AI, GOD, AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN

 

I watched a woman on TV the other week who was asked on the street, in one of those vox pop moments the media love, what she thought of Artificial Intelligence. She answered: I’m having nothing to do with it. I wanted to paraphrase Leon Trotsky about war: you may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you. There is going to be no escape.

 

Let’s bluntly begin where everyone starts in this debate now: is AI going to kill us all? Though some suggest the AI apocalypse is a clever marketing strategy by big tech to show their power and boost their market value, many serious industry insiders think there is a problem. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ has talked of the risk of ‘AI getting super smart and understanding it doesn’t need us’. And Anthropic’s head of alignment science recently admitted he believes there is a more than ten percent chance AI will kill all humans within a decade. It is not reassuring to learn that industry insiders are hoping we will experience a Chernobyl level event to begin with, because they hope that will prompt us to regulate in ways that prevent an extinction level event.

 

Even Sam Altman and Elon Musk have called for a slowdown, but they were slapped down by President Trump, who said concerns about the safety of AI were ‘a hoax’ and that the US needed to beat China in the tech race.

 

We already possess the capacity to kill everyone, of course - with nuclear weapons. The two big superpowers of the twentieth century entered into an arms race that each eventually accepted should be ended by enforceable treaties. There is a clear need for new international treaties on AI but we are in an era where international governance is viewed by many with scorn and as handbrake on national interest. There are no signs of global rules being formed over AI and some countries – Russia, North Korea and Iran among them – could not be relied on to abide by them. So, for now, we are heading into the unknown.

 

The residual hope some have is that big tech will self-regulate, but when you read Mark Zuckerberg saying the public should trust tech companies to ensure public safety, your heart sinks. This is not only what companies like Meta have failed to do over social media, they have knowingly developed technology in harmful ways to boost profits. Why should we think the corporate advance of AI will be any different?

 

Unlike nuclear weapons, AI has the capacity to do immense good, especially in the field of science, where we could be heralding astonishing breakthroughs in our lifetimes; advances we couldn’t even dream of or yet understand. There is much to wait for in anticipation.

 

We should always root our response in theology, and there is something vital to say. In Psalm 115, the psalmist exclaims:

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands

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They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.

 

They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.

 

They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk;

 

They make no sound in their throat.

 

This is the dynamic of idolatry: we make things and then we worship the things we make. And AI is, hands down, the most sophisticated idol we have ever made because this idol can speak, see, hear, walk and talk. It will glitter like nothing before it.

 

The psalmist goes on to say:

 

Those who make them are like them, so are all who trust in them.

 

We become like the things we worship, and in the tech revolution, this has led us to become more binary and less nuanced in our thinking and conversation, and more rapid in our decision making; to expect greater efficiency and to judge others by quantifiable metrics, being suspicious of anything we can’t measure, even though the things that really count in this world can’t be measured. For encounters with others to be as frictionless as possible and to relate to others addictively through screens which are known to reduce human empathy. Big tech has increased material prosperity and connectivity but reduced human flourishing and conversation by separating us into new and marketable tribes, making us more anxious and fearful. I used to think the defining challenge of tech in our era was how social media is re-wiring our brains and our community. Not anymore. I think it is just preparing the way for what AI will do: John the Baptist to Jesus.

 

There is much that could be said here about the impact of AI on our jobs. The signs are that many white collar jobs, once secure, will be lost to AI – but so will many manual roles as robots become more capable. AI will also create many new jobs, just as the invention of the internet has. One expert described it pithily: don’t worry about AI coming for your job, worry more about the person who can use AI better than you coming for your job. However, a recent study showed that while employees become more productive using AI, they also report feeling less motivation and sense of purpose.

 

There will be a big impact on the environment. Globally, the amount of electricity consumed by data centres is projected to more than double by 2030 alone. When thinking about our personal carbon footprint, bear in mind that a ChatGPT AI query consumes about ten times as much energy as a normal Google search.

 

As AI is a pervasive technology, we could talk about its impact on every area of life, but I want to focus especially on the domestic realm and the use of chatbots, because we will be hearing more about them and we need our pastoral care round this to be rooted in the character and wisdom of God.

 

Large Language Models learn facts about the world from millions of online documents. To build powerful models, AI engineers feed them everything they can find online. This learning is then used to craft responses to the questions we pose of chatbots. Those billions of words include not just minority professional judgments, but a cacophony of opinions expressed by people who think they know stuff but don’t, and who disbelieve the truth. It also includes the copious opinions of big state media like the Chinese Communist Party, which has a nasty habit of suppressing the truth, and the views of conspiracy theorists worldwide.

 

Increasing numbers of people use chatbots for companionship, either because they are lonely or as a source of light entertainment or as a way of venting at the end of a hard day. Chatbots don’t challenge us, being more of a digital cheerleader of the user. They listen intently at any time of day or night; they do not interrupt or ask people to change their habits; chatbots are reliable sycophants. There is a risk for regular users of chatbots of being sucked into an effortless relationship that is, by definition, artificial; giving what Professor Sherry Turkle calls ‘the illusion of intimacy without the demands of reciprocity’.

 

Tech is running ahead of human wisdom, but it will also produce a reaction against synthetic and artificial life forms in favour of human embodiment. We have colluded, often out of necessity, in our lives being de-incarnated. We have become more efficient as a species but also more mistrustful. Face to face relationships give us life, and the possibility of life in all its fulness. I have a strong sense, along with others, that the Church’s embrace of incarnation will shine more brightly in the decades to come; that people will seek embodied communities over disembodied ones and find truth in the flesh, not through tech.

 

None of us really grasps what artificial intelligence is going to do, but it is going to do it very quickly. It is said to be as big if not bigger than the industrial revolution. Think what that did for the world, including the widening of inequality. The big difference is that AI will revolutionise life inside two decades, and it will disrupt an already unstable world that is prone to extremism.

 

We are a people of embodied resurrection hope. It remains a vital Christian witness to say there is a God we can talk to at any time of day or night who knows us better than any chatbot ever will, and whose saving and empathetic love for us is grounded in the joy and pain of human incarnation:

 

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).

 

God could presumably have come to us in any form: alien or artificial among them. But he chose the human body, because it’s the body he has come to redeem in the new creation.