Reducing life to an algorithm. . .

The curiosity toward artificial intelligence is, in part, due to the lack of virtue left in work.  Our noblest work is to find a way to get out of it.  So we invent a technology that allows us to escape the drudgery of assembly lines and tedious repetitive tasks.  And for what?  So that we can spend more time on social media or Tik Tok?  How curious it is that we create machines to free us up to spend more time in front of, well, machines?

Are we proud of our efforts to reduce life to an algorithm?  It would seem we are.  The once noble jobs of the manufacturing industry provided America with a solid middle class and defined us as people who produced and made things.  The vast divide between the rich and those not so rich has grown in part because of the absence of those jobs.  Our switch to a service economy has ended up replacing the assembly line with cars marked by lights to indicate they have the big job of delivering our eats to our door before the hot food cools and before the cold food warms up.  Is this really the shape of progress?

Artificial intelligence is not really intelligence at all.  The learning curve of the machines is still rudimentary and defined by and controlled, at least at this point, by people.  Those telling the machines what and how to learn are those skilled at writing the algorithms and computer codes.  From self-driving cars to the miles of smart conveyors that send packages to the right vehicles to get them to your door, these individuals have their hands on the pulse of our future.  We should be concerned.

As beneficial as these efforts seem, the soft underbelly of it all is the great temptation to reduce life to an algorithm.  We will become the machines we invent to make our lives easier, do the work for us, and then clean up afterward.  That is the greater concern.  What of man?  What of man who starts out the inventor of the machines to improve life only to subject his life to those same machines?  It is not quite the technology that is the problem but that is certainly part of it.  What it does to us is the real issue.  When life becomes the domain of reproductive technology in which man is but the donor of the ingredients of life, is that an improvement or does it render our lives more vulnerable?  When medicine becomes a product sold and administered through the screens, does that help or will that hurt us in the end?  When death becomes an off switch on a machine or the inevitable pulling of the plug will we have elevated the mystery of life or turned the whole thing into something common and, perhaps, even vulgar?

In place of an algorithm, the Church offers the story.  It began at the beginning and has delivered to us the blunt and hard reality that no one wants to hear.  It calls us to repentance and by the power of the Word calls faith forth from the emptiness within.  It leads us to the cross where the reality we would hide is brought into the daylight of suffering and death.  It offers us hope stronger than the imagination and real enough to destroy the illusion.  Life is not an algorithm.  Life is from God, redeemed by God, with purpose only in communion with God.  Once we thought that life would be surrendered to sin but now we realize that even bigger than sin is our quest for a myth in which we can hide.  Truly St. John was speaking of us when he wrote that we loved darkness more than light.