“…And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Genesis 11:6 ESV
One memory I have as a young boy was visiting my grandparents in the mid-eighties. Living close to us, I found myself at their house fairly often. Stationed next to their home phone was a cube-shaped block of white note paper with three large and blue letters printed across the top — IBM. At that time, IBM had purchased 1,300 acres in southeast Tucson. My grandfather and my father, both being union plumbers were a few of many who helped erect the massive 1.3 million square foot complex to serve their ever growing technological advances. By then, IBM had already been around in various capacities for one hundred years. Thomas Watson, the namesake for IBM’s famous question-answering computer system, joined the company in 1914 as the General Manager and became its President soon after. Although Watson didn’t play a part in the first World War, he and his company would end up playing a massive role in the second.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I knew IBM stood for International Business Machines. The company’s herculean size, scope, and worldwide influence was remarkable to learn. But What I found more jarring and nearly unbelievable was how IBM openly and knowingly helped the Nazi Regime carry out its genocide against the Jewish people. Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, frankly summarizes:
Without IBM, there would still have been a Holocaust killing hundreds of thousands. Einsatzgruppen murder squads and their militia cohorts would still have murdered East European Jews bullet by bullet in pits, ravines, and isolated clearings in the woods. But it was IBM that helped the Third Reich create the industrial, high-speed, six million-victims Holocaust—metering ghetto residents out to trains, then carefully scheduling the moving of those trains to concentration camps for mass murder and cremation within hours, clearing the way for the next shipment of victims, day and night. 1
In short, IBM’s punch card was the “computer” of the 1930s. As Black lays out, the punch cards were revolutionary in surveilling and tracking all people through tabulation. In the third Reich, IBM’s high speed machines could quickly receive the punched cards and spit out personal information. Thus, “The Information Age—meaning the era of the individualization of statistics, or the identifying and quantifying of a specific person within an anonymous count—was born not in Silicon Valley, but in Berlin in 1933.” 2 As we noted in a previous article, Covid, the Code, and the Place for Christian Ethics, eugenics was being practiced in Germany nearly two decades before the war broke out. IBM played a major role in that time as well, helping catalog any undesirables in the 30s prior to military action in the 40s.
Throughout the war, IBM’s cutting edge technology made the Final Solution viable in many ways. But nothing advanced the herding, transporting, and death of the Jews more than IBM’s machines scheduling the railroads to train them from the ghettos to the concentration camps night and day. Consequently, from the beginning to the end, IBM’s twelve year relationship in helping to fulfill Hitler’s genocide is truly breathtaking.
Besides being an important part of technological, medical, and world history that everyone should know about, you might be asking yourself: Why is this information more pertinent now? Answer: Because the world is standing on the precipice of a new technology that even the best minds concede collective ignorance to foresee the scope, power, and unintended consequences of Artificial Intelligence.
The fear that nothing “…they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” taken from the time of the Tower of Babel, is currently being experienced — not just among Christians but largely secular futurists and technocrats. Just last week (late March, 2023) over one thousand experts called for a six month moratorium on AI development. While I doubt any real standstill will happen behind closed doors, the attempt to slow the process of developing AI reveals the hesitancy that many are feeling. To quote the great Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, “…Your Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” 3 Thankfully, the experts in the field are now considering if they should. But in reality, it’s too late. It’s not a matter whether they should, but how they should manage it.
If those developing and controlling AI falls into the hands of anyone like Thomas Watson then a divine judgment of scattering and confusion might be preferable to the alternative. Maybe that’s why Elon Musk said, “Artificial intelligence is a fundamental risk to human civilization.” 4
Edwin Black not only exposed how IBM was complicit in the worst atrocity in modern history but sagely points out why. “It is also worth asking why a company like IBM chose to participate in genocide. It was never about Nazism; it was never about antisemitism. It was about money. “Business” is, after all, the company’s middle name. IBM has proven that some corporations can get away with murder.” 5
Christian, if you or enough people believe that men like Thomas Watson wouldn’t be a part of some form of pauperization or genocide today through the power of artificial intelligence, to gain power, money, or influence, then don’t be surprised when they do. It’s a robust understanding of the depravity of man and world history that should lead us to have very little trust in man and great trust in God; even more so when we are all entering the strange new world of AI.
The people of Genesis 11:1-9 were trying as one world to exalt a name for themselves in defiance of God. Our job and honor is to exalt Christ’s name in obedience to Him. In times like these, may our obedience to God transform the human race far greater than IBM has in the past or AI is expected to in the very near future.
But what do you think?
Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff
1. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust, © 2023 Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, https://besacenter.org/ibm-holocaust/, Assessed April 4th, 2023.
2. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust, © 2023 Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, https://besacenter.org/ibm-holocaust/, Assessed April 4th, 2023.
3. Ian Malcom, Bookroo, https://screenrant.com/jurassic-park-ian-malcolm-best-funniest-iconic-quotes-lines/#ldquo-your-scientists-were-so-preoccupied-with-whether-or-not-they-could-they-didn-rsquo-t-stop-to-think-if-they-should-rdquo, Assessed April 2, 2023.
4. Elon Musk, © Copyright WBUR 2023, https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/07/18/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence, Assessed April 7th, 2023.
5. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust, © 2023 Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, https://besacenter.org/ibm-holocaust/, Assessed April 4th, 2023.
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