There’s more than one way to lose our humanity

How we treat immigrants and how AI might treat humans weighs on the mind of George Pitcher.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grey multi-story accommodation barge floats beside a dock.

The Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge in Portland Harbour.

shley Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

“The greatness of humanity,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “is not in being human, but in being humane.” At first glance, this is something of a truism. But actually Gandhi neatly elides the two meanings of humanity in this tight little phrase.

Humanity means both the created order that we know as the human race and its capacity for self-sacrificial love and compassion. In the Christian tradition, we celebrate at Christmas what we call the incarnation – the divine sharing of the human experience in the birth of the Christ child.

Our God shares our humanity and in doing so, shows his humanity in the form of a universal and unconditional love for his people. So, it’s an act both for humanity and of humanity.

This Christmas, there are two very public issues in which humanity has gone missing in both senses. And it’s as well to acknowledge them as we approach the feast. That’s in part a confessional act; where we identify a loss of humanity, in both its definitions, we can resolve to do something about it. Christmas is a good time to do that.

The first is our loss of humanity in the framing of legislation to end illegal immigration to the UK. The second is the absence of humanity in the development of artificial intelligence. The former is about political acts that are inhumane and the latter goes to the nature of what it is to be human.

We have literally lost a human to our inhumanity, hanged in a floating communal bathroom. It’s enough to make us look away from the crib, shamed rather than affirmed in our humanity.

There is a cynical political line that the principal intention of the government’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, voted through the House of Commons this week, is humane, in that it’s aimed at stopping the loss of life among migrants exploited by criminal gangs. But it commodifies human beings, turning them into cargo to be exported elsewhere. That may not be a crime – the law has yet to be tested – but it is at least an offence against humanity.

Where humanity, meaning what it is to be human, is sapped, hope withers into despair. When a human being is treated as so much freight, its value not only diminishes objectively but so does its self-worth. The suicide of an asylum seeker on the detention barge Bibby Stockholm in Portland Harbour is a consequence of depreciated humanity. Not that we can expect to hear any official contrition for that.

To paraphrase Gandhi, when we cease to be humane we lose our humanity. And we have literally lost a human to our inhumanity, hanged in a floating communal bathroom. It’s enough to make us look away from the crib, shamed rather than affirmed in our humanity.

That’s inhumanity in the sense of being inhumane. Turning now to humanity in the sense of what it means to be human, we’re faced with the prospect of artificial intelligence which not only replicates but replaces human thought and function.

To be truly God-like, AI would need to allow itself to suffer and to die on humanity’s part.

The rumoured cause of the ousting of CEO Sam Altman last month from OpenAI (before his hasty reinstatement just five days later) was his involvement in a shadowy project called Q-star, GPT-5 technology that is said to push dangerously into the territory of human intelligence.

But AI’s central liability is that it lacks humanity. It is literally inhuman, rather than inhumane. We should take no comfort in that because that’s exactly where its peril lies. Consciousness is a defining factor of humanity. AI doesn’t have it and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

To “think” infinitely quicker across unlimited data and imitate the best of human creativity, all without knowing that it’s doing so, is a daunting technology. It begins to look like a future in which humanity becomes subservient to its technology – and that’s indeed dystopian.

But we risk missing a point when our technology meets our theology. It’s often said that AI has the potential to take on God-like qualities. This relates to the prospect of its supposed omniscience. Another way of putting that is that it has the potential to be all-powerful.

The trouble with that argument is that it takes no account of the divine quality of being all-loving too, which in its inhumanity AI cannot hope to replicate. In the Christmastide incarnation, God (as Emmanuel, or “God with us”) comes to serve, not to be served. If you’ll excuse the pun, you won’t find that mission on a computer server.

Furthermore, to be truly God-like, AI would need to allow itself to suffer and to die on humanity’s part, albeit to defeat its death in a salvific way. Sorry, but that isn’t going to happen. We must be careful with AI precisely because it’s inhuman, not because it’s too human.

Part of what we celebrate at Christmas is our humanity and, in doing so, we may re-locate it. We need to do that if we are to treat refugees with humanity and to re-affirm that humanity’s intelligence is anything but artificial. Merry Christmas.

Article

Comment

Economics

Morality

Politics

27 September 2024

4 min read

The Conservative Party needs a moral reset

A party member recalls that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher as well as an economist.

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

A statue of a Georgian man looks to the left.

Adam Smith, looking right to left.

Glasgow University.

The election of a new government in the United Kingdom has felt like an opportunity to fix some of the daily challenges faced by the people of these isles. As a member of the Conservative Party, it also presents the chance for those of us who are Conservatives to take stock of what it means to be conservative and how best that definition can serve the people of the UK in a way that benefits the whole and not just specific parts.

Those who follow the internal machinations of the Conservative Party will know that the battle for a new leader has already begun. For the most part, it has focused on whether the Party needs to move to the right to combat the offering by the new kids on the block – Reform, or to the centre in order to block the leaking Shire vote that shifted to the Liberal Democrats. I want to propose a different approach.

For years as I was growing up, probably influenced by the media and how it presents politics, I assumed that the idea of a minimum wage was a socialist idea or what we might today describe as progressive politics. Things changed, when I studied the history and influence of Christian thought on Western economics, as part of a Masters in Biblical Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Adam Smith is the father of modern capitalism and hero to many conservatives. His foundational text, The Wealth of Nations, was on the reading list. Prior to these studies, I had heard and seen many conservative commentators use that text to support their claims around small government. I had also seen liberal commentators vilify his work for being the source of our broken Western systems. Many claimed that it was the basis for the economic thought and principles of Hayek and Friedman, the prominent economists who influenced the policies of the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan government in the US.

It tells us that our dogmatic positions should not prevent us from focusing on what is in the best interest of the people that politics and economics are supposed to serve.

When I read The Wealth of Nations for myself, I was shocked. I couldn’t believe how much of what he had actually said was ignored or had been misrepresented. Reading it for myself changed my assumptions and my learned narrative on capitalism. One of my greatest surprises was that Smith held what I had known to be a socialist policy, the idea of a minimum wage. To him it was such a fundamental truth that it was only briefly mentioned. Perhaps, that’s the reason so many people miss it.

Another shock was discovering that Adam Smith wrote about the place of government in regulating large corporations. For Smith, the wealth of large corporations was to be invested back into the areas from which the company was built. Jobs were to be kept local so that as many people as possible in society benefited from the wealth generated. Smith outlined that government regulation should prevent large corporations from moving their manufacturing operations to cheaper international locations to reduce costs and sidestep local communities.

Adam Smith, the father of capitalism – a protectionist and believer in the rights of workers! But what has this got to do with a discussion about the Conservative Party? It tells us that policies that do not always favour corporations but help workers or local communities are not unnecessarily anti-capitalist and by extension unconservative. It also tells us that our dogmatic positions should not prevent us from focusing on what is in the best interest of the people that politics and economics are supposed to serve.

My party needs to move away from policies that are focused on ideological battles and economics rooted in abstract ideals. And, instead, look to policies that will tangibly help everyday people. Or put differently, the party needs to move away from Oxford Union politics (I have nothing against the Union, I am a lifelong member!) and focus on real-world grown-up politics that improve the lives of the ‘many not the few’!

Lord Cameron tried to move the party to a position often dubbed Compassionate Conservativism. In fact, the origins of capitalism have long been connected to moral principles. Adam Smith not only wrote The Wealth of Nations but also considered issues around morality in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For a government to govern effectively and an opposition to oppose properly, morality and the interests of the many must be reflected in policy. And in my humble opinion, it is not unconservative to do so.