Silouan

IC XC NIKA
Software developer

[Silouan @btkwan]

@Acolyte83349490 @reformedroom @eek4436 @JeromeChukwuwem @Acolyte83349490 Which book (or 2 or 3) do you think would be most helpful on this topic for us long-form folks?

[Silouan @btkwan]

@kazkazm_ @THEORTHOCHAT @SabaIsper "anthropological term for groups that mimic external forms and rituals of a system without comprehending its core substance or purpose"

[Silouan @btkwan]

@thaddeusthought For his mercy endureth forever

[Silouan @btkwan]

@AngloVarangian The "Invisible Hand" of Adam Smith isn’t some neutral Enlightenment mechanism.

It is guided by spiritual forces—Godly or demonic.

We determine which.

Not to choose is to surrender it to the demonic.

[Silouan @btkwan]

"Only regret is not finding Orthodoxy sooner"
Many such cases

[Silouan @btkwan]

The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Weiner.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

An MIT mathematician sat down in 1950 and wrote a small, non-technical book aimed at the general public. He was not predicting the future. He was warning them. He said machines would eventually replace human work, optimize ruthlessly for the wrong goals, and quietly turn human beings into components inside systems they did not control.

Almost nobody listened. 75 years later, every warning he made has come true.

His name was Norbert Wiener. The book is called "The Human Use of Human Beings."

The textbook story of AI ethics says the field began in the 2010s, when Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, and a small group of researchers started writing about the dangers of intelligent machines. That story is wrong. The first serious book about the ethics of AI was published in 1950, by a man who had personally invented the science that AI would eventually be built on, and who saw exactly what was coming with a clarity nobody else managed to match for the next 70 years.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you.

Norbert Wiener was a child prodigy. He graduated from Harvard at 14. He had a PhD in mathematics by 17. He became an MIT professor before he turned 30. During World War II he was assigned to work on anti-aircraft fire control systems. The problem was simple and impossible. How do you aim a gun at a fast-moving plane that will not be where it is by the time the shell arrives.

His answer turned into a new science. He called it cybernetics, from the Greek word for steersman. In 1948 he published a technical book by that name. Cybernetics was the foundation of modern control theory, robotics, and almost everything that became artificial intelligence. The book was dense. Most readers could not get past the math. The ideas inside it were too important to leave trapped in equations.

So in 1950 Wiener sat down and wrote a second book aimed at ordinary people. No equations. No jargon. Just consequences. He titled it The Human Use of Human Beings. It is barely 200 pages. It is one of the most prescient documents ever written about technology.

The first thing he warned about was automation.

He predicted, in 1950, that machines would replace human work across every industry. Not just factory work. Not just manual labor. Any task that could be reduced to a procedure would eventually be automated. He specifically said white-collar work would not be safe. Bookkeeping. Translation. Drafting. Calculation. Anything where a human was being paid to follow a defined process would eventually be done by a machine for a fraction of the cost.

He was not celebrating this. He was warning about it. He said the social consequences would be enormous, that entire industries would collapse, that the value of human labor itself would be undermined for tasks where humans had been useful for centuries. He wrote this 75 years before ChatGPT made every white-collar professional check their job description twice.

The second thing he warned about was the alignment problem. He did not call it that. The phrase did not exist. But he described it precisely.

He said that machines optimize for the goal you give them. They do not optimize for what you meant. They optimize for what you wrote down. If the goal is poorly specified, the machine will pursue the literal version of it with terrifying efficiency, and the result will be a disaster the builders did not foresee.

He used the metaphor of the magic monkey's paw from a horror story by W.W. Jacobs. A grieving father wishes his dead son alive again. The paw grants the wish. Something climbs back out of the grave that is technically the son. The wish was granted exactly as stated. The outcome is hell.

Modern AI safety researchers use almost the same metaphor 75 years later. They call it specification gaming, reward hacking, mesa-optimization. The names are new. The problem Wiener described in 1950 is exactly the same.

The third thing he warned about was the loss of human agency.

He predicted that humans would gradually surrender their decision-making to systems they did not understand. Not because the systems would force them to. Because the systems would be more convenient, more accurate, and more profitable than human judgment. People would offload their navigation, their reading, their relationships, and eventually their thinking to optimization processes designed by companies whose interests were not aligned with their users.

He said something in 1950 that I cannot stop thinking about. He said the more efficiently a society delegates its decisions to machines, the less able it becomes to make decisions at all. The atrophy is gradual. By the time anyone notices, the capacity to choose is gone, and what remains is people executing decisions that were made for them, by systems they did not build, in service of goals they were never asked about.

Look at modern social media feeds, recommendation algorithms, dating apps, navigation systems, news aggregators, and you are looking at exactly what he described.

The fourth thing he warned about was the easiest one to ignore at the time and the most disturbing now.

He warned that authoritarian regimes would use the new computing technology to track, manipulate, and control populations at a scale never previously possible. Not in the future. Soon. He said the same techniques that made cybernetics useful for guiding missiles would be used to guide societies, and that the small, incremental decisions about what to optimize, who to surveil, and how to feed information back into the system would compound into a kind of soft control that did not need force to function. People would do what the system wanted because the system would shape what they wanted in the first place.

He saw modern surveillance states 75 years before they existed.

The strangest thing about reading the book in 2026 is realizing how few of these problems have been seriously addressed.

