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I was listening to a fascinating conversation between John Vervaeke and....
They made a wonderful distinction between:
- Raw intelligence, maybe best considered as number-crunching ability, or perhaps as wit; the ability to form connections.
- Rationality, the ability to be logically consistent.
- Wisdom, the ability to make good decisions.
Rationality is made not by faster computing, but by self-correction. There's the old joke that a computer is a machine that makes a million mistakes a second - what is lacking is the ability to check itself. A lot of algorithms are starting to do this. It requires a lot of computational power, but it can be done - at least in part. It requires the algorithm to contemplate; to do work that is not directly tied to an output. This raises flags, but they become obvious when we start considering wisdom.
Wisdom is a trickier nut to crack.
They argue that wisdom requires care, and care requires embodiment. That caught me off guard by just how right it is. It's actually at the core of the Christian ethos, which is fundamentally incarnational.
If something is not embodied - if it does not recieve feedback from the world, if it does not understand that it is a part of the world in which it affects (even if by mere word or computation), then why should it act in such a way to make the world better? Indeed, how could it? Secondhand accounts are always lacking. We understand partly when we are given information, but understand fully when we experience directly.
This raises all sorts of lovely questions about the mind-body connection that I don't want to get into because it's out of my depth and beside the point. Let's jump over that.
If we want wise AI, it will necessitate that it be embodied. The AI would need limbs, sensors, etc. - maybe humanoid, maybe blob-like, who knows. The key thing is that it have these faculties, so that it understands its dependence on the world and place in it.
But... why?
Why are we making these machines at all? Vervaeke and company seem to posit a vision (even if unlikely) that such beings become enlightened and then help us be enlightened. Maybe. I think there's some people in this camp. But honestly?
The same impulse driving industry in general: slavery and our inherent disgust for it.
At first we wanted our fields tilled and things built without lifting a finger. With AI, we want our taxes done and books written with the same lack of effort - and while you're at it, write me a sonnet! We want the result, we don't want the work.
So, we enslave someone and make them do it. Well, we have a sense that isn't right. Alright, well, let the guy be free and pay him. But that's expensive. Well, replace him with a machine. Now the guy is out of the picture entirely. Is removing our neighbor from the picture, and ushering in self-reliance, island existence, very Christian, though?
Adding rationality and wisdom to artificial intelligence fundamentally subverts the objective of these machines. The point of these machines is to wield the power of rationality and wisdom, without the cost of doing it ourselves, or being faced with the reality of the other. The desire to make machines rather than relationships is a love of power over neighbor.
But it's actually even worse than that. We do not want to face the reality of the other precisely because the other is a judge. We ought not enslave our neighbor not because it is unseemly, but because our neighbor is Christ - the judge.
If these AIs truly rise to the occasion of rationality and wisdom, they will judge us.
I don't mean that so much in the way of how God will judge us. I mean that in the sense that the presence of any rational, wise person, invokes a sense of judgement within us - in the way that Peter falls before Christ and asks him to leave, for he is a sinful man.
I wouldn't argue that we should usher this along, in the hopes that the AI will succeed, and cause enlightening bliss.
What I am saying, is that succeeding in making a good AI is fundamentally at odds with the goals of an AI: to have the power of being wise, content in a state of vice.
Oh, and it uses a lot of electricity. Like a lot of electricity. For all people talk about how religion is a waste of time, I think it's more energy-efficient than AI.
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In our day and age, there is a deep longing for authenticity. For me, this was at the heart of my full conversion to Catholicism. I remember reading a bit from Stranger in a Strange Land and it struck me.
As a devout agnostic, Jubal consciously evalued all religions, from the animism of the Kalahari Bushmen to the most sober and intellectualized of the major western faiths, as being equal. But emotionally he disliked some more than others... and the Church of the New Revelation set his teeth on edge. The Fosterites' fiat-footed claim to utter gnosis through a direct pipeline to Heaven, their arrogant intolerance implemented in open persecution of all other religions wherever they were strong enough to get away with it, the sweaty football-rally & sales-convention flavor of their services - all these ancillary aspects depressed him. If people must go to church, why the devil couldn't they be dignified about it, like Catholics [...] ?
My encounters with Christianity always left me with the same sense of... incompleteness. Lack. The attemps to fill this with noise, or lights, or emotion were all so... inauthentic. Like trying to fill a hole in a foundation with play-doh - yet the hole is infinitely deep. The Christians I encountered could make me aware of the God-shaped hole, but always seemed to want to shove their stupid ideas down it. Their ideosyncratic methods and terms and songs.
But after years, rediscovering the sacraments of the Church... and the traditional hymns, chants, vesture, iconography... of course these things spoke to my Jubal-like sensibilities, but... there was more... there was a reason...
These things were not trying to fill a hole.
No, they didn't think they could conjure up a little thing that would finally plug it up. They were a call, a cry, a bellowing, to go down the hole.
The authentic solution: the one without tension towards the end, without resistance to it. The modern clamor for authenticity has conflated into uniqueness, and even worse, into self-begottenness. Non-derivativeness. It is exhausting to always be novel, or worse, to try and create ex nihilo. It is a fool's errand, though: there is nothing new under the sun; the atoms have been spoke into existence long ago. All is rearrangement, all is conversion. And here the authentic call to human creativity can be found: to do only what we see the Father doing; to convert everything to His glorious will. Nothing else is creative; all else is destruction.
Nothing else is authentic; all else is a sell-out.
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