Glenn Beck spots a chilling pattern in AI that goes all the way back to Genesis

We live in a day when a teenager with a smartphone can perform tasks governments couldn’t fathom just three decades ago, says Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck is already disturbed by this strange reality, but he knows the technology in the pipeline will make our current capabilities seem like child’s play. “Something's now being built that will hand every one of us abilities that we have not earned, we have not personally developed, and we were not formed to carry,” he warns.

He is referring, of course, to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, which many experts and developers have warned could spiral out of control and turn on humanity.

It seems like a new problem, but it’s actually as old as time itself, says Glenn.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” he connects Genesis, the book of Enoch, the Tower of Babel, and one of the Old Testament’s final warnings to ask a question we may soon be forced to reckon with: What happens when technological capabilities develop faster than our ability to handle them?

Glenn, citing both Genesis and the book of Enoch, recounts the story of how he believes the giant human-demon hybrids called Nephilim came to be.

“200 [Watchers] come down on a mountain [Mount Hermon] … and they bind themselves by an oath because each one knows the other is going to lose the nerve. So what do they do? Among other things, they open a school,” he says.

“One of them teaches metalworking: swords, knives, armor. Along with it, how to grind minerals into paint for the face and dye for the cloth. Others teach reading the stars and the property of roots and plants and cutting of spells,” he continues. “And the account doesn't say they taught lies. It says they taught things that were true and the earth was ruined by it.”

Glenn says the fact that true things ushered in destruction, including the great flood, is the “weirdest part of the story” for him.

“The crime was the calendar. It arrived early. It arrived unearned from a source with no interest in what it would do to the people who received it. The giants in the story are simply the result — something enormous born of that union with an appetite that the earth couldn't feed,” he says.

The Tower of Babel followed the same trajectory and was also thwarted by God, he notes.

But Enoch, according to Latter-day Saint scripture, converted a people who became so unified — “of one heart and one mind,” with “no poor among them” — that God named them Zion and took their city into heaven, Glenn explains.

“Same architecture, opposite foundation. One is built out of what people became, and the other is built out of what some people could engineer,” he says.

He wonders if artificial intelligence is a modern-day Mount Hermon or Babel.

“We're being sold the Tower of Babel — a merged intelligence, a unified mind, every problem solved by consolidation. It's Enoch's city offered without the price that Enoch had to pay,” he says.

If the world of the Nephilim and the city of Babel were both destroyed for grabbing power before they had the character to hold it, what’s to stop it from happening a third time, he wonders.

To answer that question, Glenn looks at God’s warning to mankind in Malachi 4:5-6: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

“He's threatening a repeat,” says Glenn.

The verse names only one stay of judgment: the hearts of fathers and children — not rulers, walls, laws, or restricted knowledge.

“The [Watcher] school on that mountain was teaching knowledge, and it was unearned. … Fatherhood without fatherhood, capability handed down by beings with no stake in the children receiving it — no relationship, no formation, nothing owed, just given — give a child a blade and no reason to sheath it, and you have manufactured a giant,” says Glenn.

He points out how human flight and nuclear fission were discovered at the same time by people with no connection to each other. That’s not coincidence but divine timing, Glenn argues. “We earned [that knowledge]. We controlled it. We've been responsible with it.”

But artificial intelligence, he says, is not following that same trajectory. It’s ushering in knowledge at a rate strikingly similar to the empires built by the ancient Watchers and the builders of Babel.

Enoch and Elijah, Glenn notes, are the only two men in the Bible who do not die — and that’s not a coincidence in his opinion. Enoch is “the man sent to deliver the verdict on the first bad transfer of knowledge,” he says, and Elijah is the man who will be “sent back before the last day to repair fathers and children, which may be now — another time of bad transfer of knowledge.”

“The danger in new technology is almost never the technology; it's the interval between when a capability arrives and when the character to hold it arrives,” he says.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Glenn wonders if the technology was “received or seized.”

While he has no hopes that AI development will slow down before it reaches dystopian potential, he does have hope in people.

“Turn your heart to the Father and to the children,” he pleads.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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