Remember HAL? For those whose memories may not go back that far, HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) was the murderous artificial intelligence machine in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Based on stories by Arthur C. Clarke, the movie contains a segment in which HAL deliberately causes the deaths of several astronauts in outer space.
HAL’s villainy was fictitious, but 56 years later it’s a different story. Artificial intelligence has moved ahead by leaps and bounds, so that now, although no such machine is known to be exhibiting homicidal tendencies, the potential dangers of artificial intelligence are causing serious people to sound warning bells.
Pope Francis is one. Addressing an artificial intelligence session of G7, an international body involving the U.S. and six other highly developed liberal democracies, the Pope called AI an “extremely powerful tool” that “generates excitement for the possibilities it offers” but also “gives rise to fear for the consequences it foreshadows.”
You can’t say we haven’t been warned. The G7 session itself was a sign of growing concern about AI. And threats posed to human wellbeing by science and technology run amuck have been a literary theme for more than two centuries.
One of the first to address the topic was Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, about a scientist who assembles a humanoid monster and then must deal with the dilemma of what to do with it. (Shelley’s story bears little resemblance to all those Frankenstein movies.) Later came H.G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau, about a mad scientist who creates human-animal hybrids.
Fiction focused on the harmful potential of science and technology thrived in the 20th century. Notable examples include Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World with its nightmare vision of test-tube babies mass produced in laboratory-factories—something now happening via in vitro fertilization, and Karel Capek’s 1936 War With the Newts, about the bad things that will come from training newts to be as rapacious and bloodthirsty as human beings. And technology-enforced totalitarianism famously provides the setting for George Orwell’s 1984, which marked its 75th anniversary last year.
The dangers associated with technology are not fiction. Back in 1947, with Nazi death camps, the firebombing of Dresden, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fresh in mind, theologian Romano Guardini delivered lectures that became a book called The End of the Modern World.
The heart of it was that at a time when human beings were acquiring ever more power over the world, “man is removing himself farther and farther from the norms which spring from the truth of being and from the demands of goodness and holiness. … He must regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self and finally to God. Otherwise he becomes the victim of his own power.”
In his 1979 encyclical Redemptor Hominis, Pope Saint John Paul II warned that human beings themselves are “subject to manipulation” by the products of our own technology. And in his address to the G7, Pope Francis spoke of a diminishing appreciation of human dignity, declaring it to be what is “most at risk in the implementation and development of these [AI] systems.”
More and more people seem to be waking up to the problem that unconstrained development of AI could pose. European governments have been taking appropriate action to control AI, but the U.S. has dragged its feet. Let’s hope we catch on before HAL does.
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Add to the list all the computers that Captain Kirk had to destroy in the original Star Trek series, and the chilling movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. Apart from that, what is now called “deep-faking” has already rendered a lot of technology useless except to the so-called experts. No ordinary person can look at a well-faked photograph or listen to a faked audio clip and determine from that evidence alone if something really happened or not.
Theoretically if we design control of an intensely complex system we likewise subject ourselves to loss of control. That is, because theoretically the elevation of possibility [of unknown or cryptic possible logarithms] may increase beyond the anticipated ratio to its complexity. Unless we exhaust the expansive field of possibilities we risk error.
Shaw is correct in citing Redemptor Hominis, where “Pope Saint John Paul II warned that human beings themselves are subject to manipulation by the products of our own technology”. With AI we run the risk of outthinking ourselves. The very transfer of God given power to AI is an offense to the donor.
For clarity the danger of AI is not in information access, rather when AI is employed in deciding human actions.
The real problem with AI is promoting the idea that it actually exists. It does not exist, and can never exist. No matter to what level a computer can be programed to present outward signs of mimicking human behavior, user friendliness is the only thing it will ever become. An electrical circuit cannot hold a thought or make a value judgment and never will. I helped design CPUs several decades ago, but their increased levels of complexity has not altered their functional principles.
It should come as no surprise that the bankrupt religious faith in today’s Vatican, soulless functional interpretations of existence are taken as seriously as the secular world. Francis has said, to crowds of young people no less, “we can learn a lot from atheists.”
Warnings about the pervasiveness of AI should be on the order of discussing the metaphysical impossibility of a sentient machine and the foolishness of believing it could be otherwise, but given the outpouring of worldly foolishness from the Francis pontificate, in what is now approaching 12 years, the Church’s voice has now become very very small.
Actually, one of the reasons there are those willing to believe computers can think is to justify their materialist interpretation of humanity’s existence, which enables them to rationalize and tolerate the extermination of lives that don’t appear to function very well. But we can’t expect the new synodal Church to figure this out.
Cell phones have affected the brain, for sure.
“…and back, and forward”? Says whom?