What AI needs to learn about dying and why it will save it

Those programming truthfulness can learn a lot from mortality.

Andrew Steane

Andrew Steane has been Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002, He is the author of Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion.

An angel of death lays a hand of a humanioid robot that has died amid a data centre

A digital momento mori.

Nick Jones/midjourney.ai

Google got itself into some unusual hot water in recently when its Gemini generative AI software started putting out images that were not just implausible but downright unethical. The CEO Sundar Pichai has taken the situation in hand and I am sure it will improve. But before this episode it was already clear that currently available chat-bots, while impressive, are capable of generating misleading or fantastical responses and in fact they do this a lot. How to manage this?

Let’s use the initials ‘AI’ for artificial intelligence, leaving it open whether or not the term is entirely appropriate for the transformer and large language model (LLM) methods currently available. The problem is that the LLM approach causes chat-bots to generate both reasonable and well-supported statements and images, and also unsupported and fantastical (delusory and factually incorrect) statements and images, and this is done without signalling to the human user any guidance in telling which is which. The LLMs, as developed to date, have not been programmed in such a way as to pay attention to this issue. They are subject to the age-old problem of computer programming: garbage in, garbage out.

If, as a society, we advocate for greater attention to truthfulness in the outputs of AI, then software companies and programmers will try to bring it about. It might involve, for example, greater investment in electronic authentication methods. An image or document will have to have, embedded in its digital code, extra information serving to authenticate it by some agreed and hard-to-forge method. In the 2002 science fiction film Minority Report an example of this was included: the name of a person accused of a ‘pre-crime’ (in the terminology of the film) is inscribed on a wooden ball, so as to use the unique cellular structure of a given piece of hardwood as a form of data substrate that is near impossible to duplicate.

The questions we face with AI thus come close to some of those we face when dealing with one another as humans.

It is clear that a major issue in the future use of AI by humans will be the issue of trust and reasonable belief. On what basis will we be able to trust what AI asserts? If we are unable to check the reasoning process in a result claimed to be rational, how will be able to tell that it was in fact well-reasoned? If we only have an AI-generated output as evidence of something having happened in the past, how will we know whether it is factually correct?

Among the strategies that suggest themselves is the use of several independent AIs. If they are indeed independent and all propose the same answer to some matter of reasoning or of fact, then there is a prima facie case for increasing our degree of trust in the output. This will give rise to the meta-question: how can we tell that a given set of AIs are in fact independent? Perhaps they all were trained on a common faulty data set. Or perhaps they were able to communicate with each other and thus influence each other.

The questions we face with AI thus come close to some of those we face when dealing with one another as humans. We know humans in general are capable of both ignorance and deliberate deception. We manage this by building up degrees of trust based on whether or not people show behaviours that suggest they are trustworthy. This also involves the ability to recognize unique individuals over time, so that a case for trustworthiness can be built up over a sequence of observations. We also need to get a sense of one another's character in more general ways, so that we can tell if someone is showing a change in behaviour that might signal a change in their degree of trustworthiness.

In order to earn our trust, an AI too will have to be able to suffer and, perhaps, to die.

Issues of trust and of reasonable belief are very much grist to the mill of theology. The existing theological literature may have much that can be drawn upon to help us in this area. An item which strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the connection between suffering and loss and earning of trust, and the relation to mortality. In brief, a person you can trust is one who has ventured something of themselves on their pronouncements, such that they have something to lose if they prove to be untrustworthy. In a similar vein, a message which is costly to the messenger may be more valuable than a message which costs the messenger nothing. They have already staked something on their message. This implies they are working all the harder to exert their influence on you, for good or ill. (You will need to know them in other ways in order to determine which of good or ill is their intention.)

Mortality brings this issue of cost to a point of considerable sharpness. A person willing to die on behalf of what they claim certainly invests a lot in their contribution. They earn attention. It is not a guarantee of rationality or factual correctness, but it is a demonstration of commitment to a message. It signals a sense of importance attached to whatever has demanded this ultimate cost. Death becomes a form of bearing witness.

A thought-provoking implication of the above is that in order to earn our trust, an AI too will have to be able to suffer and, perhaps, to die.

In the case of human life, even if making a specific claim does not itself lead directly to one's own death, the very fact that we die lends added weight to all the choices we make and all the actions we take. For, together, they are our message and our contribution to the world, and they cannot be endlessly taken back and replaced. Death will curtail our opportunity to add anything else or qualify what we said before. The things we said and did show what we cared about whether we intended them to or not. This effect of death on the weightiness of our messages to one another might be called the weight of mortality.

