Essay

AI - Artificial Intelligence

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30 October 2023

11 min read

The summit of humanity: decoding AI's affectations

An AI summit’s prophecies need to be placed in the right philosophical register, argues Simon Cross. Because being human in an AI age still means the same thing it has for millennia.

Simon Cross

Simon Cross researches ethical aspects of technology and advises on the Church’s of England's policy and legislative activity in these areas.

An AI generated image of robot skulls with bulging eyes on a shelf receding diagonally to the left.

Alessio Ferretti on Unsplash.

The UK’s global artificial intelligence (AI) conference is nearly upon us. If the UK had a ‘prophecy office’ it would have issued a yellow or even amber warning for the first days of November by now. Prophecy used to be a dangerous business, the ancient text of Deuteronomy sanctioned death for false prophets, equating its force with a leading away from God as the ultimate ground of truth. But risks duly acknowledged, here is a prophecy about the prophecies to come. The global AI conference will loudly proclaim three core prophecies about AI.

This time it’s different. Yes, we said that before but this time it really is different.
Yes, we need global regulation but, you know, it’s complicated so only the kind of regulation we advise is going to work.
Look, if we don’t do this someone else will. So, you should get out of our way as much as you possibly can. We are the good guys and if you slow us down the bad guys will win.

I feel confident about this prediction not because I wish to claim the office of prophet but because just like Big Tobacco and Big Oil, Big Tech’s lobbyists will redeploy a tried and tested playbook. And here are the three plays at the heart of it.

Tech exceptionalism. (We deserve to be treated differently under the law.)

Regulatory capture. (We got lucky, last time, with the distinction between platform and publisher that permitted self-regulation of social media, the harvesting of personal data and manipulative design for attention, but the costs of defeating Uber in California and now defending rearguard anti-trust lawsuits means lesson learned, we need to go straight for regulatory capture this time).

Tech determinism. (If we don’t do it, someone else will. We are the Oppenheimers here.)

Speaking of Pandora

What should we make of these claims? We need to start by exploring an underlying premise. One that typically goes like this “AI is calling into question what it means to be human”.

This premise has become common currency, but it is flawed because it is too totalising. AI emphatically is calling into question a culturally dominant version of human anthropology – one specific ‘science of humanity’. But not all anthropologies. Not the Christian anthropology.

A further, unspoken, premise driving this claim becomes clearer when we survey the range of responses to the question “what does the advent of what the government is now calling ‘frontier’ AI portend?”

Either, it means we have finally prized open Pandora’s box; the last thing humans will ever create. AI is our Darwinian evolutionary heir, soon to make us homo sapiens redundant, extinct, even. Which could happen in two very different ways. For some, AI is the vehicle to a new post-human eternal life of ease, roaming the farthest reaches of the universe in disembodied digital repose. To others, AI is now on the very cusp of becoming abruptly and infinitely cleverer than us. To yet others, we are too stupid to avoid blowing ourselves up on the way to inventing so-called artificial general intelligence.

Cue main global summit speaking points…

Or,

AI is just a branch of computing.

Which of these two starkly contrasting options you choose will depend on your underlying beliefs about ‘what it means to be human’.

Universal machines and meat machines

Then again, what does it mean to be artificially intelligent? Standard histories of AI always point to two seminal events. First, Alan Turing published a paper in the 1930s in which he proposed a device called a Universal Turing Machine.

Turing’s genius was to see a way of writing a type of programme to control a computer’s underlying binary on/off in ways that could vary depending on the task required and yet perform any task a computer can do. The reason your computer is not just a calculator but an excel spreadsheet and a word processor and a video player as well is because it is a kind of Universal Turing Machine. A UTM can compute anything that can be computed. If it has the right programme.

The second major event in AI folklore was a conference at Dartmouth College in the USA in the early 1950s bringing together the so-called ‘godfathers of AI’.

This conference set the philosophical and practical approaches from which AI has developed ever since. That this happened in America is important because of the strong link between universities, government, the defence and intelligence industry and the Big Tech Unicorns that have emerged from Silicon Valley to conquer the world. That link is anthropological; it is political, social, and economic and not just technical.

Let’s take this underlying question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and recast it in a binary form as befits a computational approach; ‘Is a human being a machine or is a human being an organism?’

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett was recently interviewed in the New York Times. For Dennett our minds and bodies are a “consortia of tiny robots”. Dennett is an evolutionary biologist and a powerful voice for a particular form of atheism and its answer to the question ‘what does it mean to be human?’ Dennett regards consciousness as ephemera, a by-product of brain activity. Another godfather of AI, Marvin Minsky, famously described human beings as ‘meat machines.’

