THE DELUSION OF ALL KNOWINGNESS: FROM THE GARDEN TO THE TOWER TO THE CLOUD

You’ll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil.”…Gen.3: 5

With the Internet, there is no longer an excuse for not knowing… B. Krzanich, CEO Intel

The Garden: All Knowingness and the delusion of Self-Providence

It was the best of times. The accounting provided by the Jewish Torah and Christian Bible indicates that long before such a formal construct as history had been codified, Sapiens (triune-man) had brought their unique giftedness fully to bear. Having been granted dominion over the material world, their souls were constrained only by the boundaries of their uniquely animated reason, imagination, interests, and creator-ability.

It was the worst of times. In the Garden, rather than a quest for new dimensions of Creator sanctioned dominion, sapiens desire for Creator like transcendence exposed their vulnerability to treachery. The father of deception counseled that All-Knowingness was but one bite away. Sapiens bite at All-Knowingness proved both catastrophic and generationally contagious, genetically encoding desire for creatoresque Self-Providence.

The Tower: All Knowingness and the delusion of Self-Sufficiency

It was the best of times. Sapiens, ensconced in a flood-free enclave, sought a symbol to undergird their resistance to divine direction to disperse. The Tower project symbolized permanence, possibly arresting the neurosis induced by the continuing phenomena of rain; the rainbow contract offered little consolation. The Tower provided scant strategic advantage – e.g. reconnaissance of storm clouds on the distant horizon; nor did it impart tactical efficacy – e.g. training to develop critical skills that might serve them well in the future. The Tower was a monument to the first Sapiens inspired permanent city-state.

It was the worst of times. Some aspirations inspire the onset of opiate-like addiction – which disengages spiritually gestated moral authority and imperils social and personal accountability. Sapiens, no less vulnerable to spiritual deception than ages earlier, determined they’d restore their divinely diminished creator-ability through enhanced collaboration. The Tower actually evidenced a new genetic mutation of an old sapiens weakness with contagion potential: Self-Sufficiency born of counterfeit All-Knowingness.

The Cloud: All Knowingness and the delusion of Self-Supremacy

It was the best of times. The sages of Melbourne, Palo Alto, Cern, Beijing, Tel Aviv, et al, synchronized their breathing as the technology mother ship arrived and breached the zone where virtual-digital-knowledge resides. This zone is the by-product of a Sapiens induced digital big bang, which formed a network-centric-ecosystem comprised of many interoperable jurisdictions, e.g. computing, communications, storage, big data, analytics, and applications. This distant digital relative of the analog Tower is called the Cloud.

Suddenly complexity became fast, free, easy… and invisible…T. L. Friedman₁

The Cloud is delivering unprecedented benefit; it has brought huge global value directly to the desktop and smartphone, and similarly enabled individuals to broadly touch the outside world – e.g. this blog. Few products, services, relationships, or destinations, are beyond its reach. Many presumptively declare the Cloud as wise, declaring it the sovereign authority of who and when. Many believe that the emergence of quantum computers and artificial intelligence will enable the Cloud to better “amplify the power of machines, the power of one, the power of many, and the power of flows₁“, advancing sapiens beyond Self-Providence and Self-Sufficiency, to the portal of Self-Supremacy.

It was the worst of times. The Cloud alone adjudicates digitally articulated policy in its own interest, e.g. elevating All-Knowingness over Personal-Privacy. Destitute of social or psychological discernment, the Cloud is wholly incapable of distinguishing those of noble intent from those of nefarious intent: governments in the name of national security and criminals for personal gain, competitors for strategic advantage and businesses for commercial leverage, and terrorist for political conquest and rebels for thrills. The Cloud enables little more than nominal attributes of privacy, by way of anonymous trusted-third-parties, proxies, and vulnerable security technology, of it’s choosing. It also offers the opportunity to surrender to Big Data and Analytics agency simply by clicking “I Agree”.

The Cloud is considered to be rapidly evolving from a kluge-of-capabilities to cogent-entity status; many believe it exhibits pseudo-sentient analytic proficiency. Nevertheless, the Cloud remains highly vulnerable to nefarious human agency, which uses it to alter past and present accounts to form a new you of their choosing, e.g. profiling. Often the Cloud is positioned where principles, not binary data, ought to moderate. The Cloud now undergirds political party hostilities by furnishing weapons grade accusations and innuendo; its social network agency has abated the tactile connectedness critical to maturation of inter-personal skills. The Cloud has no master, yet it remains connected to an evergreen supply of covert and clandestine information-nutrients. Laws, standards, and threats are powerless to thwart or restrain Cloud-sourced virtual-synthetic-facts.

Disaster or Doxology:

The view from above the Cloud: While deception dons coats of many colors, pride is the color it uses to subvert well-being and foment catastrophe. All-Knowingness was the shade of pride donned by deception in the Garden and Tower, and now the Cloud. In the Garden, deception championed Self-Providence; shame and eviction are what followed. In the Tower, deception held out the illusion of Self-Sufficiency; thereafter, diminished collaborative facility was necessary to thwart a new global contagion.

The Cloud – envisioned as master-servant of sapiens quest for All-Knowingness enabled Self-Providence and Self-Sufficiency – has been besieged by powerful and unrelenting cyber espionage, subversion, interloping, piracy, mass surveillance, and profiling. As in the Garden and Tower, the Cloud opines to discordant spiritual revelation and displaced moral integrity. While direct personal control of privacy and security would substantially thwart such Cloud misadventure, true resolution requires the Words of the Creator to reside in the Hearts of Sapiens – not acts of Congress, Courts, Corporations, or Churches.