Announcement!

Christians should pay more attention to artificial intelligence and its possible implications for believers. As my title indicates, AI must interest Christians because in shaping our understanding of human identity, AI research touches the very heart of the Christian faith. The Christian gospel, after all, is all about becoming truly human. God became human in order to inaugurate true humanity and through it renew creation (2 Cor. 5:17). According to the greater Christian tradition, being a Christian is all about becoming truly human, by "putting on the new human being" (Col. 3:9-10) through our union with God for the purpose of becoming Christlike (1 Cor. 15:49). If the Christian gospel is essentially about becoming truly human by becoming like Christ, then anything that could foster or inhibit our humanity should be of intrinsic interest to any human being, but especially to Christians. 

As those in the tech industry know, the term artificial intelligence is a misnomer. Transhumanist dreams to the contrary, machines will never be sentient nor ever realize the uniquely human activity of understanding to which the term intelligence refers. Transhumanists and Hollywood filmmakers fantasize about "General Artificial Intelligence," as "the radical extension of technology into the domain of thought," with creatively thinking machines taking over so that "humans will no longer be the most generally intelligent creatures on the planet." ¹ General AI, however, is a pipedream, because the kind of intelligence analogous to human consciousness requires sentience, and sentience is impossible without a biological body. For this reason, most computer scientists gave up on general AI in the 1990s, and focused on "Narrow AI," the algorithmic processes that help in human decision making, and that are capable of "machine learning." ² Artificial intelligence, as computer scientist Jaron Lanier helpfully explains, has nothing to do with either simulating or even ever reaching human intelligence; rather AI "is the story we tell about our code" in order to obtain government funding. ³ AI, in short, does not exist if one implies that machines actually think or feel with even the lowest form of consciousness we know from organic life.

"The greatest danger, he concludes, is the loss of what sets us apart from all other entities, the loss of our personhood."

Lanier also warns that current techno-fiction and our use of technology are deeply dehumanizing. Social media apps are designed to create addiction to exploit our consumer habits. Moreover, the whole gamut of computing technology erodes our understanding of what it means to be truly human. Lanier worries that “if you design a society to suppress belief in consciousness and experience—to reject any exceptional nature to personhood—then maybe people can become like machines.” The greatest danger, he concludes, is the loss of what sets us apart from all other entities, the loss of our personhood.

For this reason, apocalyptic fears about superintelligences taking over the world, as imagined by Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, or Max Tegmark, may be good for selling books but do not reflect reality. Such predictions are based on a complete misunderstanding of human consciousness. ⁴ As the philosopher and ethicist of computer science Luciano Floridi rightly insists, "no AI version of Godzilla is about to enslave us, so we should stop worrying about science fiction and start focusing on the actual challenges that AI poses."  For Floridi, the true reason that existing AI applications are perceived to be a threat at all is "not because they deal intelligently with the world, [...] but because we are making the world increasingly friendly to them."⁵ The philosopher Huber Dreyfus similarly concludes his long epistemological engagement with computing technology with the sober assessment, "our risk is not the advent of superintelligent computers, but of sub intelligent human beings." ⁶

In short, we should not  be concerned about AI because of some futuristic takeover by sentient, superintelligent machines, even though the possibility of massive unemployment from eliminating jobs in the service industry is very real indeed. Moreover, the current arms race for digitalization threatens not only to widen the gap between rich and poor but also to continue the Covid era transformation of society into a collection of digital, online relations run by algorithms. The question is rather why we would ever think that only AI, big data, 5G networks, and AI-run smart cities with transparent citizens will usher in the new Jerusalem of future bliss. This hope is serious business as the recent alliance of New York governor Cuomo and Silicon Valley software mogul Eric Schmidt demonstrates. Together, the Google tycoon and Cuomo will reimagine New York State's post-Covid reality with the help of AI, focusing on "telehealth, remote learning, and broadband, [using] technology to make things better."⁷ A day earlier, Cuomo had proclaimed a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to create a smarter education system based on technology that could do without "all these buildings, all these physical classrooms." ⁸

"Our exaggerated expectations for AI to improve human society stem from our increasingly reductive view of what it means to be human. We have become used to thinking of human beings not as persons but as complex biological machines."