By contrast, Joseph Weizenbaum was also one of the early computer pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s. Weizenbaum created one of the first ever chatbots, ELIZA– and was utterly horrified at the results. His test subjects could not stop treating ELIZA as a real person. At one point his own secretary sat down at the terminal to speak to ELIZA and then turned to him and asked him to leave the room so she could have some privacy. Weizenbaum spent the latter part of his professional life arguing passionately that there are things we ought not to get computers to do even if they can, in principle, perform them in a humanlike manner. To Joseph Weizenbaum computers were/are fundamentally different to human beings in ways that matter ineluctably, anthropologically. And it certainly seems as if the full dimensionality of human being cannot yet be reduced to binary on/off internal states without jettisoning free will, consciousness and transcendence. Prominent voices like Dennett and Yuval Noah Harari are willing to take this intellectual step. Their computer says ‘no’. By their own logic it could not say otherwise. In which case here’s a third way of asking that seemingly urgent and pressing question about human being;

“Are we just warm, wet, computers?”

The immanent frame

A way to make sense of this, for many people, influential and intuitively attractive meaning of human being is to understand how the notion of artificial intelligence fits a particular worldview that has come to dominate recent decades and, indeed, centuries.

In 2007 Charles Taylor wrote A Secular Age. In it he tracks the changing view of what it means to be human as the Western Enlightenment unfolds. Taylor detects a series of what he calls ‘subtraction stories’ that gradually explain away the central human experience of transcendence until society is left with what he calls an ‘immanent frame’. Now we are individual ‘buffered selves’ insulated by rational mind so that belief in any transcendent reality, let alone God, is just one possible choice among personal belief systems. But, says Taylor, this fracturing of a shared overarching answer to the question ‘What does it mean to be human’ over the past, say, 500 years doesn’t actually answer the question or resolve the ambiguities. Rather, society is now subject to what Taylor calls ‘cross pressures’ and a lack of societal consensus about the answers to the biggest questions of human meaning and purpose.

In this much broader context, it becomes easier to see why as well as how it can be the case that AI is either a profound anthropological threat or just a branch of computing – depending on who you talk to…

The way we describe AI profoundly influences our understanding of it. When Dennett talks about a ‘consortia of tiny robots’ is he speaking univocally or metaphorically? What about when we say that AI “creates”, or “decides” or “discovers” or ‘seeks to maximise its own reward function’. How are we using those words? If we mean words like ‘consortia’ or ‘choose’ and ‘reward’ in as close to the human sense as makes no difference, then of course the difference between us and our machines becomes paper-thin. But are human beings really a kind of UTM? Are UTMs really universal? Are you a warm wet computational meat-machine?

Or is AI just the latest and greatest subtraction story?

To say AI is just a branch of computing is not to say the harms of outsourcing key features of human being to machines are trivial. Quite the opposite.

How then should we judge prophecies about AI emanating from this global conference or in the weeks and months to follow? I suggest two responses. The first follows from my view of AI, the other from my view of human being.

Our view of current AI should be clear eyed, albeit open to revision should future development(s) so dictate. I am firmly on the side of those who, without foreclosing the possibility, see no philosophical breakthrough in the current crop of tools and techniques. These are murky philosophical waters but clocks don’t really have human hands now do they, and a collapsed metaphor can’t validate itself however endemic the reference to the computational theory of mind has become.

Google’s large language model, Bard, for example, has no sense of what time it is where ‘he’ is, let alone can freely choose to love you or not, or to forgive you if you hurl an insult at ‘him’. But all kinds of anthropological harms already flow from the unconscious consequences of re-tuning human being according to the methodological image of our machines. To say AI is just a branch of computing is not to say the harms of outsourcing key features of human being to machines are trivial. Quite the opposite.

Which brings me to the second response. When you hear the now stock claim that AI is calling into question what it means to be human, don’t buy it. Push back. Point out the totalising lack of nuance. The latest tools and techniques of AI are calling a culturally regnant but philosophically reductive anthropology into question. That much is definitely true. But that is all.

