The news has been featuring Artificial Intelligence recently. It’s been a topic of interest for years, but in the past few weeks, you might be getting sick of how much you’ve heard about Artificial Intelligence, which is shortened to AI.
Why has AI made the news recently? Because people think that Artificial Intelligence is learning too much, too fast, and is dangerous? Some people are concerned that robots will take over humanity.
Maybe that concern is legit. Take a look at this clip:
How do you feel watching that clip? Nervous? Do you wonder if any of the robots will retaliate from all that pushing and abuse? Will the robots get revenge? It reminds of the film The Matrix where that happens. The Matrix depicts artificial intelligence gone wild. In the film artificial intelligence controls the world, enslaving humanity, who are used as a power source. People are kept alive in a comatose state, conscious only in a hyper-real dream-like state called The Matrix, so that while they are dreaming, the artificial intelligence can use human bodies are power generators. That’s a scary thought, the enslavement of humanity by what amounts to super-intelligent computer robots.
Obviously, our culture and world in 2023 is not even close to a Matrix-like reality, but Artificial Intelligence has its naysayers who think that if we don’t reign it in, we could be headed past a point of no return such that we cannot control it, and instead AI will control us. Others say, No, that’s just Hollywood. It makes for great sci-fi movies, but real-life AI is nothing like that.
The idea of artificial intelligence can leave us confused, unsettled, and wondering what will come of the world. Some of us think we should turn off the computers, shut down the internet, while others pull out our smartphones and revel in the wonders of technology, saying let’s see how far this can go! What is a uniquely Christian response to Artificial Intelligence? Does the Bible have anything to say about a topic that the New Testament writers could not possibly imagine? That’s what these quarterly current events weeks are all about. Trying to bring biblical theology to bear on the headlines of the day.
This is such a new topic, such a complicated one, that I hope I can do it justice, at least a little bit. So even if you don’t like technology, stay with me, as I think this just might be meaningful. Let’s start with this. My guess is that nearly everyone reading this has a smartphone. That’s not just an American thing. People all over the world, even in developing countries, in remote areas, have smartphones. Your smartphones are using Artificial Intelligence to accomplish many of their tasks for you. Especially if you are using them for social media.
AI is what makes your smartphone smart. AI is not the device itself. AI is also not the internet. Artificial intelligence is not robots. Artificial intelligence is not even computers. On the video of Boston Dynamics machines above, it sure seems like AI is robot computers, doesn’t it?
Artificial intelligence is the software, not the hardware. Software is the programs that run the computers. Hardware is the computer itself. Software is essentially a language that boils down to 1s and 0s. On and off. A whole bunch of tiny transistors that are turned on and off super fast in languages, codes, that tell the computer what to do. That’s why computer programming is called coding.
How many of you have done any coding whether in high school or college? Some of you remember when coding was done by punch cards on computers that filled a whole room. I learned some basic coding with my dad when I was young, as he was getting his doctorate in computer education. Then I worked on the 1990s-era chunky Apple Macintosh computers in high school, but after graduation I gave it up to go to Bible college.
Coding is simply learning another language that is based in math and logic. If this, then that. Garbage in, garbage out. As time went by, coding became more and more advanced, and computers became more and more powerful and a lot smaller. The phone you just showed us is way more powerful than those room-sized computers of the 1970s or the computers that sent Apollo rockets to the moon.
Fast-forward to the early 2000s when smartphones first started being released and especially the iPhone in June 2007. Coders, computer programmers had designed and written all sorts of programs that could track a person’s activity online, remember what the person did, and start to give that person suggestions or advertising based on their habits. Phones were becoming intelligent.
For example, every time I leave the church parking lot and make a right-hand turn onto Old Philly Pike, you know what my phone does? It buzzes, giving me a notification about how long it will take me to get home. And if I tap on the notification, it will open my Maps app and connect me to GPS directions if I’d like assistance in my travel home. I never told it to do that. It raises some eerie questions. How does it know where I live? How does it know I was going there? What else does it know?
At some point, probably when I first used the Maps App, it asked me my Home address and Work address, and I entered those addresses. Now it knew where I live. Then the AI programming uses the phone’s GPS to track my patterns. I drive from my work to my home sometimes multiple times each day.
So while the phone doesn’t actually know in advance if I going home when I turn right onto Old Philly Pike, there is a high probability I am going to do so, based on my past habits and the time of day. So the programmers of the iPhone have told it to notify me so that I can have travel assistance. It’s a nice feature. Or annoying, because I live 1.8 miles away and I usually don’t feel I need assistance. If, however, I had a long commute that involved highway traffic, I would probably rely on the AI assistance every day.
Since the advent of the smartphone, Artificial Intelligence programs have only become more and more sophisticated. That brings me back to the question from the beginning of the post that I never answered: Why has AI made the news recently? It is ChatGPT that has made most of the news about Artificial Intelligence lately. In fact, what might bring Artificial Intelligence down is not a group of rebel humans armed with powerful weapons in their fight against robots; what might actually bring AI down, or at least reign it in, is copyright law. Yeah. Copyright.
In the next post, we’ll learn how.
Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash
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