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.

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