And it is important to resist this totalising claim because if we don’t, an increasingly common and urgent debate about the fullness of human being and the limitations of UTMs will struggle from the start. One of the biggest mistakes I think public theology made twenty-some years ago was to cede a normative use of language that distinguished between people of faith and people of no faith. There is no such thing as being human without faith commitments of one kind or another. If you have any doubt about this, I commend No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers by Michael Novak. But the problem with accepting the false distinction between ‘having faith’ and having ‘no faith’ is that it has allowed the Dennetts and Hararis of this world to insist that atheism is on a stronger philosophical footing than theism. After which all subsequent debate had, first, to establish the legitimacy of faith per se before getting to the particular truth claims in, say, Christianity.

What it means to be human

I see a potentially similar misstep for anthropology – the science of human being – in this new and contemporary context of AI. Everywhere at the moment, and I mean but everywhere, a totalising claim is being declared ever more loudly and urgently: that the tools and techniques of AI are calling into question the very essence of human identity. The risk in ceding this claim is that we get stuck in an arid debate about content instead of significance; a debate about ‘what it means to be human’ instead of a debate about ‘what it means to be human.’

This global AI summit’s proclamations and prophecies need to be placed in the right philosophical register, because to be human in an age of AI still means the same thing it has for millennia.

Universals like wonder, love, justice, the need for mutually meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose, and so too personal idiosyncrasies like a soft spot for the moose are central features of what it means to be this human being.

Suchlike are the essential ingredients of the ‘me’ that is reading this article. They are not tertiary. Perhaps they can be computationally mimicked but that does not mean they are, in themselves, ephemeral or mere artifice. In which case their superficial mimicry carries substantial risks, just as Joseph Weizenbaum prophesied in Computer Power and Human Reason in the 1970s.

Of course, you may disagree. You may even disagree in good faith, for there are no knockdown arguments in metaphysics. And in my worldview, you are free to do so. But fair warning. If the human-determinism of Dennett or the latest prophecies of Harari are right, no credit follows. You, and they, are right only because by arbitrary alignment of the metaphysical stars, you, and they, have never been free to be wrong. It was all decided long ago. No need for prophecies. We are all just UTMs with the soul of a marionette

But when you hear the three Global summit prophecies I predicted earlier, consider these three alternatives;

This time is not different, it is not true that AI is calling into question all anthropologies. AI is (only) calling into question a false and reductive Enlightenment prophecy about ‘what it means to be human.’

The perennial systematic and doctrinal anthropology of Christianity understands human being as free-willed, conscious, unified body soul and spirit. It offers credible answers to the urgent questions and cross-pressures society is now wrestling with. It also offers an ethical framework for answering the question ‘what ought computers to be used for and what ought computers not to be used for – even if they appear able to be used for anything and everything?

This Christian philosophical perspective on the twin underlying metaphysical questions of human being and purpose are not being called into question, either at this global summit or by any developments in AI today or the foreseeable future. They can, however, increasingly be called into service to answer those questions – at least for those with ears to hear.

Explainer

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

30 August 2023

9 min read

Transhumanism: eugenics for the digital age

Retracing the history of transhumanist thought, Oliver Dürr peels off the varnish off 'TESCREAL' to find the taint of eugenics.

Oliver Dürr

Oliver Dürr is a theologian who explores the impact of technology on humanity and the contours of a hopeful vision for the future. He is an author, speaker, podcaster and features in several documentary films.

A montage shows skeletons with lamp shades instead if heads beside a fence-like division.

Image: Joshua Coleman on Unsplash.

This article is the second of a series exploring and critically assessing a conglomerate of futurist ideas and technological visions united in the acronym TESCREAL - Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Longertmism. Read the first in the series: Challenging transhumanism’s quest to optimise our future..

Transhumanism is a movement dedicated to prolonging, improving, and enhancing life through science, medicine and technology. Its proponents want to free human beings from current limitations, upgrading our species, possibly even to enter a new phase of evolution. Sounds great – to many at least. The devil, however, is in the details: Who gets to decide on what’s favourable? How exactly are these goals achieved? Who will actually enjoy the upgraded version of life? And what happens to the rest?

Such ideas – and the uneasiness they might cause those who think them through to the end – aren’t new. In fact, there is almost nothing new about transhumanism. As we will see upon closer inspection: Transhumanism is just eugenics in a new guise. This is a serious charge on people who clearly want to distance themselves from the horrors of the eugenic policies the Nazis so cruelly implemented in the 20th Century under the ideology of “racial hygiene”. To see why the charge still holds, we need a bit of historical background.

