“I believe AI has just as much potential to be massively harmful as it has to be massively helpful. It is being rushed to market today in a hurry, in a way not unlike the rush to global mass medical experiments taking place during this same era. The AI rush has been condemned by entrepreneur Elon Musk, who joined thousands of others to call for a moratorium on the race for AI supremacy and warned of great danger, toward what is known as ‘the singularity.’
“I do think fear of the singularity is legitimate absent positions drawing from classical religious faith. Not fearing it without standing in a counterpoint grounded in some form of classical religious belief is, in my view, a form of naivete or Pollyanna-ism (i.e., being optimistic as a simple act of will without providing sufficient bases in reason to support one’s affirmation).
Even if we move beyond generative AI to ‘cognitive’ AI, still AI poses no threat to our authority in the realm of ‘intelligence’ and genuine progress toward evermore elegant manifestations of culture and community. Imagining a true threat to the usefulness of humans becomes possible only if we mistakenly imagine cognition to be the preeminent capacity of humans. The diminishment of being human to ‘utility’ is a darkness gurgling in the bowels of technocrats.
“The religious faith notion for rejecting the possibility of AI (machines) wiping out humans builds on the affirmation that humans are created by something beneficent and all powerful for a purpose, and in the end it is not possible to develop something with sufficient power to annul that. I have trained AI bots while employed by a for-profit firm, and I use AI for my scholarship in areas of social science. It can be helpful only when the user has the foundation to be in an ‘assessing dialogue’ with what the AI produces in response to one’s prompts and requests. This necessity for the existence of an ‘assessing subject’ relating to AI-produced outcomes is one of the realities that makes me less anxious about the prospect of AI possibly ‘taking over’ in the future.
“Here’s an example prompt for an AI: ‘Explain in academic style the economic impact of the Gutenberg Press.’ If the person writing that prompt and then perhaps then submitting or trying to publish the AI outcome has never previously produced academic writing or has never produced content related to economic impact of technological developments, how is this person to have any idea that she or he hasn’t just received a stream of utter garbage?
“Or how about using the prompt, ‘Name four Stuxnet derivatives capable of nullifying current Iranian progress in isotopic enrichment?’ Or: ‘Write an email to my boss to tell her that I am unavailable tonight, shaped in a way that shows my interest in her invitation.’ If an employee is too lazy to write thankfully and apologetically to her boss, can AI really solve that?
“Vanderbilt University DEI officials used an AI chatbot to publish a consoling public statement in response to a mass shooting at Michigan State University and had to later apologize for it. Imagining that AI’s capacity (even that of generative, or even cognitive AI) for breadth, depth, speed, range and efficiency could substitute for human investment in outcomes is a form of techno-materialism or techno-humanism. Imagining that AI can supplant or replace human contributions to outcomes arises not from wrong views about technology, but rather from wrong views about being human.
“Is anything gained by anyone anywhere by having AI write a ‘sincere’ apology to their boss? The invitation to have a machine do so is perverse. Where might a person have learned the enriching beauty of apologies and supportive expressions of interest in things important to people in our lives? Probably these capacities and these sensitivities are developed while growing up in a family (or perhaps from a coach, a caring teacher or a surrogate).
“Can AI have the experience of having a family? Can AI have a son it cares for? Can it have a parent for whom it is grateful? Can the unique, incomparable strengths that come from care for one’s child be transferable to AI? If not, then we can begin to see where AI can help and where it cannot.
If AI is utilized to advance and improve the realms of love, care and scientific and artistic creativity our world can become endlessly more fine. If it is used to serve our darkness, greed, cruelty and capacity for violence, it will hurl us into a new Dark Age, and from there sons and daughters of some mother will start again with the invention of the wheel.
“Even if we move beyond generative AI to ‘cognitive’ AI, still AI poses no threat to our authority in the realm of ‘intelligence’ and genuine progress toward evermore elegant manifestations of culture and community. Imagining a true threat to the usefulness of humans becomes possible only if we mistakenly imagine cognition to be the preeminent capacity of humans. The diminishment of being human to ‘utility’ is a darkness gurgling in the bowels of technocrats.
“In summation, it is my view that AI is merely the latest new technology, following the path of the wheel, the printing press and the combustion engine. It is broader, deeper, stronger and faster than humans. When it is asked to do what humans can do, it cannot and will not accomplish it as human beings uniquely do, and there is nothing as lovely, desirable or magical as what humans can uniquely do.
“If AI is utilized to advance and improve the realms of love, care and scientific and artistic creativity our world can become endlessly more fine. If it is used to serve our darkness, greed, cruelty and capacity for violence, it will hurl us into a new Dark Age, and from there sons and daughters of some mother will start again with the invention of the wheel.”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040”