This week, as AI garners headlines, we see alternative views: AI is either Godlike or portends the destruction of humanity:
“I think religion will be in trouble if we create other beings. Once we start creating beings that can think for themselves and do things for themselves, maybe even have bodies if they’re robots, we may start realizing we’re less special than we thought. And the idea that we’re very special and we were made in the image of God, that idea may go out the window.”
— Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of A.I.”
I don’t see AI challenging our conception of God in the slightest. On the contrary, I anticipate a greater yearning for the divine as our society embraces a disruptive technology with little thought to the ethics around it. Take the U.K. as an example: 2 million more people attend church regularly than did so in 2018 — with much of that shift coming among 18-24 year olds. Young people are saying that society does not have the answers they’re looking for—but religion might.
After all, their experience of the modern world and what’s promised are vastly at odds:
“Everyone (including AI companies!) will need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits. But it is a world worth fighting for. If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years — the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights — I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them.”
— Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better.”
I have a number of issues with this quote. First, who is “doing their part” to prevent risks? Amodei blithely says “everyone” must. I must? You must? By refusing to specifically name actors, he’s passing the buck when it comes to preventing risks and actually deciding as a society how we want to use AI. This is the work that must be done. A commission on AI would make sense, with leading technologists, philosophers, religious leaders, and so on—but we don’t have the patience to actually think about and discuss what should happen ethically.
After all, “utopia” awaits. Except, people have assumed technology will bring new connection, breakthroughs, and a new society for hundreds of years. It always works differently than they expect. And I’m unclear on how AI provides cognitive freedom (it seems to be supplying cognitive laziness for some, which is the opposite of freedom), and it will not cause a renaissance of liberal democracy without creating shared realities and stories.
Here’s Daniel Kwan (director of Everything, Everywhere All at Once) in a New Yorker article on A.I., speaking with journalist Joshua Rothman:
“What’s the most important thing humanity has engineered?” Kwan asked me, over coffee in a West Village restaurant. “Arguably, it wasn’t the internet, or agriculture. It was the creation of the systemic and institutional trust that was required for us to build societies. And a lot of that engineering was actually collective stories—God, government—that helped us see ourselves as one family, one community. With our current technology, it’s like we’re playing Jenga.” He mimed a tower of blocks at the table. “We’ve been pulling blocks from down here, from the foundation of collective understanding and belief in a shared world, and using them to build farther up on the tower. And, if we keep doing that, the whole thing will collapse, and we’ll go back to only being able to trust the hundred and fifty people in our tribes.”
Interesting that Kwan inadvertently chose the metaphor of a tower—and when we lose our collective understanding and belief in a shared world, the tower collapses. This is the story of Babel—and it doesn’t just happen once, but again and again in humanity.
Kwan continues: “If you look at all the crises coming down on us—climate change, polarization, the collapse of consensus truth, income inequality, whatever—if I could choose one to focus on, it would be the coördination, communication, trust problem,” Kwan said. “Because, if we don’t fix that, we can’t fix anything else. And fixing that requires us to fix our stories.”
We’re obviously seeing this collapse of trust and lack of a shared reality. The political dysfunction we experience is a downstream effect of our culture: if neighbors do not trust each other and cannot share the same reality, our politicians won’t either. I anticipate AI creating increasingly personal environments that fail to more deeply connect us, rather than the shared stories for which Kwan longs.
I believe some of what Kwan suggests is a way forward: some of the most important work we can do right now is to create shared reality. I don’t believe this happens on social media. It may happen in long-form emails to some degree. I think it happens to a much greater degree in conversation: talking about what matters, about what our values are, about what’s real.
We cannot build trust without dialogue, and we cannot have dialogue with the way our society is currently structured—where we communicate via algorithm. But the strongest critique is always from one who loves his or her neighbors deeply and calls them to a higher place. This has happened throughout history, as people like Thoreau, or John the Baptist, have intentionally removed themselves from society—restructuring their space, their time, and their relationships—in order to understand it better. And they intentionally speak back into society to call it to a higher place.
We may not be able to live on a pond or eat locusts and wild honey (nor would we want to). But we can ask how we structure our spaces, our time, and our relationships. Spaces: are we close to the land, or able to live in rhythm with the earth? For many in our cities, this is very difficult. It’s even difficult for me in the suburbs. But an audit of my spaces would invite me to ask: is where I spend my time physically a reflection of my values? What do my spaces—and artifacts (good coffee, fountain pens)—say about my values?
And an audit of my time: is it spent on gathering with others, on sharing, on ways to give back? Do I spend my time in a hurry, or do I move from love to love, caring for that which is in front of me (whether person or task)?
And a relational audit: what if I were to ask others how I cared for them, and where I could do it better? It may be a bit to ask, but am I creating conversation and dialogue with others?
These steps help align our physical worlds with our interior worlds. They can sometimes feel at odds. An audit is not radical life change, but it may challenge current ways-of-being that no longer hold much life. And they are ways for us to live in greater reality with ourselves and others, ultimately creating shared realities. We embody the culture we seek to experience.