A pedigree of improving the species

In 1962, a group of scientists met in London to discuss the future impact of “biological research”, which, in their estimation, had the potential to enhance or destroy “every aspect of human life”. The meeting was unassumingly titled: “Man and His Future.” One of the key figures of the symposium was Julian Huxley – an evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and writer, who became an influential figure after being the first Director-General of UNESCO, a founding member of the “World Wildlife Fund” (WWF) as well as the first president of the “British Humanist Association”.

That same Huxley was also an unwavering promoter of eugenics (still after World War II) and had even served as president of the “British Eugenics Society” from 1959-1962. Eugenics, in short, is the attempt to ‘improve’ the human species with an eye on the gene pool. Various means and strategies are supposed to ensure ‘favourable’ traits like ‘higher intelligence’, ‘better physical constitution’, ‘more sexual activity’, and ‘racial purity’ would prevail. (Note that all of these, except perhaps the last one, are still salient today).

The general idea of improving humankind through selective breeding is old, but it gained traction after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origins of Species in 1859. Evolutionary theory provided a plausible mechanism for the evolution of life and quickly began to function like a worldview through which everything could be explained. This novel outlook suggested a continuous higher development of the human species if nature was left to its own devices. However, many also feared that these ‘natural’ mechanisms for improvement were stifled by human civilization. The consequence of which could be a “degeneration” of the human species. Against such “dysgenic” (that is, negatively affecting the gene pool) pressures, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, devised methods and strategies for the active “cultivation” of the human species, to which he gave the name “eugenics” in 1883. This was a program, unabashedly intending to supplant “inefficient human stock” with “better strains”, which meant to “get rid” of “the undesirables” and to ensure the “desirables multiplied”. All for the grand purpose, to “further the ends of evolution more rapidly … than if events were left to their own course.”

It’s obvious from reading Galton’s texts how the evolutionary bird’s eye view on the human species and its gene-pool conflicts with valuing the inalienable dignity, rights and freedoms of the individual person – eugenicists explicitly spoke against both Christian ethics and the Enlightenment “principle of equality”. Eugenics was based on the belief that everybody was not equal, and that for the good of humanity, we ought to do away with the “undesirables”. It is thus an important illustration of the ways in which science, values and politics intermingle. Darwin and Galton triggered an avalanche of what was now not only conceivable, but ‘scientifically’ backed up, and therefore also utterable in public. Soon these ideas would drive political agendas as well.

It’s hard to underestimate the cultural influence, intellectual salience and political impact eugenics had globally. The movement’s motto: “eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution” has found its way into many policies and political programs around the world. It is important to note, that though eugenics and state power converged in the Third Reich in unprecedented ways, that convergence was not confined to it. After World War II eugenic policies were simply renamed and continued in many places. The United States is a sobering illustration of this: In fact, some American states, like Oregon, repealed their “sterilization laws” as late as 1983. California, which has repealed its law in 1979, had sterilized more than 20,000 people, deemed to be “feeble minded” – as has recently been discovered.

The same Huxley was not only an ardent eugenicist, but he must also be regarded as the intellectual father of transhumanism

The movement was still in full force when Julian Huxley presented his contribution at the 1962 symposium: “Our present civilization is becoming dysgenic”, he declared. “To reverse this grave trend, we must use our genetical knowledge to the full, and develop new techniques of human reproduction.”

The same Huxley was not only an ardent eugenicist, but he must also be regarded as the intellectual father of transhumanism. First of all, he coined the term ‘transhumanism’ in 1951 (not 1957), which for him captured the “idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition.” Huxley was convinced that humanity was to use all the scientific and technological means available to actively transcend the current species and achieve the next stage of evolution.

In his contribution to the 1962 symposium, he excitedly described humanity as “spearhead”, “torch bearer” and “trustee” of what he understood to be “self-conscious evolution”. It was in light of this vision, Huxley became convinced that there can be no real objections to a eugenic policy, “when the subject is looked at in the embracing perspective of evolution, instead of the limited perspective of population genetics or the short-term perspective of existing sociopolitical organization.” The task at hand was larger than any nation state, culture, or even religious sensibility. Humanity was to achieve the next step of evolution – obstructing this, Huxley was convinced, was outright “immoral”.

