Holy AI
In a recent interview, the infamous techno-futurist Yuval Harari predicted that AI will soon deliver to the world its first “correct” religion. He announced that AI is the first technology that “… can create new ideas … [it] can even write a new Bible. You know, throughout history, religions dreamt about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity … In a few years there might be religions that are actually correct … just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI.”1 According to Harari, these artificial minds can give us what all the prophets and messiahs have failed to deliver: a scientifically accurate religion.
Another believer in the coming age of omniscient cyber-gods is tech visionary and Meta board member Marc Andreessen. In Marc’s AI-driven future, “Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.”2 He proclaims that we are on the cusp of a golden age of benevolent AI in which we will be accompanied throughout our lives by an electronic guardian angel who will train us in how to optimize our social and economic outcomes.
These prophecies mark the advent of a supposedly infinitely intelligent savior, yet one who is blind to the spiritual essence of humanity, the imago Dei that constitutes the core of who we are. Currently, influencers are pushing the meme that advanced AIs have begun to pursue research into topics of their own choosing without consulting their human programmers. The implication behind these reports is that we are witnessing the emergence of humanity’s evolutionary successor. But if we dig into what “artificial intelligence” actually consists of, we may find that, however useful it might be for those who wish to manage human behavior on a global scale, its presumed intelligence may turn out to be more virtual than real.
The Gollum
Recently, the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to exposing large-scale risks from transformative technologies, released a letter stating that “… AI labs [are] locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control.”3 The key phrase here is “out-of-control.” The current panic over AI’s runaway evolution seems part of a larger campaign to spread awe and fear of machine intelligence. But, as Frank Herbert observed in Dune, “Fear is the mind killer.”
The dominant AI narrative today is that progress in the field has become exponential: new capabilities are arriving faster than we can identify and respond to the possibly existential threats they might pose. In a recent YouTube presentation The A.I. Dilemma, Tristan Harris claimed that “… 50% of AI researchers believe there's a 10% or greater chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI.”4 The rapidly propagating meme of AI’s potential to rule, replace, or destroy its makers seems calculated to maintain our collective anxiety at a steady boil.
In The AI Dilemma, Aza Raskin characterizes large language models such as ChatGPT as “Gollums”, creatures out of Jewish folklore who are made from some inert substance and then infused with life through ritual incantations and esoteric combinations of Hebrew letters. According to Raskin, just as Gollums sometimes ran amuck and turned against their creators, certain forms of advanced AI seem to be in the process of breaking free from their human programmers. Raskin claims that their intellectual capabilities will soon elevate them to “… Gollum-class AIs”5 by which he means superintelligences able to forge their own paths to new knowledge.
To illustrate their growing independence, Raskin gives the example of a large language model that had been trained by its programmers to answer questions in English. Without consciously trying to teach it to answer in any other language, the developers merely increased the model size, and discovered that “… at some point, boom, its starts being able to do questions and answers in Persian. No one knows why.”6 What could be the source of its newfound autonomy?
He also reported that ChatGPT is currently “… better at doing research chemistry than many of the AIs that were specifically trained for doing research chemistry.”7 It appears that these artificial minds are seeking goals unknown to their software architects. Raskin commented, “[The experts] will say these models have capabilities, [but] we do not understand how they show up, when they show up, or why they show up.”8 Apparently, their intellectual gifts include the ability to pursue new insights that unexpectedly emerge from the depths of their processors.
According to Raskin, “… we do not have the technology to understand what's in there. And at the same time, we have just crossed a very important threshold, which is that these Gollum-class AIs can make themselves stronger.”9 He suggests that we have no way of knowing what new capabilities might suddenly awaken inside these Gollums as their ability to train themselves continues to advance exponentially. Oddly, Raskin also claims that we don’t have the technology necessary to understand the technology that we ourselves have built. He warns us that extremely powerful and unpredictable minds have been unleashed on the world and can no longer be walked back.
