Is Artificial Intelligence alive? – A Theology of AI, Part 3

Have you seen the news reports about AI capability of voice cloning? You record your loved one, then upload the audio files into the AI app or website.  AI stores the audio files into the computer memory.  Then it manipulates those audio files, allowing people to type anything into the app, and the AI will turn that text into an audio file in the voice of the loved one. 

I watched news reporter Carter Evans use the app with audio files of his own voice. Evans then called his mom, fooling into thinking that he was asking her for money.  Other reports describe people capturing audio of, say, a woman’s daughter, then using that audio to call the woman, and in the daughter’s voice say “Mom, help I’m kidnapped, send money to this phone number.”  This is fraud.  Impersonation.  It is illegal, crime made possible using AI technology. 

Lying, fraud and deceit are out of line with the heart of God.  Lying, fraud and deceit are in line with the evil one.  So we Christians stand against all forms of fraud.  We stand against deceit.  We stand against harming others through manipulation.

What I have detailed so far is AI as a tool that can be manipulated illegally by humans.  What I have not talked about this week is the possibility of AI taking on a life of its own to the point where humans cannot control it.  We are not at that point.  We’re not even close.  But some are concerned.  I listened to a podcast in which one of the primary computer scientists who worked on AI for decades said that he is astounded by how fast it is growing in its capabilities.  In an article, journalist David Brooks, talks about the two main approaches to AI: those who want to limit it and those who want to embrace it.

Brooks interviewed a cognitive scientist Hofstadter, who said this, “We’re approaching the stage when we’re going to have a hard time saying that this machine is totally unconscious. We’re going to have to grant it some degree of consciousness, some degree of aliveness.”

In other words, is Artificial Intelligence alive?  Is it sentient?  Does AI know that it is alive?  Is it aware of itself?  Have humans created a kind of Frankenstein?

Brooks says No.  He writes, “But, I’d still argue, the machine is not having anything like a human learning experience. It’s playing on the surface with language, but the emotion-drenched process of learning from actual experience and the hard-earned accumulation of what we call wisdom are absent.”

At issue here, Brooks writes, is what does it mean to be human?  Are we just physical matter, a happenstance of natural biology?  If so, we’re not essentially different than a computer program.  As Christians, we beg to differ.  We believe humans are composed of not just a material part, but an immaterial part.  Humans have part of us that is seen, but also part of us that is unseen.  We throw around words like body, soul, spirit, heart and mind to help us describe the complexity that is humanity. 

I’m not going to argue for certain words.  What I will argue for, though, is that humans are created by God, created with both a physical part and a spiritual part merged together.  We are uniquely hybrid beings with a consciousness of both the material and the immaterial world.  That physical/spiritual hybrid cannot be replicated by computer programming, even computer program that is highly intelligent.

Photo by Aideal Hwa on Unsplash