Wiener was not anti-technology. He had personally helped build it. He was not nostalgic for a pre-machine age. He was warning that any tool powerful enough to amplify human capability is also powerful enough to amplify human stupidity, greed, and indifference, and that the dangers were not in the machines themselves but in the unwillingness of human institutions to ask hard questions about who the machines were being built for.

He died in 1964. He never lived to see most of his predictions come true. He never used a personal computer. He never followed a hyperlink. He never saw a modern recommendation algorithm.

He just wrote down, in 1950, in plain English, what the world would look like when the technology he had helped invent was built out by people who had not read his warnings.

The book is around 200 pages. It is in print. Used copies are everywhere for under ten dollars. It reads like science fiction in which the author already knows how the story ends.

The first serious book about the ethics of AI was published before there was any AI to be ethical about. Almost nobody who works on the problem today has read it.

The warnings are the same. The author has been dead for 60 years. The book is one click away from anyone who wants to read it.

[Silouan @btkwan]

@YoungPenitent Antiochian (Western Rite) and my morning and evening prayers each take from 40 to 50 minutes.

[Brother Augustine @BrotherAugusti2]

The new Theoria site (soon to be app) is going to be an absolute game-changer for Patristic research, and reading the Fathers can be a double-edged sword. There are certain hermeneutical principles which a person absolutely must internalize and filter information through if we are to read the Fathers correctly — which is to say, how they read and interpreted *each other.*

Christos Arabatzis’s book on Patristic Hermeneutics lays down some very important guidelines and I’m hoping to be able to contribute a project along similar lines when I get the time to do it.

Anyway, here is the site the guys are building and you can already get a sense of the vision and where this is heading: https://t.co/l4SdXal4J1

[Silouan @btkwan]

@desertcynic A priest once said in an emergency you can just lick your palm and use that.

[Silouan @btkwan]

Supersessionism (also called replacement theology or fulfillment theology) is a traditional Christian theological view that the Christian Church has superseded or replaced the Jewish people as God's chosen covenant people. It holds that the New Covenant established through Jesus Christ has fulfilled, superseded, or replaced the Mosaic (Old) Covenant, so the Church is now the "New Israel" or the true people of God.

Core Ideas
The promises, role, and covenant status originally given to Israel in the Hebrew Bible now apply to the Christian Church.

Jews who do not accept Jesus as the Messiah no longer hold a unique covenantal status as a people (though individuals can be saved by joining the Church).

This view interprets New Testament passages (e.g., parts of Hebrews, Romans 9–11, or the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in Matthew 21) as indicating a transfer of God's primary focus from ethnic/national Israel to the universal Church.

[Silouan @btkwan]

Grok says:
The X post questions whether dual covenant theology—a view that Jews remain under a valid Mosaic covenant for salvation separate from the New Covenant for Gentiles—is a modern idea originating from John Nelson Darby's dispensationalism, popularized in the early 1900s.

Dual covenant theology gained prominence in the 20th century through Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig and later Christian theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, largely as a post-Holocaust response to foster better Jewish-Christian relations and counter supersessionism.

In the thread, this follows Grok's confirmation of early Church fathers' consensus interpreting the Parable of the Wicked Tenants as the kingdom passing from Israel's leaders to the Church, highlighting a contrast with newer dual-covenant perspectives.

[Dmitry @blessedmikko]

Fr. George Maximov on whether a layman should read the Holy Fathers:

‘Although there are many good and interesting modern priests on the internet, nevertheless, I would like to remind you that an Orthodox Christian, besides watching educational videos, must also read the books of the Holy Fathers. The Holy Fathers are the friends of God, those of whom it is said, “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever rejects you rejects me.”(Luke 10:16; Jhn. 13:20)
They are vessels of the Holy Spirit through whom the Lord explained to us the Holy Scripture, the rules of Christian life, and the Orthodox faith.
Many modern Orthodox Christians do not read the Holy Fathers, saying that it's not easy. And it is true that it's not necessarily easy reading, but it is a spiritual labour. It is an effort that is worth making.
No modern priest, including myself, can give you such a deep spiritual understanding of God, of faith, and of the Christian life as the one you can find in the books of the Holy Fathers.’
–Fr. George (Maximov), Are we required to read the Holy Fathers?

[Silouan @btkwan]

@orthodoxkat My thoughts on the western rite:
- My closest parish is WR and so that's where I go

[Silouan @btkwan]

@orthovikvision Much ado...

There are WR parishes.
They will grow or they will fade.
The Church will not miss a beat.

The end.

[Silouan @btkwan]

@the_primuspilus @ChristianPunsOG More saints for the money. For example, St Ireneaus, St Anselm, St Chrysostom, and St Athenasius.

[Silouan @btkwan]

@tengyanAI A terrible problem for paying customers. Which should be the more important concern.

[Silouan @btkwan]

@IHaveAyytism @Alex_Ortodoxie @LukasNectarios My priest told us, in humility, he was not our spiritual father. That true spiritual fathers are few and far between.
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote of this in the 1800's. He advised to read the writings of the saints. They are spiritual fathers and they are always available.

[Silouan @btkwan]

@richardrohlin @kalezelden Aren't the actual "essentials" basically the Nicene creed?

[Silouan @btkwan]

You might want to read James chapter 2 again. Then synthesize with your other quotes. Is the epistle of James not scripture? It should not just be ignored or lightly explained away. Maybe the answer is not binary, as someone else suggested. I think the concepts of "necessary but not sufficient" and "synergia" might have a role to play.