In order for this kind of weight to become attached to the claims an AI may make, the coming death has to be clearly seen and understood beforehand by the AI, and the timescale must not be so long that the AI’s death is merely some nebulous idea in the far future. Also, although there may be some hope of new life beyond death it must not be a sure thing, or it must be such that it would be compromised if the AI were to knowingly lie, or fail to make an effort to be truthful. Only thus can the pronouncements of an AI earn the weight of mortality.

For as long as AI is not imbued with mortality and the ability to understand the implications of its own death, it will remain a useful tool as opposed to a valued partner. The AI you can trust is the AI reconciled to its own mortality.

Review

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9 April 2025

4 min read

Is it OK to pray for the death of a dictator?

What happens when the mighty lose their thrones.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Bullet holes on a wall and white paint outlines mark the site of an execution

The wall where Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were executed.

NPR.

The end, when it comes, can be nasty, brutish and filmed.

Muammar Gaddafi, self-styled Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, spent the last moments of his life cowering in a Libyan sewer after an air strike on his convoy. On discovery, a mob subjected him to some ghastly final abuses before death – the kind of ending he had mercilessly condemned thousands to. It was almost biblical in its parabola, and it was recorded on a wobbly camera.

But it was not the first of its kind in this generation. On Christmas Day 1989, the disfigured face of Nicolae Ceausescu was broadcast on TV following his summary execution by hastily assembled opposition forces in Romania. Only days previously, he had been an unassailable dictator.

Vladimir Putin has spoken about Gaddafi’s ending, and it clearly troubles him, but perhaps Ceausescu’s death is lodged in the dark recesses of his mind because it was the one bloody end of all the communist leaders of eastern Europe.

Being a dictator is an all-consuming job. Too many domestic and foreign enemies are made along the way for the dictator to drop their vigilance. And their downfall often comes at the hands of those closest to them; by definition, these people know the dictator’s movements and weaknesses better than others and are best placed to exploit them. The military must be equipped to suppress dissent, but give it too much power and the generals pose a risk to the dictator. Yet if the military lacks the hardware, control of the population becomes harder. Many dictators surround themselves with specially trained loyal guards to defend against the military, but the rule of terror means no-one speaks the honest truth and so risks appear everywhere. No wonder dictators are usually paranoid and themselves racked with the fear that a culture of capricious violence induces in everyone.

These and other theories are explored by Marcel Dirsus in his compelling book How Tyrants Fall (John Murray, 2025). Dirsus notes how dictators require money, weapons and people to survive in office and for the elites around them to believe these goods will remain in place. They also need to immerse the surrounding elites in blood guilt, so that their fate becomes entwined with the dictator’s; Saddam Hussein compelled others to join him in the murder and execution of opponents.

For Dirsus, there are two ways to topple a tyrant. The most direct is to take them out, but this is rarely straightforward. Coup attempts are often shambolic in their planning and even well-orchestrated ones usually fail; the consequences for those implicated are always horrendous. The second route is patient and pragmatic, looking to weaken the tyrant, strengthen alternative elites and empower the masses. External powers often have minimal influence unless, like the US in Iraq, the country is invaded and the tyrant deposed. Sanctions often fail to hurt the elites; a state’s geographic proximity to the tyrant’s nation can be useful, as it gives a base from which opponents of the regime can work.

Modern technology is changing the face of political action, making it easier for large groups to mobilise against regimes, as seen in the short-lived Arab Spring. It also enables dictators to track opponents more successfully than even the feared Stasi in East Germany. Right now, it feels like the tyrants are ahead in this game.

Shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a friend said to me that he was praying for Putin’s death or downfall. I asked him how sure he was that the person who replaced Putin would be better. If the pragmatic route for toppling a dictator involves strengthening different elites and empowering the masses, the likelihood is that the elites will take over, not the masses. Dictators never allow the components of civil society to form; democratic institutions take decades to build. And they rarely anoint successors in advance, for fear alternative power bases are created. When dictators fall, it usually leads to initial chaos and violence before another elite can establish itself from which a new dictator will emerge.

In her inspired song of praise at the news she would give birth to the long-awaited Messiah, Mary observes how God ‘has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly’. It is a role reversal typical of St Luke, recorder of Mary’s song, a gift of eschatology many want realised today, not just in the world to come. When the powerful are brought down from their throne today, they are typically replaced by the next most powerful person, and if the throne remains vacant or is contested, what follows often feels like the spirit that went out of a person in Matthew Gospel returning with seven other spirits more evil than itself, meaning ‘the last state of person is worse than the first’.

This need not be a counsel of despair, but a call to informed intercessory prayer which is short on controlling advice for God’s geo-political strategy, and long on the wisdom and patience of the one throne that endures.

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