society if effective means of co-ordination and co-operation are not developed” UB 81:6.30.
And what has been the role of religion in industrial activities and economic development? In Paper 92, we are told that “religion has hindered industrial activities and economic development,” but as a counterpart, it has also maintained “a cultural ethics, civilized morality, and social coherence, and made it possible for later revealed religion to compensate for these many evolutionary shortcomings” UB 92:3.7. It is useful to keep this in mind when considering counterweights to a technological development that has not only a religious basis, but simply an ethical one. And let us remember that, as we are told in Paper 99: “Religionists must function in society, in industry, and in politics as individuals, not as groups, parties, or institutions” UB 99:2.3.
So, what can we do to rebuild society and lead it on the path of spiritual growth? What can we do to ensure that technological development doesn’t get out of hand and can be channeled so that all of humanity can benefit from its advances?
In Paper 92, we are told that “modern man is confronted with the task of making more readjustments of human values in one generation than have been made in two thousand years” UB 92:7.14. We live in accelerated times; today we enjoy technology that just a couple of decades ago seemed to be only the stuff of science fiction. All of this undoubtedly forces us to adapt quickly to equally rapid changes that affect our way of living in society with others. No doubt this acceleration is part of the revelators’ famous statement that “Urantia is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment.” UB 195:9.2.
In document 99 there is a paragraph that emphasizes the importance of religion (or, rather, religious living) in answering the above questions:
Political science must effect the reconstruction of economics and industry by the techniques it learns from the social sciences and by the insights and motives supplied by religious living. In all social reconstruction religion provides a stabilizing loyalty to a transcendent object, a steadying goal beyond and above the immediate and temporal objective. In the midst of the confusions of a rapidly changing environment mortal man needs the sustenance of a far-flung cosmic perspective. UB 99:7.2
Furthermore, genuine spiritual faith “to the continued survival of altruism in spite of human selfishness, social antagonisms, industrial greeds, and political maladjustments.” UB 101:3.14.
Let me refer to this paragraph from Document 118, which seems to me to offer the best way to face the challenges that technological development is posing to us:
As man shakes off the shackles of fear, as he bridges continents and oceans with his machines, generations and centuries with his records, he must substitute for each transcended restraint a new and voluntarily assumed restraint in accordance with the moral dictates of expanding human wisdom. These self-imposed restraints are at once the most powerful and the most tenuous of all the factors of human civilization—concepts of justice and ideals of brotherhood. Man even qualifies himself for the restraining garments of mercy when he dares to love his fellow men, while he achieves the beginnings of spiritual brotherhood when he elects to mete out to them that treatment which he himself would be accorded, even that treatment which he conceives that God would accord them. UB 118:8.10
We now have “a new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism” UB 195:9.2. One need only glance at its pages and internalize the prescriptions we find therein.
The religion of Jesus does, indeed, dominate and transform its believers, demanding that men dedicate their lives to seeking for a knowledge of the will of the Father in heaven and requiring that the energies of living be consecrated to the unselfish service of the brotherhood of man. UB 195:9.6
For all the above reasons, and taking into account that “the great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind” UB 196:3.34, one thing seems clear: the future will either be religious, or it will not be.