It is nearly always our penchant to run fast into places where the wise are slow to go, to adopt things before we know if they are good or salutary, and to elevate the technology before we have decided how and what will judge its morality. Think of the internet squandered into a purveyor of porn or social media that has turned us into very unsocial animals. What AI has the power to do in the same terrible way is incrementally more dangerous. Everyone with a brain knows this. Few of those with brains have the courage to admit it publicly -- much less raise a call to slow things down.
The technology is not merely the problem. It also lies with those producing it. By every account, AI is able to learn but what will it learn and who will be its teacher? By every account, AI is capable but what if that capability comes with a commensurate loss of our own intelligence or initiative or dedication? Rome seems to be the one place beginning to address this. Indeed, the voice of calm and caution will either come from the Church or it probably will not come at all. That is a stark and scary thing to say but I fear it is the truth.
Hinton is worried about guardrails to keep the thing from careening off the cliff. I am even more worried about a steering wheel and the foot on the gas and brake pedals. If we are only worried about a guard rail, we are doomed. We need voices to place what we are doing into the context of morality and goodness. This is hard for science and for technology. Both seem to prefer to experiment first and make rules later. It is to this that Christianity should be poised to intervene and to help us form a sense of what is good and salutary and what is not before it is too late. We have already learned that AI competes with truth and makes us suspicious about what is true and what parades as truth under AI hands. We have already learned that our technology replicates not only what is good in us as people but also what is bad.
As Hinton himself put it, we are on a speeding train right now. The problem is we are still laying the tracks at the same time. As we call know, capitalism is the driving force behind this -- profits -- but capitalism has always been either weak or slow in the area of morality -- what is good, right, and just. I do not say this to suggest that other economic systems are better than capitalism but only to remind us of the Achilles' heel of our constant quest for a newer, better, and more profitable future. “We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly,” Hinton said. “We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”
The moral voice of Scripture is needed now more than ever. We cannot wait until that moment when we think we have it perfect. Good is not the enemy of the perfect. Before it gets ahead of the tracks, we must be prepared to begin to build a framework by which to judge the benefits and the curses of this new technology. The last thing we need is to squander the promise of the internet in AI created porn or social media in AI created mythology and lies. Wake up, the ethicists and moral theologians of the Church. We need you now more than ever.
1 comment:
“The moral voice of Scripture is needed now more than ever.” As you quoted here with regards to the emergence of AI, its growth perhaps more pernicious than the unwary have contemplated. A future with certain people getting rich from AI, but many more out of work, idle, and impoverished could advance social disorder in ways the inventors of AI refuse to consider. The term “unintended consequences” seems pertinent. But even before we started to talk about AI in 2024 and 2025, the red flags of the digital revolution were being raised by concerned observers, including academics, teachers, parents, and pundits. I recently saw a video by an 8th grade teacher, a young blue haired lady, and she said many of her students are nearly ignorant, being unable to read or speak above kindergarten level. They cannot seem to put a logical sentence together with a subject and predicate, nor can they engage in critical thinking. The blue haired lady teacher seemed to be from the contemporary pool of American teachers, dressed down, unkempt, striving to identify with their students, yet even she recognized the failure of education in our country. So desirous to relate to their students, many teachers forego their responsibility to mentor the students in their charge, and demand they actually learn the fundamentals. But even diligent teachers are challenged because parents do not reinforce education in the home, as in prior generations. Their parents are usually occupied with their own smart phones and too busy to see how the kids are doing, what they are learning, and if they have command over the rudimentary skills needed to navigate in a semi advanced society. Our society, once better educated, is semi educated, and the test scores of children reveal the truth. The adults aren’t doing much better. AI will make matters worse. If the human brain finds certain information of little use, it is stored in the archives of our minds, forgotten, or rendered obsolete. Picture this happening to millions of people under AI, who will forget how to solve fractions, communicate properly, remember vocabulary. For this reason, we had better continue to share the word of God boldly, lest more people forget about Scripture, or let AI act as the evangelist for truth. Soli Deo Gloria
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