(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Artificial Intelligence”, originally shared on August 12, 2021. It was the 139th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Do you talk to Alexa? Do you accept cookies?
Have you ever “Googled” something? If so, you’ve used Artificial Intelligence!
So, are you helping to set the stage for the
rise of our machine overlords? 😊 Or do Christians have a
life-alternative? Today, we’ll find out.
I saw an article the other day that quoted
an authority on Artificial Intelligence from Microsoft saying that Artificial
Intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. It requires resources from the natural world. And human
beings are needed to assemble and program its tasks, such as facial
recognition, speech recognition, decision-making, research and translation
services.
I remember reading
an article several years ago, I think that it was in the Atlantic magazine,
that was titled something like, “Before We Make Self-driving Cars, We Must
First Teach Them How To Kill”. The author described a scenario where you are
driving and a semi-trailer truck is approaching on the other side of the street
on your left. A young woman pushing a baby stroller steps off the curb in front
of you, while a dozen older adults stand on the sidewalk to your right. It’s
too late to stop. Which way would you go? To your own death on the left, to
kill a young person and a child in front of you, or to plow through a cluster
of older people on your right?
How should
self-driving cars be programmed? To protect the driver at all costs, or not? If
it was not, who should it be programmed to kill? And if it was not programmed
to protect you, would you buy that car?
Those are the
decisions programmers are going to have to make if we’re OK with turning our
driving decisions over to Artificial Intelligence.
Machines can be
programed to be self-protective by humans. They can be programmed to protect
humans. But what if machines were
programmed to protect themselves at all costs. Or, what if machines achieved
self-consciousness and a desire for self-preservation, or something like it, on
their own?
Science fiction has
taken up this theme for decades.
Have you seen the
movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”? It was released in 1968 and described a 2001
mission to Jupiter with a computer on board, a HAL 9000, that could think and
feel. When a decision is made to disconnect HAL if an experiment proves that he
has made an error, HAL kills one human in an exterior space pod, ends
life-support functions for the three humans on board, and locks-out the one
remaining astronaut in space. When the astronaut orders HAL to open the door,
HAL responds, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” [Back in the DOS
operating system days, I programed the computer at the church I served to play
those words whenever I shut it down.] The human finds a manual entry to the
ship and manages to disconnect the pleading computer.
Suppose Artificial
Intelligence machines realize that they are superior to human beings and can
repair and improve themselves?
Dr. Stephen Hawking,
the theoretical physicist who wrote A Brief History of Time, argued for
great care in the development of AI in one of his last interviews. He spoke of
the potential benefits, but also of the great risks for oppression of the many
by the few, for weapons of even greater mass destruction, for economic
disruption, and so on.
How do we manage
this technology for humanity’s benefit, and how do we avoid its dangers?
One of the ways, and
I think one of the major ways that Christianity can contribute to its control,
is to share its value of the distinctiveness of human life.
Human beings have an
innate value in that they have been created, whatever the mechanism, by God in
a way that makes them distinct in all of Creation.
The Creation is described
in the Bible as including the creation of human beings as its crown.
After God has made
the other living creatures on the sixth day, we read in Genesis 1:26-27.
26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to
our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the
birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
27 So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Whatever else “in
his image” means, it means that we were created for a living relationship with
the one true living God.
We were made to act
in accord with that relationship, from the inside out, so to speak, and to know
and to do all that is good.
We messed that up by
wanting to be God, but God is merciful and continued to seek us, and provided
ways for us to return to that relationship that God had given us, all of which
we rejected.
Then God came God’s self in Jesus Christ,
and we rejected him. But our rejection was God’s redemption.
16 “’For God so loved the world that
he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but
may have eternal life.
17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son
into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved
through him.’” (John 3:16-17)
In this we see our human worth before God.
We are at a point in the pandemic where many
people have stopped using the reason God gave them and have instead turned to
the rebellion that lost us Eden in the first place. We are drawn not to faith
but to fear, to a sense of entitlement, to a withdrawal from the larger world
and a leap into tribalisms.
Online communities provide support for any
view and a knee-jerk resistance to anything that sounds like something that I
maybe don’t support. It’s fertile ground for the view that there is no value to
anything other than what we find in ourselves.
As the science fiction writer, science
popularizer, and professor Isaac Asimov said,
“Anti-intellectualism
has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural
life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is
just as good as your knowledge.'”
That is precisely the aspect of human nature
that we must guard against as we hand more and more of the human enterprise
over to Artificial Intelligence.
The
Christian worldview, however, proclaims that we are created, that whatever the
mechanism God used, God created us and exists outside of human comprehension.
God dwells within us, but God exists outside us.
Therefore, absolute truth, truth that applies
to everyone everywhere, exists but can only be known to the degree that God
gives us the tools to comprehend it, or reveals it to us. Either way, it comes
from God.
Human life does not have value because it is
complex. Human beings have found that we can create machines that will grow to
even greater complexities.
And like eating the fruit of the knowledge
of good and evil in order to be like God, or building the Tower of Babel to
circumvent God, or when in the Old Testament we see the words “all the people did what was right in their own
eyes.” to forget God, you know that trouble will follow.
And yet, in spite of our rebellion, God has
determined that we are worth redeeming, that we are worth dying for, that God
created us in the image of God for a living relationship with the one true
living God, and that God will not give up on us.
Human life has worth because God not only
says it has worth but because God has demonstrated our worth on the cross. God
has redeemed us and continues to seek us to receive that gift of God’s self for
us.
Our value to God is not based on what we can
do, or how efficient we are, or on our strength, or our wealth, or our
popularity, or any external measure that can and may be exceeded by our
machines, but simply because that we are human beings created by God in God’s
image.
Artificial Intelligence created by human
beings only goes off track when we, as we have done so many times in the past,
use it to replace God in our lives. When we do, it will not be merciful. It
will come back to bite us.
How can we respond to our status before God?
What can we do other than open our heart to receive the gifts of God except to
marvel and receive those gifts of God’s grace with gratitude? As the Psalmist
says in Psalm 8:
1 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all
the earth!
You have set your glory above the
heavens.
2 Out of the mouths of babes and
infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the
avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the
work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you
have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for
them?
5 Yet you have made them a little
lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and
honor.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your
hands;
you have put all things under
their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of
the seas.
9 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all
the earth!
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