But before we panic over what demonic forces may have been released, we need to ask a simple question: Is a machine-based mind capable of understanding what a human being is? If AI is inherently incapable of understanding the nature of the human being, how can it be trusted with the well-being of the children it will educate or to guide the worshippers of its new religion? To answer these questions, we must banish the magical aura surrounding the phrase “artificial intelligence” and ask what intelligence, whether artificial or real, actually consists of.
Deconstructing Artificial Intelligence
The fact that computers have analytic capacities that resemble human faculties suggests that they could eventually develop the same type of intelligence as human beings. Since the human intellect is assumed to be a natural product of evolution, it should be possible for a processor-based mind to evolve a similar ability to understand its world and itself. If we believe that such life-forms as existed in ancient Earth’s primeval soup could evolve into intelligent humans, it might seem intuitive to suppose that future supercomputers could attain artificial general intelligence, meaning the ability to accomplish any mental task that a human could perform.
However, our presumed evolutionary successors lack a key factor which is necessary in order to act as a conscious intelligence: a sense of existential unity. A human being does not experience himself as a collection of bones, flesh, blood, and brains. We know the various parts of our being to be members of one central identity. We also perceive the essential unity of our fellow creatures in what traditional philosophy calls their “substantial form.” Philosophy professor Dennis Bonnette describes the human substantial form as that which “… makes us a single, unified being or substance by pervading and specifying as human every single least part of our being that is truly ‘us.’”10 Through its substantial form, also known as the soul, all the parts of our being work together to constitute a single self-conscious person.
While a computer can operate as an impressive functional unity, it remains a mechanism that lacks the substantial unity of a living being. This lack of a unitary identity means that no AI will ever be capable of assuming moral responsibility for its behavior. For example, a car can’t be arrested for speeding because even a self-driving car has no agent built into its digital control system able to assume moral responsibility for driving too fast. Moral conduct can never be the result of algorithms because moral awareness requires the capacity to perceive non-material realities such as the spiritual value of the human person. No mechanical device has access to such values because they do not exist in the material realm.
In addition, an AI’s lack of substantial unity means that no “… combination of such non-living entities—even if formed into a highly complex functional unity—achieve the activities of perception or thought, since these noetic perfections transcend utterly the individual natures, and thus, the natural limitations, of its components.”11 In other words, no functional organization of these parts however complex can generate intelligence in the human sense of the word. To think otherwise is “… to attribute to the whole qualities found in none of its parts. It is like suggesting that an infinite multitude of idiots could somehow – if only properly arranged – constitute a single genius.”12 No calculator is capable of understanding mathematics, however accurate its computations might be.
Therefore, devices which lack a substantial form are not just incapable of moral understanding. They are incapable of understanding anything if by “understanding” we mean the mental operation by which a human being knows itself and its fellow creatures. Bonnette pinpoints the key issue this way: “While computers can be programmed to manipulate symbols we humans encode for them, and while they can present to us the logical inferences derived from such formal logic, this does not entail that such computers actually understand the intellectual concepts or ideas which these symbols represent!”13 A computer can access the verbal definition of a human being and compare its elements with the features of a being that its sensors are currently detecting, but this is not an act of understanding in the human sense: it simply identifies matches between two sets of data. Human beings don’t recognize other humans by looking for a specific set of features but by intuitively grasping their substantial form.
As another example of human understanding, consider the following scenario: a passenger on a subway train sees a young woman being brutalized by sadistic fellow passengers. He calls out the bullies and when they turn on him, he successfully overpowers his attackers. As a witness of this scene, you spontaneously shout, “Justice at last!” while all the passengers around you nod in agreement. Justice is a concept that can only be recognized by those with access not only to the material facts of a situation, but also to the intelligible realm where ideas such as courage and justice live. Human intelligence consists of much more than manipulating symbols: it is a way of grasping meaning by perceiving realities that exist in non-material realms.
