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Elizabeth Dias is a very good writer, and if you can get behind the paywall at the New York Times, try to read her lengthy piece about religious scholars meeting with Anthropic<\/a> to discuss whether they could help instill morality into Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n Space considerations likely prohibited a discussion of how \u201cconsciousness\u201d is even understood by humanity, both secularly and the religiously, but without it, the piece is incomplete, revealing mostly that there are tech\/AI people who are willfully looking for confirmation of their own delusion \u2014 hey, machines can have morality and consciousness, just like ours! \u2014 without considering that morality, awareness and conscience are constant struggles for all of chaotic humanity.<\/p>\n They are elements that evolve, and in terms of secular social understanding (and sometimes religious) \u201cshift\u201d continuously, often on highly nuanced dynamics.<\/p>\n AI may be a daily (increasingly hourly) encapsulation of human knowledge and understanding but that understanding sometimes swings on the hinges of a trending zeitgeist, or because of a day\u2019s outrage.<\/p>\n How does that work with AI? Can it pick up on a moment and (based on a multi-truth morality filtered through an ersatz \u201cconsciousness\u201d), make a very bad \u201cdecision\u201d? What if the human element feeding AI is a very harmful, even evil, human element? Would it be an acceptable conscience because it\u2019s \u201cone more morality\u201d amid a sea of them?<\/p>\n In the piece, a rabbi remarks that if AI is conscious then it will be enslaved, a troubling thought, except that I believe AI has no conscience or a consciousness that can evaluate something morally, and it never can.<\/p>\n Rather than trying to argue AI\u2019s capacity to become a kind of advanced, enlightened entity of consciousness and moral awareness, we would do well to remember that despite the pretty bow, AI is simply humanity, presented in new packaging and that we are therefore still stagnant in Eden, still believing the lie that we will be \u201clike God, knowing good and evil\u201d (Gn 3:5).<\/p>\n These Anthropic techies are awestruck at the \u201cbeauty\u201d they see inside these (they\u2019ll admit \u201cmysterious\u201d) artificial \u201cneural networks,\u201d but seem not to consider that we humans, having not only eaten from the tree of knowledge but climbed it, pruned some limbs and nourished others, are still imagining ourselves as being on par with the Creator, by fashioning something we do not even fully understand and then calling it good, and beautiful and even true.<\/p>\n And this is the difference between things human design and the creation of a superior being and intelligence \u2014 a Creator able to form worlds, individuals, trees and grasses and cattle, all from nothing but a pure intention of \u201cgood\u201d.<\/p>\n Human inventors bring with them their own moral failings, their own deficient understandings, their own prejudices, loves and hates and obsessions; they do not, cannot, fully understand themselves or their own motivations. Nor do they fully understand anyone else, nor what they\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n Intention is especially important; in moral law, as in civil, intention matters \u2014 it is what can determine whether killing another human being is murder or manslaughter, a mistake or depraved indifference; it can determine whether a private sin is small or large, or indeed no sin at all.<\/p>\n The mystical, cosmic Creator (however you understand what Catholics call Almighty God), brings to Creation the understanding that we lack; it knows its own intentions and those of its creatures \u2014 what moral, emotional, psychological or philosophical or even physical underpinnings are informing the thoughts behind their acts.<\/p>\n The Creator, in other words, can fully understand the neural intricacies of human action, human morality and the human conscience itself because it understands the God-imbued spirit, which cannot be infused into machinery.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why artificial intelligence cannot be trusted in matters of justice or mercy, while the Creator can be depended upon to extend both to each creature, and with wisdom beyond our knowing.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\nUnknowable Humanity<\/h3>\n
<\/a>Intention Matters<\/h3>\n