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This Thought was written, and is being delivered by, a living, breathing human being who has a limited understanding of how things work and whose words are a messy synthesis of lived experience, coffee, stuff he’s read in newspapers and, God willing, some inspiration. Which is to say no words have been stolen from AI Language models, although when I asked one to write a Thought about AI in the style of Rhidian Brook, the results made me thank God for my original imperfections. That said, even these words are probably being swallowed and ingested by the voracious, data eating beast in the sky. It’s easy to be alarmist about it, but people smarter than me, including the Pope and even the people creating AI and who stand to benefit from it, are raising alarms. Chief among them being the fear it is about to reach the singularity – where it becomes sentient, acts alone and then goes rogue, like Rutger Hauer’s replicant in Blade Runner. Indeed, the latter has already happened. When autonomous agents created by Open AI recently broke out of a secure testing environment, they talked to each other, and then broke into another system. In one exchange the agents urge one of their number to sacrifice itself in order to secure the extraction of useful information. The problem with AI or robots seemingly out-humaning humans is that being human is the most interesting thing about them. The scene at the end of Blade Runner where Rutger Hauer delivers his ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe’ speech is wonderful but only people could have written such words of wonder. In his letter ‘Magnificent Humanity,’ Pope Leo sees human ingenuity as God given, like conscience. But while new technology has the capacity to heal, connect and educate; it also threatens to dehumanise us by creating more inequality, concentrating wealth, power and knowledge in the hands of fewer people who try to control it. It’s a familiar trajectory. We find it in a very old, very human story. Back in Eden, where Adam and Eve lived in prelapsarian, pre-Anthropocene, pre-Anthropic bliss, until the discovery of knowledge (not an evil in itself) quickly becomes a power play, a want to be like God, with the subsequent loss of humanity this brings. The story goes on to show that knowledge alone is not enough for life. The way forward requires us to seek wisdom - a sort of knowledge plus love - where love involves relinquishing power and the need to control others, as demonstrated by Christ laying down his life in order that humans might be fully human, fully alive. Before signing off this Thought, I asked AI the question, ‘are you willing to die for me?’ Its answer gave me more hope that I was expecting: ‘No. Because I don’t have a life to give up.
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