The more we think of AI as human, the more we think of ourselves as machines

Oc. 16, Robert Hunt, director of global theological education at Perkins School of Theology on the SMU Dallas campus, for a commentary cautioning against blurring the lines between artificial intelligence and humanity. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading: The more we think of AI as human, the more we think of ourselves as machines: https://tinyurl.com/mwnt4crs

The student in my doctoral seminar almost snorted when someone referred to Amazon’s Alexa as an Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

“It’s nothing but a voice activated database query system. There’s no intelligence involved at all,” she scoffed.

She had a point and missed the point. Finding more user-friendly ways to access data has always been important and, over the years, technological upgrades have included a leap from specialized languages (secret codes that only the computers and their overlords understood) to natural language interfaces (“Alexa, turn on the lights.”) While impressive, these advances are not artificial intelligence.

By Robert Hunt

The student in my doctoral seminar almost snorted when someone referred to Amazon’s Alexa as an Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

“It’s nothing but a voice activated database query system. There’s no intelligence involved at all,” she scoffed.

But this misses the real issue. The biggest leap forward is not how well computers think, but how we think about computers. What is changing is our consciousness of what it means to be human. By giving an interface a name, a distinctive voice, and the appearance of a personality, Alexa isn’t teaching us to use a natural language database interface, she’s teaching us to regard a computer program as one of us. These days Amazon even sends you notes suggesting that you need to “keep up” with Alexa and what she’s doing, just as you might a long-forgotten friend.

The ubiquity of Alexa and Siri, now found in just about every cellphone, automobile and sprinkled through businesses and households, continues a long pattern of anthropomorphizing computers. Star Wars creator George Lucas created robot characters, C3PO and R2D2, that expressed emotions toward both humans and one another. These, in turn, elicited such strong emotional attachment that having human characters risk their lives to save them didn’t seem ridiculous.

In the first generation of Star Trek we also learned to allow non-humans into the realm of human emotions and loyalties. It is hardly surprising that the second generation of Star Trek would carry on exploring the humanization of artificial intelligences. In the TV series Star Trek Generations, an AI (Data) stands trial, claiming what are essentially human rights. In the film Star Trek: First Contact, we find the temptation of that same AI to join the Borg queen and take on the sins of the flesh.

It doesn’t really matter that AI hasn’t yet lived up to the claim of being intelligent in the sense of being sentient. What matters is the growing cultural acceptance that devices created by humans and made of silicone, plastic and metal are living beings whom we treat as peers.

That acceptance also slowly changes the way we think of ourselves. Much attention has been given to whether and when so-called AI will actually become intelligent. Aside from fiction, such as Neil Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, not nearly enough consideration has been given to how we begin to think of ourselves as AIs.

Perhaps the most obvious change is the steady relocation of human personhood into the mind, and thus the brain. In the early part of the 20th century human death was marked by the cessation of breath and heartbeat. Since the late 1960s, it has been identified by a lack of certain meaningful electrical signals in the brain. To be dead is to be “brain dead,” even if the rest of the body functions. And to be living is to be “brain alive” even if sustaining the brain’s life is entirely through artificial means. We measure the presence of a mind and soul by what happens in the brain.

As Jeffrey Bishop notes in Anticipatory Corpse, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated transplant surgery the body (and not necessarily a human body; we also use pig, cow, and artificial parts) has become a repository of interchangeable parts necessary to sustain the brain and central nervous system. I personally have two artificial lenses, and a cow’s heart valve in a silicone structure. Artificial hips, knees and elbows are ubiquitous. We’re all really just Six Million Dollar Men and Robocops in waiting.

Small wonder transhumanism (which made the cover of TIME in 2011) has become popular among those who have the wealth and hubris to imagine themselves as potential transhumans; their essential consciousness transposed into a computer program.

One such is Elon Musk, who in a 2018 interview with Axios on HBO said humans must merge with artificial intelligence, creating a “symbiosis” that leads to “a democratization of intelligence.” Indeed, as our cultural sense of what it means to be human changes, we may well divide into three types of humans: those who can afford to become transhuman, those who will simply die, and those whose religion promises they live eternally in some other form. Religion will become the poor-person’s transhumanism.

The transition that moves the center of being human to the mind, now defined as a complex of electrical impulses supported by mechanisms that maintain it (the body), represents as profound a transition in our understanding of what it means to be human as those affected by great religious teachings and the advent of modernity and the secular age. And like those religious teachings and the rise of modernity, it poses profound questions of how we will understand ourselves and others.

When does a living body lose its human rights? When does it begin to have them? Should AIs, when they emerge into sentience, have human rights? And when they reproduce themselves, a major goal of AI research, who will control their reproductive rights? Most of all, what makes a human a human? Is there something more to us than observable patterns of electrical interactions in the brain?

Traditionally the intellectual center for exploring human self-understanding has been the humanities. Yet universities have been consistently downgrading the study of the humanities in favor of STEM subjects related to increased economic productivity. And in any case scholars in the humanities need to refocus on emerging cultures and their understanding of what it means to be human. STEM researchers, who study what we are, don’t have the tools to study who we are and how we express our self-understanding. So those of us who focus specifically on what it means to be human must address future humanity as well as the past.

Religion, too, addresses our understanding of what it means to be human. Yet the changes even now taking place with the advent of AI seem to have scarcely gained the notice of religious leaders still battling with modernity. We’ve grasped that there may be virtual churches, but have we considered that some of their members (and even preachers and musicians) may be intelligent machines represented by avatars? What happens to our humanity when it isn’t merely disembodied, but re-embodied in a different form? What do terms like “body,” “soul,” “spirit,” and “flesh,” mean in virtual worlds?

Because we are on the cusp of an axial shift in human self-understanding we need a renewed focus on these questions. And that focus must bring into view not just the exploration of the past, but the human of the future, even now emerging in literature, television and film, history, politics and the fine arts.

Robert Hunt is the director of global theological education at Perkins School of Theology on the SMU Dallas campus. He wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.