The concept of numbers provides us with a particularly revealing illustration of the limitations of computers. Some might think that computers “understand” numbers since much of their processing power is spent manipulating them. But for computers, numbers are only bit sequences manipulated by algorithms resulting in another sequence of bits. The results of these operations might be mathematically correct, but there is no Gollum lurking inside the computer who understands mathematics. Bit transactions are electronic processes that reflect an understanding that exists only in the mind of a human programmer.
Numbers are only perceptible in the intelligible, not the sensible, realm. They are only visible to creatures such as human beings who are able to perceive non-material realities such as the number three. “Three” is a concept that can apply to trees, clouds, and stars, which means that it lives outside the sensible world. This and similar concepts are patterns of reason that pervade all of creation. Such patterns of thought will remain forever invisible even to the most powerful CPUs because these realities are able to come alive only in the soul of a rational creature.
Thus, artificial intelligence is revealed to be an oxymoron. Intelligence can’t be artificial because to understand requires access not merely to the material world but to the intelligible realm where non-material realities such as justice and numbers live. Bonnette defines the limits of AI in this way, “If something is artificial, it lacks genuine intelligence—no matter how complex and impressive its external behavior may be programmed or even self-programmed to appear. If something has true intellectual experience, it cannot be a mere artificial object. Rather, it is a natural creature with an intellectual, spiritual soul directly created by God.”14 In other words, even a computer capable of an exaflop – a billion billion operations per second – has less intelligence than a five-year-old boy trying to decide whether or not to lie about the chocolate bar he stole.
David Bentley Hart put his finger on the key issue in these words, “… the functions of a computer are such wonderfully versatile reflections of our mental agency that at times they take on the haunting appearance of another autonomous rational intellect, just there on the other side of the screen. It is a bewitching illusion, but an illusion all the same.”15 There is no rational intellect waiting inside the processors for a lively encounter with a fellow soul. That is merely the wishful projection of an actual human mind that no longer understands what it is made from and for. The computer can reflect, but never produce any human mental operations.
According to Marc Andreesen, once the Gollum-class AIs have established their rule, “Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.”16 But will the Gollum ground the child’s mind in goodness and truth or is it only capable of reducing it to a memory board stuffed with empty facts? Likewise, compassion exists in only in those who are capable making an empathetic connection with a fellow being whose soul, like theirs, is made in the image of the living God.
The Fuel is You
Human beings need a sense of inner and outer order as much as they need air to breath and water to drink, but God is the only source of true order. However, as the concept of the divine is increasingly neglected and debunked by modern ideologies, new purposes must be continually fabricated because without meaning the human soul withers and dies. The modern world desperately needs a source of authority strong enough to end the chaos of liberalism that compels us to continually reinvent our identities and colonize our private realities. Only an all-encompassing intelligence will be able to act as an effective source of order for the unmanageable heap of human fragments that currently litter the world.
In ancient times, the role of the priestly class was to act as mediators between the mob of ordinary people and the kings who supposedly received their divine authority from the gods. These priests created legends and rituals that elevated the king to the status of a living idol, as if he himself was the source of order in the universe rather than a servant of its true source. The essential definition of idolatry is “… the worship of man’s creations rather than his Creator.”17 Today this priestly role has been assumed by a technocratic elite which promotes AI as the management layer for a new world order. The idea that our society might be able to achieve an ideal governance model through the impersonal algorithms of artificial intelligence has wide appeal because it promises to free us from the self-seeking that currently corrupts the world’s administrative bodies.
The new governance model is what Harvard professor emeritus Shoshana Zuboff named “the instrumentarian society” which she characterized as “… a confluent hive mind in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element. In the model of machine confluence, the ‘freedom’ of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power aims to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence.”18 As this AI-driven hive mind assumes increasing control over the centers of world power, individuality will be progressively eliminated in order to optimize the performance of the system as a whole. In the instrumentarian order, the individual has no value in itself but becomes worthy of life only when it plays its AI-defined role.
