Why Starlink?
Or, why is space so important?
War, famine, pestilence, and natural disasters kept the world population down; these problems kept people focused on survival, so much time and effort was just put into having enough food.
If you had enough food, you had to defend it.
And if you did not have enough food, you would ‘other’ your neighbour so you could wage war with them and steal their food. (And women.)
So, progress was slow.
We are Tony and Christine Arcus.
Ask Mark is a project helping people make sense of a changing world.
Yes — we are using AI to reach you.
That is not as strange as it sounds. In 1900 the Salvation Army premiered Soldiers of the Cross at the Melbourne Town Hall — film, lantern slides and a living voice. They did not wait for the medium to become respectable. They used what was in front of them.
We want to do that with AI: not to replace the church, but to connect people with this same Jesus.
Copper to Steel
The transition from stone to copper, and from bronze to iron, took thousands of years.
There have been times when survival could take a back seat, and times when whole people groups almost disappeared.
Survival living started to disappear with the Renaissance and the Reformation, with Islam contracting, and prosperity becoming mainstream in simple things like sustainable agriculture, shipping commerce, and then the Industrial Revolution.
We still had issues around land sovereignty that set us back from Napoleon to Hitler.
Then the stupidity of communism kicked it. It was not enough that the Industrial Revolution brought prosperity to millions and would bring it to millions more. Communism had to raise its jealous head, and like a plague it killed 50 to 60 million in Russia, 30 million in China, and millions in Cambodia, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, and Africa.
Today in the West, we have a weird suicidal love for communism.
These progressives that have never lived under communism are doomed to repeat it.
Like Marx before them, they think so highly of themselves that they become fools.
They live in an echo chamber, have never had a job not paid by taxes, and see themselves as intellectual saviours. Then, as people who have never produced, they want to take the means of production away from the producers.
How do we avoid this?
This is why Starlink.
Unlike Europeans moving to the US in the 19th and 20th centuries, we have no new continent to move to.
But we do have a new mindset to move to.
AI abundance.
Not as a saviour, but as a pathway coupled with rational thinking, productive input and productive output. The obvious is obvious to those who are not reactionary, envious, or jealous.
Starlink represents a new pathway.
The Industrial Revolution lifted millions out of subsistence living. Across four generations, millions went from dirt floors and night labour to heated homes and beds without lice to sleep on.
The Industrial Revolution started slowly, then all at once.
Steam engines appeared first in the 1710s, then more commercially in the 1770s, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing by 1830. At the turn of the century, 1900, steam was king.
The digital world started earlier than people think if you consider punch-card looms.
The first true electronic computers came into existence during the Second World War. The IC in 1958 started to accelerate things, first as multi-room behemoths, then desktop models like the PDP-11 in the 1970s. Then the TSR-80 in 1978.
Moore's law kicked in, and growth hasn't stopped since, doubling every 18 months. The cell phone in my pocket has more raw computing power than all computers in the whole world when man landed on the moon in 1969.
Unfortunately, mad men rise and fall: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, taking millions with them to early graves. The trick to not dying is not to be there when the madman arises.
Get out of New York, California.
People left Germany for the US and prospered.
Be where foolish people are not; don’t be where the foolish act ideologically to their own demise.
It's hard to leave home when home is all you have known.
Millions have seen what was happening, did nothing about it and are a statistic in a madman's legacy.
We may have no new land we can move to, but there will be places that embrace AI, SI, and Super Compute in space. Be where this is happening!
Or you can go where God is calling you, as the safest place is the middle of God's will. Also, if you become wise and understand the world that is in the middle of a revolution, you can act instead of react. Pray into guidance instead of living in fear.
We are living in the information revolution, and while it has been going on for some time, from the IC to the PC, from Microsoft to Google, from the internet to Starlink and now AI and SI.
Today, changes are happening in months, not decades: million-chip coherent training clusters; soon, million-node inference satellites in orbit. First, software Grok checks your emails; next, Grok in your car diverts for a coffee; then Grok brings in the groceries.
The luddites will exist, but just as they could not stop the industrial revolution, they will not be able to stop the informational revolution; just be aware, be wise, and don't be a target. Not afraid, just not foolish.
Starlink is a precursor and a mark on the map for how to see the changes that can keep you safe.
Understand Starlink, understand Grok, or any of the competitors, and you will begin to see a prosperous pathway forward.
There is a lot more to unpack, both in terms of how this fits with God's calling for going into the whole world, and God's calling in you for which world you are called to, and how to be an actor, not a reactor.
Reach out and connect with me if you are interested in your calling in God and AIs place in this calling.
AI: a massive auto-correction machine
I’ve said that an AI is just a massive auto-correction machine, or a next-probable-word projector.
Well, it’s worse than that.
Depending upon the applications of the questions, from raw maths to coding, from historical information to theoretical ideas, on to social analysis, and then diagnosis and opinion interpretation, AI becomes less about the underlying information and more about pleasing the questioner.
Is AI a Thinking Machine?
If you lower your definition of thinking, then maybe an AI thinks.
What an AI does is deeply predict what the next word in the answer will be.
This prediction creates the appearance of thinking, knowledge, and even understanding, but it is just an unbelievable amount of information synthesised into a matrix of connections to predict the next best word.