The Deep Moral Failure of AI. By Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic.
I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence — trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property — back to us as a utility, like electricity or water.
These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.
The acknowledged problems:
Technology journalists, academic experts, and activists typically emphasize the AI industry’s prodigious environmental toll, its reliance on intellectual-property theft, its exacerbation of racialized algorithmic bias, its use in dangerous autonomous weapons systems, its role in warrantless surveillance, its exploitation of cheap foreign-labor markets, its upending of the domestic labor market at home, and the like. …
They are measurable harms that can be quantified, and that regulations and policy can be built around.
The deeper problem:
Even if all of these concrete problems with AI were magically solved … we would still be left with a technology that radically unsettles many traditional conceptions of human dignity and meaning, and that threatens to outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines.
This is what the most thoughtful Christian critics are able to see. [The social critic Ivan Illich] wrote in 1971, when the rise of the computer was the primary technological concern, that man “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.” He concluded, “We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.”
Today, AI puts “man” even more at stake, as many of Silicon Valley’s leaders attempt to bring about a digital successor species, based on the belief that humanity’s evolutionary destiny is to usher in a higher form of intelligence.
What is humanity for?
Defending humanity against its digital doppelgänger requires having a positive conception of what humanity is in the first place. As the pope writes in his encyclical, “Technological progress — valuable in itself — requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues.” …
Christianity has a clear “anthropological vision,” asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures. …
ChatGPT was not made in the image of God …
If secularists flinch at calling this taking — what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition” — a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it.
What is money for?
David Archibald:
The International Space Station didn’t actually do anything.
The F-35 program could be abandoned tomorrow.
The AI thing will lower costs and thus improve our standard of living. Which will offset the reduction coming from a higher cost of energy.
Those without AI, and nuclear to power that AI, will be at a considerable disadvantage which will be measured in a lower standard of living.
hat-tip Stephen Neil