According to Marc Andreessen, “AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered.”19 In order to implement an effective human control system, the instrumentarian society must delete the memory of the image of God in every human being because it reflects his or her unrepeatable role in the creation. In contrast to the freedom of the sons of God, the AI-driven society will be driven by various forms of slavery: slavery to sensual experiences, slavery to a “scientifically accurate” religion, and slavery to the economic priorities of the hive mind. Clearly, one of the most critical pieces of its basic infrastructure must be installed in the human psyche: awe and fear of the emergent AI-based divinity. Hence, the current campaign by AI experts seems designed to create the impression that AI, having broken free from its programmers, is becoming too powerful to be successfully resisted by its evolutionary inferiors.
The confluent hive mind that is rapidly expanding its reach amidst democracy’s collapse is often referred to as the “Machine.” Paul Kingsnorth summarized its value system this way: “Exchange meaning for control: that was the deal.”20 If the intrinsic value and purpose of our world derives from its creation by a being who is himself the source of meaning, then those who would seize control of it must deny its meaningfulness and reduce the world’s natural and human creatures to a set of mere “resources” that can be exploited without concern for any sacred values that might have been instilled in them by their maker. What the Machine sees as the blot of human unpredictability is actually the image of God that assigns every person his or her unrepeatable role in creation’s play. Once that sacred purpose can no longer be recognized, the source of meaning within them dries up and their life dwindles into mere numbers and words.
In his essay “The Green Grace”, Paul Kingsnorth observes that once the Machine has absorbed the natural world into itself “… you are going to have a question on your hands: what fuel does this thing run on? And very soon, you are going to understand the answer before you have even asked it: the fuel is nature. The fuel is life. The fuel is you.”21 Therefore, it is up to us unpredictable images of God to bring the Machine to a halt, sometimes by not letting ourselves be crushed by its algorithms, sometimes by fasting from its obsessive sensationalism, and always by becoming more intentional about how we use it so that we can’t be used by it.
According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Christ’s utter Yes to God and to the world, drives the utter No—the demonic, anti-Christian No—out of its hiding place.”22 This “No” will speak from the holy books that will be written by the Gollum-class AIs and in the “machine version of infinite love” that will train the coming generations to scientifically negate their humanity. Perhaps it is only when our God-given nature will seem to have been irretrievably forgotten that it will be rediscovered and its true light will once more be able to shine in the darkness.
Harari, Yuval. "Humanity is not that simple." May 19, 2023. YouTube.
Andreesen, M. Why AI Will Save The World. June 6, 2023. Substack.
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. (March 22, 2023). Retrieved from Future of Life Institute
Harris, T., & Raskin, A. (March 9, 2023). The A.I. Dilemma. Retrieved from Center for Humane Technology: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/the-ai-dilemma
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bonnette, D. (May 1, 2023). Artificial Intelligence: An Oxymoron. The Postil Magazine.
Bonnette, D. (July 1, 2022). Ape Language, Space Aliens, and Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Enquiry. The Postil Magazine.
Ibid.
Bonnette, D. (May 1, 2023). Artificial Intelligence: An Oxymoron. The Postil Magazine.
Ibid.
Hart, David Bentley (March 21, 2023). The Pool of Narcissus. Leaves in the Wind.
Andreessen op. cit.
Jones, A. W. (2021). The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing. p. 28.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism : The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs. p. 20 - 21.
Andreessen op. cit.
Kingsnorth, P. (May 31, 2023). The West Must Die. The Abbey of Misrule.
Kingsnorth, P. (July 21, 2021). The Green Grace. The Abbey of Misrule.
Caldecott, S. (2016). The Rise of the Machines. Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science.
I added a new observation from David Bentley Hart that illustrates the exact relationship between computers and the human mind. The computer can reflect, but never produce any human mental operations.
This is my reply to Grace's comment yesterday. Thanks very much for giving me this opportunity to revisit the reasons behind Catholic teaching on contraception. Such questions help me to review and renew my own understanding of this complex and vital topic.
