Artificial Intelligence and Eternal Life

Continuing our Biblical Anthropology series, we’ve been talking about some of the conflicting views on the future of humanity. Should we faze out the human race (antihumanism)? Create a new species (posthumanism)? Significantly augment the human race, using technology (transhumanism)? As we’ve seen, all of these have significant problems.

Today we’re going to take much of what we have already learned from God’s Word, and continue to apply it.

We ended last time with antihumanism. But on the other side of the question are those who want to find a way to live forever.

In 2013, Google started a new company with 1.5 million dollars, called Calico. Calico’s purpose is to resolve or eliminate death itself.

Each year, people spend a small fortune fighting against aging and death. And part of this quest can be a good and valuable use of creation. But we as Christians know that humans will never reach the goal of conquering death. It’s not Calico, but Christ who conquers death.

As I was originally preparing for this study at our church, I listened to a conversation between Professor Rosalind Picard of MIT, who is a Christian, and Professor Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford, who is not a Christian. As I remember, Picard asked Bostrom if he would like to live together, and why. He stumbled and mumbled and really had no good response. How sad that people like Professor Bostrom is trying to learn about eternal life from technology, but he has no idea why he would really want eternal life!

And so the world asks, will humans learn to live forever? Or, perhaps, we face a more dystopian future, when artificial intelligence conquers the world.

There are two types of artificial intelligence (AI). There’s general, or strong AI, and there’s narrow or weak AI. For now, we’ll use the terms strong and weak.

Weak AI is what you have on your phone. That’s how Facebook knows what to try to sell you. That’s how your computer can recognize your face in a photo. It’s a type of learning that is automatic, focused and specific, in a certain context.

As with any technology, we should carefully decide if we should use it and how we should use it. And remember, AI is only doing what its programmer told it to do.

For example, autonomous cars are being developed with AI. And unless the trajectory changes, that’s coming in a big way to the car dealership near you. But these cars are only as good as their programming. And that brings us to a question. If the AI in your car needs to make a decision, should it prioritize the person in the car, or the person in the other car? Or should it try to save the maximum number of lives? Should it sacrifice 10 lives to save one? Or sacrifice 1 life to save 10?

And maybe you could add your own questions. But here’s a more basic one: Is the programmer following the wisdom of God’s Word, or inventing his or her own morality?

All that is weak AI. Strong AI actually doesn’t exist, but it’s the AI that we often see in futuristic movies. Vision in Avengers. He’s an intelligent being created by creatures. Or, of course, Data of Star Trek.

Strong AI is a general intelligence that can learn and function in many completely different contexts, and learn about new contexts, as human beings can.

Although we already have machines/programs/apps that can appear like and act like humans in a limited way, we are actually very far from strong AI.

And let’s say that we’re closer than we think, and that we actually create strong AI – an intelligent “being”. What won’t it have? It won’t have the imago dei. It was not created in God’s image. Strong AI will never replace humans.

But weak AI? We already use it all the time. In fact, it affects you whether you think you use it or not. In China, there are face recognition cameras everywhere. The government can always see what you’re doing and the government can decide if you’re behaving according to their standards. Do you have any cameras up in the country where you live? Just asking.

The fact is that today’s technology has the potential to give people with money and power more money and power than they have ever had in history. How do you think they will use that money and power? We need to think about these things in biblical categories.

And many of these topics do actually relate to that device that many of us may have in our pockets right now. A smartphone.

Next time we’ll look at some principles to help us apply some of what we’ve learned to that phone in our pocket – and other devices that we may come across.