Artificial Intelligence has truly sky-rocketed in the past decade. Advances have been huge and they’ve come rapidly. Image generators are “creating” images that are putting artists out of jobs. Chatbots like ChatGPT are performing language tasks like something out of science-fiction novels. And the hype behind all this is astronomical.
In this respect we were recently handed an open letter where it was pleaded that we pause AI experiments and in the meantime “ask ourselves…Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
Prominent names in computer science, such as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak are signatories to this letter and as a result it made headlines all over the world with the usual pomp surrounding anything even remotely pertaining to AI.
Regardind the open letter, Time magazine posted this in an article very recently:
I refrained from signing [it] because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it… Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result… is that literally everyone on Earth will die.
Quote taken from this article.
Heavy, heavy stuff. Apparently, we’re heading towards doom and destruction. Annihilation at the hands of robots is just around the corner for us, it seems. It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? If things progress as they are now, surely soon AI will supersede us. It just has to happen, doesn’t it? That seems to be the current trajectory of technology.
Is that the case, though?
The first thing to realise is that there are other voices in this entire debate trying to play down the current state of AI. Those that are honest about what is happening can easily admit that it’s difficult to see hard intelligence in anything currently exhibited by AI. It’s good at the tasks that it does – there’s no denying this – but it’s still fundamentally unintelligent (as I’ve discussed on my other blog in this post, for example). Indeed, there’s a GitHub page entirely devoted to documenting the mistakes being made by ChatGPT and the like. When you analyse these mistakes (and not just the cherry-picked results we’re fed by the media and those that have a vested interest in maintaing the AI hype), it becomes easier and easier to discern this lack of intelligence.
Allow me to blatantly quote myself here:
A lack of understanding is a lack of intelligence. Operating on the level of knowledge (i.e. data) is still just operating like a machine. Just because something looks intelligent, doesn’t mean it is. This is the great fallacy of the Turing Test (more on that in a later post).
So, AI still lacks something important, something grand, some core component that will allow it to progress from operating on the level of knowledge to the level of understanding.
Important people in the industry are talking about just this. For example, Yann LeCun who is the Chief AI Scientist at Meta (parent company of Facebook) said something to this effect last week at the Viva Tech conference (June, 2023):
What it tells you we are missing something really big … to reach not just human level intelligence, but even dog intelligence
Quote taken from here [emphasis mine].
Yeah, exactly! The head of AI at Facebook realises that there’s a core component missing in AI to even give it dog-level intelligence because:
[Generative AI] systems are still very limited, they don’t have any understanding of the underlying reality of the real world…
Quote taken from here [emphasis mine].
That’s an honest, hype-free analysis of the current state of affairs.
Yann LeCun’s research now is devoted to trying to provide AI this missing, core component because without it AI will always be stuck on the level of knowledge (data). In fact, he released his first research results earlier this month, which he will be presenting at CVPR 2023 (a world-class conference on Computer Vision) soon. The model still doesn’t exhibit understanding but he hopes he is heading in the right direction.
Here is where Christianity comes in. We know that we are unique creatures created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27). We have an eternal soul that is capable of grasping eternal concepts and hence the ability to understand “the underlying reality of the real world” (to quote Yann LeCun again).
Indeed, our soul is the seat of understanding and free will. This is the missing, core component that scientists are squabbling over. It is false to assume that throwing more data at a machine will somehow give it the ability to finally exhibit intelligence. As if that extra megabyte of data, that extra word in a sentence, that extra pixel in an image will finally bequeath a machine with understanding. As if it will finally be able to cross that infinite divide between nothingness and consciousness.
Because, as G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man argues, it truly is an infinite divide between what a machine or dog can do and what a human being can do. The human soul is bottomless, transcendent and the understanding that it gives us is anchored in Infinity. Machines will always rest at the level of matter, at the level of limited empirical data. Understanding requires a crossing over into the realm of the immaterial. And this is something that we cannot assist a machine in doing. Only we can grasp the inherent Logos around us.
So, machines can and will get “smarter”. They can and will LOOK more and more intelligent. They will LOOK more and more like they are understanding. But they will ALWAYS fundamentally lack this core component and it will be always possible to show this. Always.
Christianity gives us an edge over the world in this respect. We know that it is futile to devote resources to the search for this elusive element. We know where the frontiers are of our existence and we can go and enjoy life elsewhere. And we certainly do not have to fear any impending doom from AI (unless this doom lies at the level of machines still incapable of understanding but given the abilities/weapons to destroy us – that’s another story, however).
Parting Words
I’ve used some pretty loaded words in this post like “understanding”, “intelligence”, “soul”. I deliberately steered away from trying to define them because in the context of Christian philosophy, it’s not difficult to stick with our intuitions and especially traditional understandings on this matter rather than getting bogged down in heavy semantics. I think it’s more important for now to have the bigger picture in view.
Secondly, there is the whole notion of understanding in animals that I could have delved into as well. We can certainly call some animals “intelligent”, for example. But, the bottom line is that this is a different form of “intelligence”. It’s still not as profound as what humans do (once again, see Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man for a great analysis of this). I’ll leave it at that for now.
Thirdly, there are philosophers floating around the ether who call themselves “Christian” and believe in things like the future ensoulment of machines (and other bizarre things like this), which is such poor theology that I didn’t want to bother engaging with them in this post. Apologies.
Lastly, I assume readers here come from a background of faith and there’s no need for me to discuss topics like the existence of the soul or even the existence of God. I’m taking faith as a given here (whatever your path was to attaining it) and assume that you’re open to it enhancing your reason and vice-versa. That’s the beauty of it all, isn’t it?
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