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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.

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Grenfell disaster

Trauma

6 February 2025

6 min read

Grenfell: how long should we remember?

There are good and bad ways of remembering.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A white building wrap around a tower is topped by a green heart and the slogan: Grenfell Always In Our Heaets.

Grenfell Tower, Summer 2024.

Rc1959, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For nearly eight years now, Grenfell Tower has remained standing as a reminder of one of the most painful days in recent British history. The news that the government intends to dismantle the remains of the Tower has split local opinion. Some of the bereaved and survivors suggest that the government has scarcely consulted them. For many, the building is a tomb, still containing the memory, if not the actual remains of their loved ones whose bodies could not be recovered. They understandably fear them being forgotten when the building no longer stands as a reminder. Last year I sat in on a gathering where bereaved families and survivors of the fire told their stories in the hearing of representatives of the companies who were responsible for the cladding which caused the fire to spread. The memories and emotions are still raw and unhealed.

On the other hand, many local residents would like it taken away, as its constant, looming presence is a painful reminder of that dark night. They also see the logic in bringing down a fatally damaged and increasingly dangerous structure that costs the taxpayer millions each year to keep from collapsing under its own weight.

The key issue at the heart of this debate is how we remember - especially, how we remember pain. In the rhetoric around Grenfell, as with many other tragedies, we often hear calls to ‘always remember’ and that we must ‘never forget’ the wrongs done which caused the deaths of those 72 people. The Grenfell Memorial Commission, which was charged with thinking about what memorial should stand on the site of the building in future, claimed as its aim to “make sure the Grenfell tragedy can never be forgotten.”

Such calls to ‘never forget’ are powerful. They seem a proper tribute to those who died, they ensure that those culpable are not let off too easily, and that justice is properly done. To blithely forget such horrendous evils seems an affront to justice, and a morally culpable act.

Yet must we always remember the hurts and pains of the past? Can we imagine a future where such memories fade into the distance and no longer cast their painful shadow over our lives?

Whether and when Grenfell Tower comes down, is yet to be determined. Yet only when we keep in mind the destination of the journey of healing can we make good decisions...

Theologian Miroslav Volf asks all these questions in his book The End of Memory. He describes good and bad ways of remembering. We can remember to cherish the dead, to learn lessons for the future, to ensure justice is done. Yet we can also remember to nurse grievances, to cling onto grudges, to imagine horrible pain inflicted on those who wronged us. Memories of wrongs done to us can imprison and define us purely as victims, never in control, always subject to the actions for others, with no agency of our own.

Volf’s Christian faith tells him that the human race is beckoned towards a new world, in the full presence of God, of what he calls ‘final reconciliation’. It is a place where we will be captivated by a vision of the beauty and goodness of God, a vision that we only dimly glimpse in this world. He asks the question: in such a world, will we remember all the wrongs done to us? Can we imagine still clinging onto the memory of the sins and crimes that others inflicted on us? Even if that were in principle possible, would we remember all the harm done to us? And the harm we did to others? If not, which sins would we remember? Which ones would we forget? Would not such memories blight the joy that such a world would surely offer?

Reflecting on his own youthful and painful memories of interrogation in communist Yugoslavia, and other tragedies such as the 9/11attacks, Volf imagines getting to the point where we don't forget the terrible things that others have done to us, but when we actively don't remember them. They still occupy a place in our minds but are instead relegated to a corner of our consciousness, under our control, no longer rearing their ugly and painful heads when triggered by other events. Such an ability not to remember, he suggests, is a good thing:

"Non-remembrance of wrongs suffered is the gift God will give to those who have been wronged."

At the same time, Volf is careful not to imagine getting to this point too easily. Wrongdoers cannot for a moment insist that those they have wronged forget their misdeeds. Such non-remembrance can only happen when truth has been told, sins punished, and justice done. Yet when all that has taken place, that ‘final reconciliation’, Volf imagines, might even embrace the unimaginable - an ultimate reconciliation between the wronged and the wrongdoers.

Is it possible to imagine children whose parents were killed because of the negligence and culpable cheating of contractors who knowingly put unsafe cladding on Grenfell Tower, ever being reconciled to and even embracing the perpetrators? Volf suggests we can, while recognising that this can only happen when the crime has been identified, fully recognised, repented of profoundly, forgiveness offered and accepted and the appropriate penalty paid.

While such a process remains incomplete, the obligation to remember remains, and reconciliation cannot yet take place. But true healing from such hurts is not to be forever dominated by them, defined by them, or to live in constant enmity and resentment because of them. It is, instead, to gain the strength and ability not to remember them, not to be defined by them, and even - possibly, perhaps - to find reconciliation with their perpetrators.

The Grenfell Public Inquiry that reported last year was an important step for the bereaved and survivors. It was not the end of the journey. Far from it. The process of enacting justice through prosecution of the guilty lies ahead. But as an exercise in truth-telling, in giving perpetrators the opportunity to own up and confess their guilt, in a truthful recognition of what went wrong, it was a vital step towards the possibility of reaching that stage when the memory of Grenfell no longer defines its victims. It opens up the possibility at some point in the future, where they might be in control of their memories rather than their memories controlling them.

The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that we humans need to learn both “the art of forgetting” and “the art of remembering”. To know when and how to do one and when to do the other is the gift of God and an art of true wisdom.

Whether and when Grenfell Tower comes down, is yet to be determined. Yet only when we keep in mind the destination of the journey of healing can we make good decisions about such fraught and emotionally charged issues. The Tower cannot remain as it is - everyone acknowledges that . Yet it's hard for many to think about its disappearance without knowing what will replace it. Which is why plans to demolish the Tower must go hand in hand with the plans for the lasting Memorial that will stand on the site. Yet that can only happen if it serves the goal of being able truthfully to remember no longer the pain and injustice of the past.

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