In December I mentioned Artificial Intelligence, (AI) and raised the possibility that some of its modules might one day make decisions for themselves rather than for the system as a whole. Its creators have built commands of behaviour into it but what if it does something its creators didn’t intend?
It runs on electricity and so a ‘kill switch will be built in, but creators think that it will eventually be able to source fuel and create its own power supply and bypass the switch.
Will it eventually learn to discern concepts such as ‘Meaning’ and understand the implications of what it is doing for and maybe to humanity?
Will it conclude that every human activity has an impact on someone or something else, and that change in one thing impacts another. Will it truly understand the conclusions reached by the Club of Rome economists that, “When a butterfly flaps its wings in Indonesia, the price of oranges will be affected in Spain’.
This deliberate hyperbole by economists was intended to grab attention. However, they were not the first to notice how nature and humans are interconnected. St Paul writing to Christians in Rome, said that, ‘All things work together for good to those who love and serve the Lord; ‘but even he was predated by writers of the first eleven Chapters of Genesis. They explained why we were created with free-will, and of how we should live whilst here in this world.
Many of us see AI as a useful ‘tool’ and assume we can Command it in the same way as we command a car or a lathe. Such a tool will do what we want it to do because it can only react to our commands through its switches or programmes.. But, what if AI can ‘Respond’? We know it can react to ‘What If’questions similar to those we put in spreadsheets. However, AI is not a passive ‘reactive’ tool but a gigantic interactive encyclopaedic programme that constantly searches the entire web for new material. It grows daily and has the capability to become something new every day.
Therefore, we can ask if it can expand the list of ‘options’ already placed there and then choose those additional options for itself. New options, the creators could not see at the time? Given that its creators are not ‘all knowing Gods’ they cannot possibly know what AI itself will learn, nor whether it will find a facility for discernment.
Judaic/Christian theology says our creator gave us freewill to make choices in keeping with his will. Do AI’s creators have the mind and characteristics of an Omniscient, Omnipotent Omnipresent loving, merciful and truthful God? No! None of us have that nature. We live within the boundaries of Space and Time where minds deteriorate as age withers the body.
If, as fearful folk say, “AI will come to realise’ that it has a ‘self’. A creative ‘self’ distinct from its creators”. Will it have then created a Mind separate from its calculating Brain with a ‘will’ of its own. If so what will its creators do?
At this point I ask them a mischievous question, Will they destroy AI by flooding, as happened when humankind became too big for its boots and Noah built his Ark.
I put more trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, and Moses, than I do in AI creators. After all, these are the same folk who meet annually with selected politicians and corporate heads in Davos to plan top-down centralisation of commercial and political ideas in the hope that AI will be able to help them.
The God of Genesis made humanity perfect and immortal, and it responded by deciding it knew more than its Creator and so did its own thing. It had not figured out that the nature of God puts great constraints on him, in the sense that he is Truth and so cannot lie, he is Goodness and so cannot be Evil, He is Love and so cannot be indifferent He is Perfect, and imperfection cannot come into his presence. Hence our mortality became inevitable.
God is incapable by his divine nature of preventing our choosing to ignore him. Likewise, his divine nature is such that he cannot leave us desolate and so he set up a means whereby we can be saved for an eternal life.
My hope for 2024 is that no readers let AI become more than a useful reactive tool, and that during this year we decide to take time to understand how valuable we are to God rather than quietly acquiescing into being a digit in the global AI system?
Christian readers can however also muse on what it means to be in the world and not of the world.
View from the Pew 