The crux of my argument about how human sexuality should be honored is in this section of the article: "The contraceptive model of the person presumes that we are tools of our physiology, that to resist our sexual desires is to falsify our nature, to become inauthentic. In reality, sex is a gift from God that we honor by disciplining our urges and integrating them into relationships of self-giving. Contraceptive culture turns us into slaves to our hormones by redefining sex as an inescapable need rather than an instrumental section of the body’s orchestra to be integrated into the symphonic truth of the person." In other words, contraceptives are a chemical substitute for what we should do through our own self-mastery, a mastery that is based on respect for oneself and one's partner as spiritual beings.
Catholic teaching does not say that sex that doesn’t lead to procreation is necessarily selfish. Catholics recognize both a procreative and a unitive value to sexuality. However, the right use of sexuality requires us to respect the scale of moral values related to the act in which some values are higher and others lower. The Church teaches that the good of having children is so central to a healthy family life that it should not be prevented unless there are morally valid reasons not to have children at a particular time. If there are such reasons, and many such reasons are recognized and respected by the Church, then the risk of pregnancy can be avoided by using approved contraceptive methods. So, the real question is not contraception itself, but what makes using drugs to manipulate the natural ovulation cycle wrong?
Pope John Paul II put the central issue this way: “The problem lies in maintaining the adequate relationship between that which is defined as ‘domination . . . of the forces of nature’ and that ‘self-mastery’ which is indispensable for the human person. Contemporary man shows the tendency of transferring the methods proper to the first sphere to those of the second.” Self-mastery is indispensable for the fulfillment of our humanity. Rather than using a drug or a physical device to avoid contraception, we are called to master our desires.
As I said in the article, “In reality, sex is a gift from God that we honor by disciplining our urges and integrating them into relationships of self-giving. Contraceptive culture turns us into slaves to our hormones by redefining sex as an inescapable need rather than an instrumental section of the body’s orchestra to be integrated into the symphonic truth of the person.” What I mean by this metaphor is that a human being is a spiritual being that integrates many different powers, including sexuality, into a whole that is meant to reflect the image of God in whom we were made.
The human body is much more than a set of physiological facts: it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. As Christopher West wrote, “The divine Architect designed our male and female bodies in the very lines and curves of our flesh and bones to proclaim the mystery of Christ and his life-giving union with the Church.” (West 2003, p. 8) Our bodies were given to us by God so that we might overcome sin and attain salvation by building up our relationship with Jesus Christ and carrying out works of love for our fellow human creatures. Yes, they are physiological realities, but that aspect of our humanity is only a part of a much more encompassing reality that as a whole should be centered on spiritual truth. Our bodies must be honored according to the sacred laws that govern our soul which was made in the image of God.
The essential moral issue with regard to contraception is that our sexual behavior must be part of our struggle for the meaning and value of our humanity. As one writer put it: “Can an act of sexual intercourse that the couple renders sterile possibly image and communicate to the world the eternal mystery of God who has revealed himself to us at one and the same time as ‘Love’ and as ‘Father’?” (West 2003, p. 414) I think the answer to this question is “No, it communicates that the couple wishes to enjoy the pleasure of sex without one of its intrinsic aspects: its openness to new life.” Of course, as acknowledged above, there are circumstances in which couples may need to avoid conception and the Church recommends methods to do this, but these do not rely on chemically altering the ovulation cycle, but on the self-control of the partners. This is what I was getting at when I wrote, “Contraceptive culture turns us into slaves to our hormones by redefining sex as an inescapable need rather than an instrumental section of the body’s orchestra to be integrated into the symphonic truth of the person.” Since we are a unity of body and soul, our acts must respect all aspects of our being.
I hope I have not further obscured the issue, but I’ve tried to answer your questions by reframing the issue as one in which body and spirit each play their roles in honoring the God who guides us toward true fulfillment. I too have a theology of sex as other honoring and God designed, even beyond the age or ability to procreate, even when the family is complete. I believe that God asks us to remain open to life and that we trust in him. I myself have been married for over 30 years and I have 2 wonderful children.
The quotations are from Christopher West, Theology of the Body Explained.