“If only AI had worked out better.” is one of the favorite sayings of a contempary and fellow traveler thru the 80s AI boom. There are so many problems in life that a bit of effective AI ought to be able to solve. Coordinating the time of a meeting, or calling up the cable company and squeezing the next six month discount out of them

I’m currently reading “When time shall be no more. Prophecy Beliefs in Modern American Culture.” I haven’t gotten to the modern part yet, I’m still working thru the history of apocolypticism prophecy; three meaty chapters worth! The pattern the author sees in the historical record is that when ever western societies undergo trama a bloom of apocolyptic prophecy sweeps thru a segment of the population. He reports that each time things settle down again the bloom dries up, quickly. Each time this happens the various characters and events in the book of revelations are methodically mapped onto the recent history. This allows the narators to show thier enemies are the agents of satan. To hear him tell it these blooms seem more organic rather than planned. The forshadowing (teehee) is that later in the book modern media empires and PR based political movements will discover and exploit this market. A clear sign of the end times!

The laundry list of historical figures who’s names have been proven to sum up to 666 is amazing! Every pope, of course, and most historical figures.

Mapping names into a calculation that reaches a particular value is a simple search problem. The kind of thing that early AI tech is very good at. So it’s not suprising that you can get software to find these calculations. What I found amusing though was that you can find message boards that outline how to hack that software, so you can use it for free. Surely we need an open source version.

Now if only AI had worked out we would have software that could read any conflict narative and map it’s participants and events into the book of revelations allowing us to deamonize and polarize with much greater efficency.