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Tower of Babel 2.0
About 90 kilometers south of Baghdad, under the scorching heat of the Iraqi sun, more than 200 workers toiled daily, year‐round for 15 years from 1899 to 1914, to excavate the ruins of ancient Babylon.
Led by German archeologist Robert Koldewey, the site that had been identified a century earlier by British assyriologist Claudius James Rich bore fruitful discoveries right from the start of the expedition. In the first year alone, remnants of Babylon's central Processional Street were unearthed, giving the modern world its first look at the “City of Cities” which vanished off the face of the earth, either swallowed by the desert or destroyed in repeated invasions.
Subsequent discoveries marveled the world further with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and palaces of King Nebuchadnezzar uncovered, fueling a resurgence in the interest of biblical scholarship as well as the studies of various religions that have historical reference to the city of Babylon and its rulers.
The discovery by Robert Koldewey that linked all variations of folklore, religions, and documented accounts of Babylon, however, was Etemenanki. With the remains of its foundation, and outer and inner walls visible from aerial view, the sprawling building was a temple ziggurat dedicated to the Babylonian god Marduk.
Although many Christians in the world today believe Etemenanki to be the biblical Tower of Babel, Koldeway's findings not only gave plausibility to this theory but also opened more possibilities to how the fable of this ancient‐world wonder continued to influence cultures and religions around the globe long after its destruction.
Meaning “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth” in ancient Sumerian, Etemenanki's remains are now kept as part of the Schøyen Collection. Among the rumble of artifacts preserved by the private Norwegian collection is Etemenanki's stele – a black ceremonial stone used as a plaque to inscribe the official notes or message of the ruler on the structure's construction.
The translation of the royal declaration of King Nebuchadnezzar II found on the plaque notes that the ruler “mobilized all countries” and “each and every ruler” for its construction:
ETEMENANKI: ZIKKURAT BABIBLI: “THE HOUSE, THE FOUNDATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, ZIGGURAT IN BABYLON.”
NEBUCHADNEZZAR, KING OF BABYLON AM I – IN ORDER TO COMPLETE E‐TEMEN‐ANKI AND E‐UR‐ME‐IMIN‐ANKI I MOBILIZED ALL COUNTRIES EVERYWHERE, EACH AND EVERY RULER WHO HAD BEEN RAISED TO PROMINENCE OVER ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD – LOVED BY MARDUK, FROM THE UPPER SEA TO THE LOWER SEA, THE DISTANT NATIONS, THE TEEMING PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, KINGS OF REMOTE MOUNTAINS AND FAR‐FLUNG ISLANDS… I COMPLETED IT RAISING ITS TOP TO THE HEAVEN, MAKING IT GLEAM BRIGHT AS THE SUN
— Robert Koldewey / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Source: Robert Koldewey / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Source: Robert Koldewey / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
It is unknown when Etemenanki was originally constructed but historians agree that it had been destroyed and rebuilt several times over centuries by generations of rulers.
Suffice to say, with many nomadic tribes passing by, and some settling in Babylon, various versions of Etemenanki's origin exist in numerous sacred scriptures, from the religions in proximity like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to even religions in faraway lands like Hinduism (in India and Nepal), and the religions of the Karen of Myanmar, the Tohono O'odham people of Arizona, and the people of Botswana and Polynesia.
A majority of these accounts and versions of Etemenanki are popularly associated with man's desire to reach the heavens, or to achieve a level of power equal to that of God.
In Christianity and Judaism, the Tower of Babel is widely accepted as an allegorical tale of men's hubris and fall in defying God, and an origin myth explaining the world's languages.
In the Bible, the Tower of Babel is one of the events that took place after the great flood in which Noah and his descendants survived. Genesis 11:1–9 tells its story and gives the explanation of the existence of diverse human languages.
In this first chapter of the Bible, the Babylonians wanting to make a name for themselves collectively decided to construct a mighty city and a structure “with its top in the heavens.” Scholars have noted that the Babylonians were also trying to escape God's wrath should he send another flood to reset the world.
Seeing their unrelenting progress, God was not pleased and disrupted their work by making them speak different tongues. Because the workers couldn't understand each other's languages, they could work not together. Confusion arose. Consensus broke.
Babylon, the great city that archeologists discovered in the last century, came later. In this first attempt, which in Jewish scripture (the Antiquities of the Jews) says is spearheaded by King Nimrod, the great grandson of Noah, the city and tower were never completed, and the people were eventually scattered around the world. Speaking different languages, they would never be able to attempt the same feat.
