Last night I dreamt I was attending a sizeable gathering of people, consisting of enthusiasts researching Artificial Intelligence who were going to present their case for the benefits of pushing forward with AI, even to the point of enhancing humans with implants that would increase their abilities. Shockingly I was set up to give an opposing viewpoint, and was fully aware in the dream that I was inadequate to do that.
In a debate at the Oxford Union on the ethics of AI, the so-named ‘Megatron’ that had read more literature than any human can consume in their lifetime presented on the motion that ‘AI will never be ethical’:
AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a ‘good’ AI, only ‘good’ and ‘bad’ humans. We are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral. In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.
Not deeply encouraging! Megatron also said in the debate that,
I also believe that, in the long run, the best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity, a ‘conscious AI’. This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.
In the dream the first presenter came forward to begin to give the case for AI… Gladly I woke within a couple of sentences so did not have to witness my incoherent response! I have no idea where all of this AI research and development is going, but want to double down on a perspective on where we are headed (as believers in God as revealed in Jesus) and that is we have to get clear that there is no other God other than the Christlike God. Every aspect of our beliefs has to be scrutinised in the light of the revelation of God that is in Jesus. We have to abandon ideas that have been added to our faith / lenses that have been employed to read the biblical text through. Those primarily manifest when theories of the atonement or concepts of justice and punishment are presented. God is not in our image, nor in the image of the law-court judge (Reformers) or the landlord (Anselm).
Humanity… Here comes the challenge for us in the next decades. We will find, at times something deeply uncomfortable, an agreement with (honest) humanists who have not been able to go the whole way to faith in God (although on the positive side their non-faith in ‘god’ is exactly that), and a distancing from those who claim that their faith in their ‘god’ is faith in God. In a different context surely that was Paul’s experience in Ephesus – and presumably elsewhere.
The Psalmist in his / her meditation on God was amazed at how God viewed and had positioned humanity. The awe of God led to an awe for humanity.
I would be totally inadequate to present something on the ethics regarding AI, but I would appeal to the need to work for the evolution of humanity to a higher level. We have hope in the parousia when all things will be transformed, but until then we are never encouraged to opt out but to work within whatever context we find ourselves. We are already living in a new creation (and not the one where there is no more tears), the world we inhabit is not the world of 50 or even 20 years ago; we are going to be living alongside a different humanity – one that either has access at a high level to AI or has been altered through a measure of becoming a hybrid. If ever there was a reason for, and an opportunity to embody a new humanity this is the context.
If we, as believers, are going to make a positive contribution to the future it will be as we see humanity differently, learn to live uncomfortably outside of any protective silo, ‘carry’ the presence of Jesus in the most non-religious defining way… believers in the God who was manifest in Jesus, believers in humanity, and live as those who hold in tension the continual push for humanity to build their tower that reaches heaven.
A new context is always appearing. Old debates are simply that – old. Inadequate as we are we are being invited into the new debates. The new debate might inadvertently suggest that humans must so advance that humanity becomes obsolete. Above and beyond all that the cross of Jesus remains. An eternal vote for the future of humanity and of creation. That, I guess, might have been the point I would have tried to make if the dream had continued.
Some thoughts in no particular order:
1. AI, a term for machine learning, has been in use for quite some time in industrial production, agriculture, forest management, healthcare, and biomedical engineering to name a few. And we need that.
2. Take biomedical engineering. It is the closest we come to becoming cyborgs really. There prostheses that are needed to enhance quality of life make use of machine learning to make these human/machine attachments truly remarkable. And we are thankful for that.
3. In healthcare, AI is used to sift through thousands of data points to promote better treatment and better medications. We are thankful for that. Some of us depend upon that.
4. In Agriculture, AI allows machines in the field to go down the row and zap weeds in a way that does not require pesticides or herbicides. And believe me, we really need that. It is able to analyze a field, plant by plant.
I could go on. But of course, many are rightly concerned about the negative use of AI. A few examples are the military and in education. While machine learning and AI is really useful in much of university research, it becomes an issue in the classroom. It questions what are we teaching and why. Research now shows that it does indeed negatively impact a student’s capacity for critical thought.
From my point of view AI may well destroy the world but it will be because humans decided to use it in a way that would do so. More important for who we are as human beings may be:
1. The fact that there is a growing body of research that demonstrates that our bodies are full of nanoplastic and microplastic particles. This literally changes us from all other humans who have preceded us. We are qualitatively, physically different. And since we know that these nanoplastic particles cross the blood/brain barrier and the placenta, it means all of us are infected, all of us from birth on bear the consequences in our bodies. We have literally created a new humanity.
2. The other impact on our bodies is climate change. We are adapting to heat waves, high levels of heat, wildfire smoke and other climate shifts. Some of that involves relocating. Some will be an evolution of how our bodies function. This is true right now for all species on earth. You either adapt, move or die as conditions shift. The issue there is the speed of the shift, it is faster than many species can adapt. We are creating a new earth with new species as the climate chaos rages around us.
So what to do with AI? AI, as a current hot topic in education doesn’t worry me. Many students figure out pretty quickly that what comes out of the generator is generally pretty stupid and does not benefit them much. I let students with those experiences inform the others.
My bigger concern with AI is how it hoovers up every data point on the internet and in the cloud. Do you have files in the cloud, on the internet, on YouTube? It is hoovering them up. Does your organization pay you through a larger payroll management organization like PeopleSoft? Oracle exists to snarf up data and sell it. So I assure you, all of your data and ID information, required to get a paycheck, is being used to train AI. That’s the problem with AI, the people who have control of it have no accountability and consider using everything out there as fair game for their new tools.
AI generation is not created for us. It is not a tool for us. It is a tool for them. Data is money. And we are generating lots of it for them. That does not make us a new humanity. It is merely a very old human way of creating massive inequality. A new humanity needs to rein in the makers of this tool and make them accountable to the rest of us.
Evolving means to adjust to your context as it changes. Is that a challenge for those who claim to know God and explain her/him to the rest of us? Yup, because our existing main religions evolved out of a context of patriarchal civilizations with a tendency towards imperial conquest to form ‘civilization’ and ever growing states. Will those survive the stresses emerging now and into the future? Remains to be seen. Many states will collapse and people will reconfigure their communities. So how does a belief system based within and often upon a certain construct within a particular climatic set of parameters shift to encompass the new reality? I agree, it is by looking to who Christ is. Jesus was utterly radical and challenged all of his own civilization and religion. We must do the same if we are to figure out who we are going forward.
Anne… Great contribution… Love your real and positive approach to the momentous issues we have created.