The term AI seems to be all over the place, the richest men talk about it, the ‘smartest’ men talk about it like everything now using half truths to disguise the reality. And it pervades entertainment including the latest Mission Impossible movie. Even though I already saw this movie a decade ago when it was called Age of Ultron. But the only real wisdom I have seen on the subject comes from Gilbert magazine. An organization which celebrates the great G. K. Chesterton.
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, The Entity. Dead stupid.
Dr. Peter J. Floriani an aging computer scientist and Chesterton super-fan, points out some of the many problems with the currently developing idea of AI. Basically machines, even complex computing machines don’t have a mind. And in an attempt to improvise mind by using ‘random’ numbers they do little more than a Ouija-board or a deck of tarot cards. But that gets one thinking, if they want a machine to have a mind, where do you look? You can use the combined information humanity has created, i.e. the internet. But that’s not a mind, it doesn’t create it’s just elaborate stealing like what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing the last couple decades. It does not adapt, or respond, an certainly is no source of creative energy or the surprise which is innovation as George Gilder points out. Knowing what has been is no real predictor of the future. I suppose you could seed the machine with some sort of animal. But we all know this is no mind, but an elaborate organic mechanical system of it’s own. Which leads to the central evil of C. S. Lewis’ planetary books.
C. S. Lewis and J. R.R. Tolkien made a deal one time that Tolkien would write a time novel and lewis would write a planetary novel. The result was his three books about Ransom, the Philologist. And the culminate with that other source of mind, the fabled, ghost in the machine, the demonic. We Christians are not materialists, because we are right and the world is not just material. Lewis rightly predicts that the worship of the machine will inevitably lead to inviting the demonic to inhabit the machine. And we are back to all the old paganisms. Which is why his grasp of the underlying philosophical things really happening in the world, served him so well in his day as well as being prophetic for our day. He had a real mind, using the wisdom of the past, the examples of history and the truth of God’s word to create something, new different, real, true and beautiful.
Machines are just tools used for an end. And we know there are two sides in this battle Matthew 12:30. If you are not using these tools for good you are using them for evil. And generally not admitting the source of agency is a sure sign you are concealing evil agency. The truth of God is not afraid of being in the light, it does not have to pretend it’s source is spontaneous or mysterious or magical. Because that’s what good is, it’s appreciating, rightly, what God has done for us. He is the source of all good gifts. He bestows on us all sorts of blessing including the blessings of mind and the ability to create or sub-create as Tolkien says. As Lewis and Tolkien did with their tools, the pen. Men who shunned even the typewriter and would have been appalled by the machines we have today, as I type on my laptop, could see what was really going on in our day better than we can. That is intelligence that no artifice can produce. Artifice, the work of men’s hands, the idol.