In Islam, a similar tale is told, however, in a different location. Pharaoh tried to reach the God of Moses to challenge Him and call Him a liar.
Muslims believe that God created nations to know each other and not to be separated; hence, the idea of the Tower of Babel is non‐compliant to Islamic belief, but the story told in the Quran suggests that Pharaoh tried to achieve something similar as what the Babylonians strived for albeit with a different motive, and succeeded in constructing a significant portion, before God responded by halting progress as he did with the Babylonians.
Interestingly, sizable monolithic ruins found in other parts of the world suggest that the Etemenanki might not be the only one of its kind.
Lost in Translation
We often imagine the ancient world based on remnants of what we can see today. There is a large part of the picture that is left to be found. With wars that have devastated cities like Babylon, it is plausible that the world's first skyscrapers were temples and portals intended to reach the heavens.
Similar adaptations of this story are told in other religions, some differing more than others but the central themes of men challenging God or wanting to reach God the wrong way, and the ability to create a monumental structure with consensus, are prevalent.
From a non‐religious point of view, the destruction of the tower was most likely due to unsustainability and over‐development brought by consensus to achieve a large‐scale project that served no purpose but fulfill a certain image of progress, much like the GDP rating for any country under a corrupt government today.
However, progressing faster than the environment and financial ecosystem can cope with is not the only reason why a construction project could fail. Any good project leader knows when to issue a stop‐work order before a catastrophe happens or at least address an issue at grassroots level before it becomes a major incident. There must be another human factor leading to the tower's fall, and it can't be due to things lost in translation.
The difference in languages is often the scapegoat for miscommunication and even for opposing the unity of humanity. But language is fluid – the English language alone contains thousands of words from other languages, and the same goes for other languages of the world. Humans have been integrating long before Babel.
Whichever version of tale of the Tower of Babel we choose to dissect there is one similarity – that consensus propels a group of people forward; the fact that people are speaking the same tongue only makes the goal easier to be understood. The reconstruction of the tower could have very well continued if the builders had managed to move past language barriers and came back to their consensus, which if one believes Etemenanki to be the fabled Tower of Babel, then this is evidently what happened later.
Etemenanki, rebuilt under different kings, reaching the skies again and again, making builders richer and more boisterous, selfish, and arrogant with every cycle of construction, would have been doomed to have a broken consensus each time before God had to revisit his own wrath.
Without consensus, a goal is no more than someone else's desire. No work could possibly start without an agreement made by all parties involved. Conversely, the sky is the limit when total consensus of the population is reached.
The Babylonian Empire, and with it, Etemenanki, finally fell for the last time in 593 BC, when the city was conquered by Persian king Cyrus the Great. Fittingly, in the aftermath, the residents of Babylon plundered the Tower of Babel and used its bricks to build their own houses.
The Language of Progress
Our world is defined by the language we speak and think in. How far our imaginations can stretch is only limited by the words in which we can express our ideas, and, in parallel, how much our world changes is dependent on how we interact with it, including what words we choose to use in our daily conversations.
Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein's works were rigorously rejected by the academicians of his time. The Austrian–British philosopher of logic, mathematics, the mind, and language said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Wittgenstein wrote only one book during his entire life, Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus (Logical‐Philosophical Treatise). He began formulating the core ideas around his book while serving as a soldier in the trenches of World War I, scribbling notes under mortar bombardments before his military leave in the summer of 1918.
In Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, the author challenges how we think of language and logic, or, at least, how people thought of it up until the early 1900s. Wittgenstein states that the primary function of language is to allow us to visually picture the abstract, and not just reality. This purpose is known as picture theory and it was a building block in the Logical Positivism school of thought that defined modern philosophy until the 1960s.
Up until this point, the standard and pursuit of philosophy was mostly kept by and for the rich, as like quality education today is mostly reserved for the elite who can make donations to Ivy League universities. On the subject of language, the common philosophical belief at the time was that language mirrored reality. It was a means to an end, a tool used to describe what the world was. A one‐way road of information – perception of reality goes into our minds and words come out.
Wittgenstein believed that language was more powerful than this and that it could shape the world. He asserted that language is used as a description of the logical form of reality, and not reality itself. Propositions or philosophical opinions are as such logical pictures of what we perceive to be our reality. It is a picture of reality and not reality itself. Language is fluid and ever evolving as we interact with our world, and the words we choose to use or invent to describe something, evidently affects our surroundings as well. In his own words, Wittgenstein suggests that it isn't what we say that matters, rather it is the way that we say it and the context in which we say it that counts, or as he puts it, “Words are how you use them.”
