Opus 2025-436: Catalog of Fear

There are at least four different types of fear that are common in our lives:

Fear as awe or reference.
Fear as being startled.
Fear as concern.
Fear as craven panic

The first fear is that which we see in the Bible as it relates to a fear of God.  It is based on the idea of God’s awesomeness and how we should have reverence for Him.  It also is sometimes used as an adjective to express the dynamic depth of God‘s creative ability.  We see this in Psalms.

(Psa 139:14 KJV)  I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

This is the kind of fear I felt for my father.  It is healthy and necessary.

Then there is the fear that we have when a scorpion drops off the curtain onto your arm while you’re naked in the shower.  Or the times when my grandchildren are able to sneak up on me and make me jump and squeal.  There is at least a moment of panic and sometimes a total blitzkrieg of screaming yelling and shaking.

There is the fear which is just in a general sense, concern.  What comes to mind here is the speech that FDR made where he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  

And of course, the last one is that fear that makes us into petrified patriots.  It is that fear that the government is going to come and get us.  It’s a fear of the mysterious “they”.  It is that fear which acts like a regulator on our accelerator pedal or like the self driving cars that will suddenly hit the brakes for what look like no reason and throw you toward the windshield.  It is a consuming and controlling fear.

What instigated this was my wife quoting a talking head who said something that I’ve said many times, that our fear of AI is vastly overblown.  That’s my paraphrase, I did not actually hear him say whatever he said.  Should we be afraid of AI?  Not of AI itself, what we need to be afraid of are the programmers and developers who are guiding AI and telling it what to do.  If you remember the Isaac Asimov science fiction novels about robots this will resonate.  There were the four laws of robotics and I think the first one was that you should not do anything to harm a human being.  If our developers and our programmers do not start with that foundation, then there is no telling where some of this stuff could go.

We have lived with this reality all our lives.  It applies to any new technology from atomic energy to VHS.  They all have the potential for good or evil.  Atomic energy can give us pollution free power or destruction.  The VHS, which had such promise for education and enrichment became the avenue of pornography.  The fear needs to be focused on the human element.

So fear God, get prepared to be startled by events, be concerned about those events, and fear the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.  And don’t forget to lock your doors.

homo unius libri