Artificial intelligence: a guide for the perplexed
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
A former airline pilot, Simon Cross left industry to complete a PhD focusing on the metaphysical tensions in scientific perspectives on divine action. For the past four years he has worked for the Church of England researching technology ethics and the regulatory and governance challenges AI poses for society.
He has written a fantastic Grove booklet on Artificial intelligence: a guide for the perplexed which is the best short guide I have seen. Here are some extracts to give you a flavour of his argument.
Simon begins by exploring why this has become such an urgent question.
An innovation purportedly threatening the extinction of the human species; a new technology definitely disrupting our educational methods and ap- proaches; a likely cause of mass redundancies. Yet also: a source of hope for medical diagnostics and therapeutics; the promise of increased efficiency in public transport (and of instantaneous and effective reactions in situations where things go wrong). And, whichever of these sets of predictions (or both) one focuses on, an astonishingly rapid pace of development; to give just one example, ChatGPT’s latest iteration as GPT4 has in a short space of time ‘learnt’ to get a decent pass at mathematics examinations, and at least one Oxford academic sets his students essay questions along with an example of what ChatGPT could do with it. ‘There’s your first challenge: do better than that.’ Yet of course the time might come, and might come quite soon, when the student, at least unassisted by technology, simply cannot ‘do better than that.’
The goals of this study are, first, to lay out the central features of AI in non-technical language and, secondly, to indicate some of the key components of a theological framework for engaging with the wide range of questions and issues involved. The focus is in the main on the more abstract and theologically significant questions, rather than on policy questions in education or in healthcare. It will be obvious to anyone following developments in their field that if a week is a long time in politics, it is a very long time indeed in the world of AI! The questions dealt with here are not novel ones, though they might become more and more pressing as possibilities and ambitions for AI systems are extended in the coming months and years.
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