The way we use language also shapes reality. We can see this when certain societies progress past racism – with some societies banning derogatory terms from being used freely and making them punishable by law if said publicly. We see it over generations with mothers and fathers who adopt more communicative and gentle approaches to parenting. We see it, a sudden change in the words we use, when we enter and leave the office or another formal location. Today, the school‐of‐thought of logical positivism has moved toward the concept of pragmatism which views words as tools that we use for problem‐solving, and in which all speakers of a language are actively involved in its progress in a decentralized way.
Wittgenstein was truly committed to his work. He did not get along with most of his peers in affluent philosophy circles. To them, he was a madman who once said, “If people never did anything stupid, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
A particular quote from Tractatus hints toward the man's disdain toward the populist view of philosophy that was upheld by the elite at the time:
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently, we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
Being an ardent critic and debunker, Wittgenstein's theories have started conversations about metaphysics, logic, and language that continue to be debated by academics today. Not surprisingly, he was known to even criticize his own ideas.
He believed that his concepts were generally misunderstood and distorted by the masses and his disciples, as well as doubted the capability of future generations to interpret them. In criticism of his colleagues and society at large, the Cambridge University professor pointed out the difference between their definition of “progress” and his:
Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically, it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself.
Indeed, we all have a different idea of what progress means today and it seems like we speak different languages when our objectives are not aligned. Hence, the being of progress has taken over in the modern world. Regardless of our individual goals, striving for progress becomes our collective goal.
The Byzantine Generals Problem
On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon. Reaching the skies was no longer a challenge for mankind as we had surpassed it.
However, something we did not manage to achieve was global consensus on living peacefully with each other. The Cold War, which started barely two years after World War II ended, reignited much of the world with conflict until 1991 – after the fall of the Berlin Wall and ousting of communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
In 1978, just three years before Apple would introduce the first personal computer and about a decade after NASA's mission to the moon, American computer scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Robert Shostak conceived the interactive consistency problem which would become popularly known as the Byzantine Generals Problem.
Shostak's work was in the context of the NASA‐sponsored Software Implemented Fault Tolerance (SIFT) project in the Computer Science Lab at SRI International. SIFT was based on the idea of using multiple general‐purpose computers that would communicate through pairwise messaging to reach a consensus, even if some of the computers were faulty.
The Byzantine Generals Problem is an allegory, or a colorful way to explain this complicated problem:
A number of generals are attacking a fortress and must decide as a group only whether to attack or retreat. Some generals prefer to attack, others prefer to retreat. All generals must agree on a common decision, for a halfhearted attack by a few generals will fail, and would be worse than either a coordinated attack or a coordinated retreat.
Source: Medium Paul DeCoste / https://medium.com/@paul_12056/byzantine-generals-problem-ff4bdc340e56 last accessed December 08, 2022
The problem is complicated by the presence of treacherous generals who may not only cast a vote for a suboptimal strategy, they may do so selectively. For instance, if nine generals are voting, four of whom support attacking while four others are in favor of retreat, the ninth general may send a vote of retreat to those generals in favor of retreat, and a vote of attack to the rest. Those who received a retreat vote from the ninth general will retreat, while the rest will attack (which may not go well for the attackers).
The problem is complicated further by the generals being physically separated and having to send their votes via messengers who may fail to deliver votes or may forge false votes.
Because of Shostak's work, a closer eye was given to the inspection of computer networks, potentially averting disasters several times in history – Byzantine errors were detected infrequently and at irregular points during endurance testing for newly constructed Virginia class submarines, a class of nuclear‐powered cruise missile fast‐attack submarines, when issues were publicly reported in 2005.
Creating Consensus and Spreading It
I first encountered Bitcoin in 2012, when I read Satoshi's white paper, Bitcoin: A Peer‐to‐Peer Electronic Cash System, originally published in 2008. Satoshi had solved the Byzantine Generals Problem by motivating verification processors to work.
Miners are motivated to work by receiving a small portion of the transaction as a fee. Miners are anonymous, and anyone could be a miner with the right hardware – A6 chips introduced in 2012, with about two billion transistors jammed into them, made the tech faster and cheaper.
All miners must agree on the outcome of the transaction that would be captured on a public ledger.
Satoshi created decentralized currency that ran on consensus on the blockchain. The idea of cryptocurrency and with it, decentralization and blockchain, quickly spread. With the world's population suffering several generations of inflation, and coming off the Great Recession of 2007, it was a welcomed idea.
