Issue 40 AI and the churchBlog | AI and being human
AI and being human
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 13.09.24
The rise of so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ has very quickly raised a whole host of questions, as we have seen in this edition of the magazine. Although at first the major questions were thought to be about ethics (how it is used) and power (by whom and to what end), we are now realising that the biggest questions are about what it means to be human.
To explore this question, we need to begin by dispelling some myths. AI is actually not very intelligent; I only have to look at the very odd sentences created by the AI behind the speech recognition on my phone to realise that! This is why chatbot ‘helpers’ on websites or phone systems are so frustrating. They don’t actually ‘understand’ anything: all they do is recognise and then mimic patterns of speech, which in fact are simply sequences of digital information, scraped from the internet and analysed for repeated and matching patterns.
This ‘virtual world’ of AI is completely dependent on the material world, but in ways we often miss this.
As I type this on my computer screen, I am dependent on the factory that made this screen, the people who worked there, the metals and minerals used to build it, the cables that connect it, and ultimately those who mined these resources from the earth.
And where is AI when we need it? As someone once said, AI is able to write poems and compose music, leaving me more time to wash the dishes – but what I want is for AI to wash the dishes so I can write poems and compose music!
These questions begin to open up the questions to reflect on, regarding AI, and what it means to be
