By Chris Watkin, TGC. (Image: Andy Kelly/Unsplash)
Few if any technologies in history have spawned such wildly different predictions as artificial intelligence. In a single week, you might hear one expert prophesy AI as the end of humanity, another herald it as the solution to all scarcity, and a third dismiss it as overhyped nonsense.
The first group are the doomers, speaking in apocalyptic tones about AI’s existential dangers. They’re not just cranks and crackpots: Eminent AI pioneer and 2018 Turing Award colaureate Geoffrey Hinton puts the chance of AI-driven human extinction in coming decades in the 10-to-20 percent range. That’s the same odds as the lifetime risk of sudden cardiac arrest for men.
Next, there are the boomers, making wildly utopian predictions about how AI will transform the economy, society, and even humanity itself. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company responsible for ChatGPT), has floated the idea of a “Moore’s Law for Everything,” imagining an AI-driven future world where everything from housing, education, food, and clothing will halve in price every two years.
Finally, there are the scoffers––people who think the whole AI world is drunk on its own hype, like the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain, argues that “worrying about evil AI killer robots today is a little bit like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars.”
Amid the cacophony of doomers, boomers, and scoffers, how are you and I supposed to work out what to make of AI and how this technology and its consequences relate to the God of the Bible?
I want to address one of the most important questions raised by generative AI: What does it reveal about our humanity? In response, I’ll sketch a framework for thinking about AI that’s more robust and more roundly biblical than the ways Christians sometimes approach the topic. In working out such a framework, Christians have an opportunity to seize and a pitfall to avoid.
Opportunity: AI’s ‘Horseless Carriage’ Moment
The opportunity to seize is this: We’re now in AI’s “horseless carriage” moment, when the way we relate to this new technology is still being hammered out.
In 1895, the automobile was a curiosity called the horseless carriage. Our forebears understood these new machines in terms of what they were already familiar with (carriages). Only later did they shape a category of their own, and the automobile was born. Similarly, AI is currently in its horseless carriage moment: We’re working out whether we want to relate to it more like a tool, like a servant, like an intimate partner, or like a god.