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| From Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens to Techno-Human: The digital person |
Our scrutiny of AI comes as Oppenheimer has been a media talking point both as a film and as the focus of a troubling issue—was it morally right to develop the nuclear bomb? Nuclear energy—of benefit to humankind, generally speaking; nuclear weaponry—still a danger to nations and, in extremis, to the continued existence of humanity on this planet.
We are at a similar point on our journey with regard use of AI. From Scientific American:
A 2023 survey of AI experts found that 36 percent fear that AI development may result in a “nuclear-level catastrophe.” Almost 28,000 people have signed on to an open letter written by the Future of Life Institute, including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, the CEOs of several AI companies and many other prominent technologists, asking for a six-month pause or a moratorium on new advanced AI development.
And significantly, (from here and here), concerning the "Godfather of AI":
Geoffrey Hinton, perhaps the world’s most celebrated artificial intelligence researcher, made a big splash a few months ago when he publicly revealed that he’d left Google so he could speak frankly about the dangers of the technology he helped develop.
[...] Hinton’s basic message was that AI could potentially get out of control, to the detriment of humanity. In the first few weeks after he went public, about those fears, which he had come to feel only relatively recently, after seeing the power of large language models like that behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
[...] Now consider the combined possibilities that machines can truly understand the world, can learn deceit and other bad habits from humans, and that giant AI systems can process zillions of times more information that brains can possibly deal with. Maybe you, like Hinton, now have a more fraughtful view of future AI outcomes.
Some are not worried. Advances in technology must take their own course, they say. We should go wherever science and technology takes us, even if it is to our detriment. We are just "star dust"; and if humans disappear from this planet, so be it.
As I write I'm thinking of the likes of Yuval Noah Harari, with his work, Homo Deus: "... humans have completed their cosmic task and should now pass the torch to entirely new kinds of entities", among which are techno-humans, part of the brave new world of transhumanism. The frightening self-invention lauded under gender ideology gives us an inkling of what awaits us as mere creations of genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces.
However, there is another perspective on our management of the human future:
I believe the third millennium is so far best understood as the dawning awareness of the Crisis of Man. It is a crisis involving every person on earth, and mankind’s relationships to earth; and to animals, to plants, to the sky, to the waters, to the weather, to the atoms, to the heavens.
What reality is (1), who we are (2), and what is the basis for understanding the relationship between them (3), are the foundational questions which are under dispute.
This is from writer and parent Tara Thieke, who identifies the culprit in the upheaval of WEIRD society as Artificialism:
The pain of the Crisis is that many people adhering to old answers are only beginning to realize they live in a society shaped at every level by new answers, answers which communicate a profound rejection of Man and interpret reality as a place devoid of limits.
Artificialism is the common ideology bonding the New Answers. It begins in ancient Greece with the theory of atomism; it lurked in the background as the nominalists and realists quarreled in the medieval universities; it spurred the great consciousness shift of the Scientific and Industrial revolutions which produced scientism and reductionist materialism.
With the reach of contemporary technology, Artificialism builds on its past gains by prompting a new (ancient) rejection of reality, Man, and communion-based knowledge. Artificialism is no longer a denier of essences, but a promoter of self-created fantasies [...]. It used the blank slate when it was suitable; today it uses gnostic gender ideology when that is appropriate.
All that the Artificialist ideology wants is to replace Creation and Man. It will use anything to get there, and we have allowed it. Our engagement with its incessant temptations atrophies our memories, our skills, our hands, our bodies. It really only leaves us with feelings of addiction and rage, feelings so exhausting that we numb them by rushing back to the Artificial virtual domain to get another rush of dopamine. Increasingly the Artificialist institutions program us to fit their desires via their algorithms.
A crucial point in answer to the questions, Is it inevitable? and Is it right?:
It’s understandable to feel a surge of doubt and helplessness when one suspects one is surrounded. But not one of the futures proposed by the Artificialists is truly inevitable, and they are all dependent upon enormous amounts of deceit and manipulation. What makes Man so interesting, his ability to make choices, is something the Artificialists abhor. They do not want Man to be More Man; they want us to be something distinctly less.
A unit, not a face. A quantity, not a quality. Matter and Man must be deprived of their meaning and Man convinced it could not be otherwise. God and reality had to be deprived of truth claims so the institutions could replace them with gods they crafted to serve their own desires.
How do we respond to the brave new world?
"... industrial society [is] ‘a world above the given world of nature,’ where I came to see how the ‘above’ was brought about through ‘artificial synthesis,’ as in the isolation of active ingredients and their synthetic counterparts."
She writes:
We are told to dwell in fear about a climate change crisis, and we experience troubling shifts in our environment. What makes all the difference, though, is how and who we allow to interpret this information for us.
Is the remedy to our ills a yet further plastic-ification of the world, to give greater power to the same technocrats who have most notoriously rejected respecting Nature’s limits? Is it to consider how Artificialism is warping our food, has poisoned the water, tortured and manipulated animals, and at every moment showed a determination to replace what is given with a synthetic, controlled option?
Her conclusion is a sweet one for the worried and the weary, though I doubt its simplicity of expression excludes a radical countercultural stance, and a willingness to enter the battle to reshape society in order to be able to celebrate the natural and the human, limitations and all. Thieke puts it this way:
You do not have to craft an entire worldview on your own to resist Artificialism. You do not have to fight Goliath at every moment, all on your own, forever:
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” Matthew 11:28-29
The work was done long ago on the Cross. We do not need to fight the new System with yet another new System. It is the prayer of the heart softened by metanoia, not Systems, which fully answers the triad of the questions under dispute. It is our relationship with the Holy Spirit which is the summum bonum of Man and Creation.
Ω See also: Why science needs to break the spell of reductive materialism
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