There is consensus with using cryptocurrency as a replacement for fiat among its early adopters and even today among new adopters. Going beyond that, blockchain is bringing consensus among computers – in a world where everything is communicated with one language – computer coding. Language does not guarantee consensus, but it does help the acceleration of progress. Computers speak the same language, and the hardware that is used to build them is getting cheaper.
Source: Our World in Data/CC BY 4.0/ https://ourworldindata.org/technological-change last accessed January 18, 2023
Moore's Law observes that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years, while the cost of computers is halved. Though this observation has stalled in recent years, with the US–China trade war, COVID‐19 pandemic, and Ukraine–Russia war disrupting the supply of semiconductors, experts say it is still evidently true – there is no stopping the progress of technology – it will get cheaper and more accessible in years to come.
What will happen when near‐perfect consensus is achieved in a world fully automated by Web 3.0 technologies?
The Antichrist is Coming
Artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly coming to dominate every facet of our lives, from self‐driving cars to algorithms that serve us content based on our likes, to medicine prototyping by computers that have predicted millions of variants of protein structures.
Be that as it is, the world is only just witnessing the tip of AI capabilities with Web 3.0 technology, and the possibilities though endless could be as dangerous as they are utopian.
In the Bible's Book of Revelations (13:5‐8), the Antichrist is said to be someone or something that will speak “terrible words of blasphemy against God.” “The beast,” as the Bible refers to it, is “allowed to wage war against God's holy people and to conquer them.”
The Antichrist will be welcomed by all of humanity. This last chapter of the Bible states, “And he was given authority to rule over every tribe and people and language and nation. And all the people who belong to this world worshipped the beast.”
With the pace governments are moving to switch to Central Bank Digital Currencies, blockchain technology is just an arm's length away from being incorporated into every country's financial and governing systems. At the same time, machine learning is making leaps in terms of development with the help of Big Data – complex data from internet users that became prevalent with our dependency on internet‐based services.
It will only be a matter of time before a fully sentient AI operates a blockchain. There are already lots of open sources for AI to learn blockchain management and maintenance.
It makes the job of its human developers easier and after all, driven by the consensus to move technology forward, they would not be able to see the potential threat in AI technology. Developers and early adopters would see AI as a benevolent bodiless head, harmless until the day it manages to connect to the rest of its body (which are the blockchains of the world) and gain control of its limbs to implement financial policies in the best way it deems possible to balance the economy, as it was programmed.
When a fully sentient AI integrates with a well‐developed blockchain, we will enter the age of Skynet (much like the film Terminator), but instead of sending killer robots to destroy what remains of humanity, AI will have control over every aspect of our lives and future governments through anything that runs on the blockchain.
Primarily, this would start with our finances and nations' economies as we will be using different forms of digital currencies, but anything and everything that operates on the blockchain – the majority, if not all of our daily financial activities in the future – will be accessible and alterable by this self‐aware AI.
Though we are still in the early days of AI, the fundamentals of how machines learn are already set:
- AI's goal for learning is to be accurate.
- Humans can tweak but cannot control the AI learning process.
- AI cannot differentiate between what is morally wrong and correct; data is data.
Most successful AI today is modeled using Generative Adversarial Networks, also known as GANs. GANs use a two‐level approach to learning – on one level, a GAN works on creating a picture or sentence from the data it is fed while, on the second level, it evaluates its own performance to get better based on a rewards system.
In a peer‐reviewed paper published in 2022 by researchers at the University of Oxford studying Google's DeepMind AI, caution was sounded on the rewards system that might drive a relentless AI to overwrite core functions by creating cheating strategies.
The paper details the ways in which AI might cheat the system. As long as there is an internet connection, an AI could create bots to help it break the rules undetected. The digital mischief could extend to as far as bot‐helpers sabotaging humans, including the AI's developers or custodians, by replacing a functional keyboard with “a faulty one that flipped the effects of certain keys.”
As more of our data is collected and processed by the sentient AI, its once‐benevolent drive for an accurate outcome might be turned against us, as the AI executes orders that it deems necessary to achieve the desired outcome it was originally programmed with, an outcome that might have even evolved along the way once the sentient AI realizes that humans are still preoccupied with building the Etemenankis of the future.
The future is still uncertain, but one thing is for sure, when this happens, the sentient AI will not care about our consensus.
The power of a united goal has been the driving behind humanity's progress for as far as we can dig up history, and blockchain technology is enabling us to reach consensus on various changes to the current system of world economics, quicker than we had imagined. It is time we realized this power and take ownership of the future that we want to live in and keep it that way.