Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now in the news although it has been around for some time.

As with any new technology, there are early adopters and late adopters.

Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, some have enthusiastically experimented with what ChatGPT can do for them, while others are cautious about it.

However, it is here to stay, like all new technology. One question people are asking is, How will it impact my life?

People have unknowingly interacted with AI in chatbots and others more consciously in driverless cars. You may have heard the terms facial and speech recognition, and ‘machine learning’ (ML). AI has many applications, which are growing all the time, and they are likely to take over most areas our lives.

So what are the pros and the cons?

Pros

The Pros are always pushed with any new technology, in order to promote it.

We are told that robots will make life easier, doing the mundane work, giving us more leisure time to do what we really want.

Already AI is reading radiological scans faster than humans, for 24/7 if need be, more accurately and more consistently than the best radiologists, combining the knowledge of multiple radiologists into programmes that can be multiplied across the world wherever they are needed. Who can argue against such a benefit?

Artificial intelligence can release people from humdrum jobs and give them time to develop their interests and let their real creativity emerge. It can preserve dying languages and cultures.

People have only to experience AI to see its potential. It may be impossible for us to predetermine its potential, and this scares many.

Cons

It is easy enough to find cons because of people’s fears of the unknown.

What will it mean for my job, my privacy, my freedom, etc?

However, these questions will not change the fact that it will continue. The mantra used against the sceptics is “embrace the change and go with the flow”.

The important question is not any of those already mentioned, but who is in control of any given example of AI?

History is full of the Luddite reaction to progress. I am not a Luddite but my greatest concern is who will be in charge of any given example of AI? And how will they use the new technology? A knife can be used for good or for ill. Similarly with nuclear energy. Similarly with artificial intelligence.

This concern is already identified further afield, many people asking the same question about international bodies such as the WHO, the UN, NGOs, etc. Who is in charge of these multinationals corporations and how do the public interact with them? So the question is very relevant.

So what?

The vision and the threat of AI necessitates international co-operation especially because of its speed of change. An AI Utopia may become an AI dystopia.

As the issue becomes more acute, and it will, who can we trust? Already trust is at a premium, seen at airport boarding procedures.

Politics and public manipulation

The world’s first AI general election took place in Argentina this month, and more will follow. Barak Obama was the first candidate to use social media to win the US Presidential election in 2008; since then the use of social media has become mainstream in order to target and influence the public. Similarly with artificial intelligence. However, the reach of AI goes much further than social media and political elections.

Already the world has witnessed the first artificial intelligence war. AI is used by Israel against Hamas in Gaza, using space power allied with machine learning (ML) and supercomputing, which enabled Israel to identify and target the subterranean tunnels built by Hamas in Gaza, so that Israel does not rely only upon drones and aircraft for surveillance.

Trust in public life

We cannot trust people who will not tell you their agenda nor their beliefs.

There was a time when people publicised their confession of faith and we knew where they stood. Nowadays many people are hardly able to explain their own worldview far less their confession of faith.

Its importance is lost on many people. How many people know that Hamas in Gaza will not agree to any two-state solution in the Middle East because they interpret their islamic religion as forbidding them to yield any land once occupied by islam? As the Ottomans occupied the land of Israel for 400 years, during which time they did nothing for the improvement of the land, nor did Jordan who occupied the West Bank of the river Jordan from 1948 till 1967, so radical muslims will not concede any land to “the infidel”, especially the Jews.

This confession of their faith is clear, written in their Hamas Charter, but other people are not so clear about their worldview. How is trust to be built in such an environment?

The closest equivalent nowadays is political manifestos, but experience of broken political promises shows that we cannot trust those who compose them.

So, whom can we trust? People don’t know what faith is and how trust operates, because they don’t know what truth is, nor how to determine it. In a post-truth society, artificial intelligence will be able to deceive multitudes. Already AI can imitate human interactions, human speech and soon it will be able to make videos at will – and at whose will?

We need to know, but bad actors will not tell you.

How do you discern bad actors? They remain hidden Jn 3:19. They are not transparent, and if you detect someone telling you lies, then do not trust them. You may listen to them and politely engage with them, but you have no reason to trust them.

Trust is earned, by telling the truth and keeping your word. You can only trust someone or something that you have judged to be trustworthy. You need evidence to form such a judgment.

Christianity deals with truth, faith and trust. It teaches critical thinking and it is therefore the need of the hour. Artificial intelligence will be able to do so much for people that there is a danger that it will do the thinking for people, who will subordinate their critical faculties to AI machines. Christianity teaches us to stand against peer-group pressure Heb 12:1.

The limitations of Artificial Intelligence

The Wikipedia page on AI has much to say about artificial intelligence, but it does not discuss self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is basic to the rational human being. We have difficulty determining what animals think about themselves but our own experience tells us that we cannot recall much from when we were a baby, if anything at all. This shows how difficult it will be to even approximate human self-consciousness. It may be possible to programme an AI machine to behave as if it has personality but we know that it has been programmed and it is not true human personality.

One spin-off from AI may be that it will demonstrate the uniqueness of the human soul. Just as there are unbridgeable gaps 1. in the fossil record, 2. from chemistry to the biochemistry of living organisms, and 3. the biochemical to biological gaps are even bigger, so 4. the personality and the self-consciousness gap between animals and human beings will be discovered to be even greater, until secular unbelief will have to succumb to the fact, unwelcome to the ungodly, that human beings are the product of an Intelligent Mind and not of mystical evolutionary and random processes. Evolutionists will continue to fight their narrowing corner, claiming that intelligence is simply extra terrestrial in origin, and not divine, reminding us of the history of paradigm shifts – the desperate attempt to maintain the paradigm, such as Aristotelian cosmology, or whatever, until it cracks under the weight of its implausible presuppositions – in this case, the presupposition that there is no God.

Just as the complexity of life is pushing back the atheist agenda, so the limitations of AI may yet prove to the sceptical secularist that mankind is more than a complicated piece of biological matter.

The future of AI

AI is here to stay and I suspect that AI has a long way to run, and that it will include implanting AI devices in animals and other forms of biological life to harness their God-given abilities for the good of mankind.

This could easily coincide with the biblical Millennium, and the end of that Millennium (Rev 20:7-8) could arrive through the revival of sceptical unbelief suggesting that the benefits of the biblical Millennium have nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with artificial intelligence and technology.

The secularist will then move the focus of their criticism from denying the being of God to promoting the wonder of man-made technology, much as current evolutionists try to replace the wonder and worship of God with the wonder of science and the worship of scientists.

The Bible tells us the end of such unbelief Rev 20:7-11.

Meanwhile the future is bright for humanity because the Lord Jesus Christ is in control Ps 110:1 and the nations will yet learn this Ps 2, and acknowledge it Rev 11:15. AI has its downside in the hands of the wicked but in the hands of Christians the upside is bright indeed.

“The labour of the righteous tends to life: the fruit of the wicked to sin.”

Wise king Solomon’s book of Proverbs 10:16.

Links:

12 Aug 2017: Hyper evolution and the fear of robots.

20 Dec 2023: Mayer Tousi: “it is not the system that is the problem, but those in charge of the system”.

29 Dec 2023: John Cleese and Stephen Fry discuss artificial intelligence, its origin and probable future, looking beyond the present to thousands of years ahead.