Our exaggerated expectations for AI to improve human society stem from our increasingly reductive view of what it means to be human. We have become used to thinking of human beings not as persons but as complex biological machines. In part, this view arises from human reason's strong, and seemingly irresistible, tendency to humanize the machine and mechanize the human being. ⁹  Our nearly boundless confidence in AI and digital technology is the culmination of a long historical development within a techno-scientific worldview that mechanizes mind and body. This radical shift in worldview began in the 17th century, when philosophers like Rene Descartes and Galileo. Descartes split our unified life-world into an inert, mechanical body on the one hand, and a rational, knowing mind on the other. Galileo followed by claiming that the basic language for deciphering the world is mathematics. Essentially, Galileo discarded subjective experience of the world  in favour of quantifiable, mathematical data. Natural science itself, of course, arose from our experience of the world as lived, embodied human selves. Yet, as the philosopher Michel Henry has argued, over time the scientific worldview became an abstraction that eventually eliminated subjective experience and caused us to reconceive life in mechanistic terms. ¹⁰

This quantification of human experience developed gradually into an entire worldview that has taken a firm hold of our imaginations across the globe. Especially in the twentieth century we have witnessed its completion. We no longer assess reality on the basis of lived life but on the scientific abstractions that reduce everything to quantifiable, measurable, and predictable functions. This functional view of life, in which every human experience is boiled down to some kind of code, program, or mechanism, became firmly entrenched with the rise of modern computational technology. With the advent of cybernetics, computers, and robotics, everything from biological evolution to the function of the human mind—indeed life itself—is explained in terms of coded programs and information exchange. Biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, boldly proclaims that "Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information," insisting that this assessment "is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth." ¹¹  The merger of the scientific worldview with modern technology constitutes the experiential lens of modern culture. We have arrived at a techno-vision of human life. ¹³

We have been so conditioned by our immersion in and use of technology that we no longer notice how genuine, individual, subjective experience has become transformed into a universal code of computational cyphers and feedback loops. How else does one explain talk about "intelligent" machines who "understand?" Or about "affective computing”? Or about machines possessing agency, as Rebecca Piccard believes? ¹² Emotions are indeed as intrinsically involved in human reasoning as Piccard avows. The quality of human consciousness, however, requires precisely the living body on which sentience, and the uniquely human, personal, and social consciousness is based.  We associate with someone saying "I feel," or sing with Al Jarreau, "we are in this love together." As Raymond Tallis has convincingly shown, while it is already a mistake to equate human and animal emotions, it is a fundamental category error to attribute human feeling, thinking, or acting to computers. In fact, the work done by neuroscientists over the last decade in embodied cognition shows beyond doubt that computational models utterly fail to capture the rootedness of human perception in organic life.

Thus, we no longer assess reality through the lens of an organic life world determined by the human spirit that is rooted in and yet transcendent of the living body. Rather, we view life through the techno-vision of a computational engineer. Without doubt, AI, like any other tool, can make our lives easier. At the same time, however, our unbridled enthusiasm and hopes for this technology are based on our forgetfulness of what human beings really are: embodied, irreplaceable, socially-constituted individuals. In brief, we are persons, and every single word we use to describe our agency evokes the whole embodied, existential world we only experience in joint attention with others. Humans think, act, feel, recognize, perceive, commune, and, ideally, build up one another in love. Christians claim that persons reflect the image of their Trinitarian God who became human to show us true humanity. If I am right, and AI visionaries, along with all who are in the grip of a techno-scientific worldview, continue to diminish our human nature, then all humanists, but especially Christian humanists, should reflect carefully about so-called Artificial "Intelligence." For the greatest danger is the loss of what sets us apart from all other entities, the loss of our personhood.