Notes on the AI REVOLUTION
The AI Revolution is under way. The final consequence is, to borrow a famous phrase, yet hanging in the stars, but the first fruit has appeared. Jobs are beginning to change or disappear. AI is liberally used as a shortcut in finding information and creating content. Out on the fringes, AI has become a substitute for human relationships, and an authority in spiritual matters. The social fabric is now a little more threadbare. But what society will be in the end, we have yet to learn.
The most significant prophecy of the AI Revolution is singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence becomes self-aware. If it happened, this would be the most momentous consequence of the Revolution. Sentient AI would be a new form of life—a new species. Our responsibility, and our danger, would be tremendous. The old stories about computers taking over the world recognized the risk of a creation in competition with its creator. A new species might challenge humanity for our place at the top of the food chain.
Singularity has not materialized. More fundamental than the question of whether it will happen is the question of whether it can happen. AI, at its most advanced, is a simulacrum of a person, able to learn, reason, and interact within limited parameters. Whether the simulacrum can become real turns on the nature of the real. Can personhood—the essential characteristics of thinking, feeling, living humanity—be manufactured?
In “The Seventh Sally,” Klapaucius rebukes Trurl for inventing a mechanical civilization and handing it over to a brutal tyrant. Trurl defends himself, arguing that the civilization is only a model and everything within it is “but the minuscule capering of electrons in space.”
Klapaucius retorts, “And are not we as well, if you examine us physically, mechanistically, statistically, and meticulously, nothing but the miniscule capering of electron clouds? Positive and negative charges arranged in space? … Don’t you see, when the imitator is perfect, so must be the imitation, and the semblance becomes truth, the pretense a reality!”[1]
At the bottom of this argument is the assumption that the material universe is all that exists. We are only capering electrons, positive and negative charges in a complex arrangement. Granted sufficient knowledge and skill, that can be manufactured. The perfect imitation is possible.
But we are more than matter. We have souls as well as bodies, and our nature is imprinted with the divine image. The Bible describes our creation: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.”[2] There is no exact imitator of God, and no perfect imitation. We don’t have the materials to manufacture a soul.
Nonetheless, the simulacrum will likely get better, and a close imitation may cause a great deal of trouble. That is another consequence hanging in the stars. We will learn it, just as we will learn the end of everything else. AI is a genie released from its bottle, and it is too late to go back. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re taking the ride.
[1] Stanislaw Lem, “The Seventh Sally,” in The Cyberiad (New York: Harcourt, Inc.), 167-68.
[2] Genesis 1:27a.
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