More on more

Though he is not credited by self-professed founder of the “philosophy of transhumanism” Max More (perhaps for strategic reasons) it is nevertheless fair to say, that Huxley pre-empted all the major concerns of the transhumanist movement today. More merely reiterates Huxley’s – and for that matter basic eugenic – ideas, when he writes that we are the “vanguard of evolution”, must now “consciously take charge of ourselves” to “accelerate our progress”, move “beyond mere humanism” to “focus on our evolutionary future” and that science and technology are the means to achieve this. What is different today is just the extended set of scientific and technological tools available. When transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom [who recently was at pains to clear his record of a racist email he wrote in the 1990s] writes about “dysgenic pressures” on humanity, he plainly reproduces eugenic arguments:

“Currently it seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility. If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species.”

Such a strain on human intelligence, for Bostrom, amounts to an “existential risk”, given the challenges humanity is facing today – not least: figuring out how to deal with an artificial superintelligence that might destroy humanity, no less.

If transhumanists deal with their eugenic pedigree at all, this consists mainly in reassuring everybody that: transhumanism isn’t eugenics. In doing so, they prematurely identify eugenics with state-sponsored coercion, against which they promote a “liberal eugenics”. Bostrom writes:

“The last century’s government-sponsored coercive eugenics programs … have been thoroughly discredited. Because people are likely to differ profoundly in their attitudes toward human enhancement technologies, it is crucial that no one solution be imposed on everyone from above, but that individuals get to consult their own consciences as to what is right for themselves and their families.”

At first glance, this looks fair enough. The problem, however, is that the ‘freedom’ in such matters is not a binary between either ‘state coercion’ or ‘individual choice’. Liberty is much more enmeshed with a cultural imagination, social expectations, and widely shared attitudes in a civil society – also educational, economic or even religious factors play a role here. Such soft factors can exert considerable pressure on individuals, even if they consider themselves to be, and legally may well be, ‘free’. There are good reasons to consider ‘liberal eugenics’ a self-defeating idea.

Contemporary transhumanism has not really reckoned with its history and thus, devotedly repeats both the ideas and mistakes of its eugenic antecedents.

At the same time, we have seen above, that eugenics cannot so easily be written off, by identifying it with state coercion. Recounting the entwined history of eugenic and transhumanist ideas, historian Alison Bashford correctly observes that “Eugenics functioned as often through liberal governmentalities, as it did through authoritarian coercion, arguably more so, depending of course on national context.”

Again, Julian Huxley is a good example: He would have emphatically agreed with the transhumanist critique of Nazi Germany, was an outspoken anti-racist. Being as he was ‘liberal’ in many regards – like, for that matter, many exponents of classical eugenics – he was opposed to any form of authoritarian, totalitarian or politically coercive measures, even in his wildest dreams about the evolutionary future. Rather, he believed that most people would find the working out of an “effective and acceptable eugenic policy” not only “urgent” but “an inspiring task.” Transhumanists like Max More and Nick Bostrom seem to prove his point.

There simply is no clear distinction between transhumanism and eugenics. The reason for this being, that contemporary transhumanism has not really reckoned with its history and thus, devotedly repeats both the ideas and mistakes of its eugenic antecedents. The problem with any form of eugenics (liberal or other) is that it is profoundly incompatible with the basic tenet of a liberal democracy, namely, to accept, unconditionally, the dignity, autonomy and rights of each and every human being in it.

Consider, as an alternative, a Christian perspective on the dignity of human beings. Christianity sees every individual, and precisely how it is now, as an image of God. Of course, Christians believe that one can live up to this or live in denial. In whatever patchy way we live out this endowment, we are, nevertheless, dignified as creatures in the image and likeness of God, of which we see the fullest picture in Jesus Christ, who is explicitly described in the New Testament as ‘the image of the invisible God’. From that point of view our current form, though finite and frail, is quite good enough. Technological innovations can be celebrated, but they do not have the burden of creating a 'dignified' life in the first place.

In the strictly evolutionist framework of transhumanism, however, there is just no basis for such things. The unceasing drive to ‘improve’ the quality of life runs the risk of measuring (according to whose standards?) the ‘worth’ or ‘worthlessness’ of human lives in objectifiable terms. Despite any transhumanist protestation, the fact remains that their entire outlook is profoundly immoral, incapable of accepting our fundamental equality. It is prone to spawn injustice – as history has shown time and time again. For transhumanists, ultimately, humanity is just a meaningless by-product of greater evolutionary processes. As a consequence, we are merely the steppingstone for what is to come (or at least the smart ones amongst us are). Whenever scientific and technical innovation converge with an evolutionist outlook, political activism and, for good measure, a tad of entitlement, eugenic ideas emerge. Transhumanism is just another case in point. So, before you sign up to transhumanism, I suggest you read the fine print of the T&Cs.