Fear of new technologies is nothing we have not seen before. From the dawn of time, people have been skeptical or even afraid of the ways that new technologies may harm people or even offend God. There is an excellent example in one of the dialogues of Plato.[1] The story of Thamus and Theuth is an ancient Egyptian myth which has two characters who are basically discussing whether or not literacy is a good thing. The god, Theuth, invented writing and took it to King Thamus and said, “Here is what I created. Look what it can do.” And the king said, “No, this is bad because if you write everything down, then people won’t remember things anymore. It won’t increase wisdom; it will increase forgetfulness.”
For the written record, I am in favor of literacy. The word of God has come to us in written form through prophets and apostles. I am writing this article. Civilization as we know it could not have been built without it. But King Thamus had a point. The technology of writing has brought inestimable benefits to humanity, but it has changed how our minds and souls work.
Once upon a time, knowledge had to be learned by heart and propagated orally. And if knowledge and wisdom are transmitted orally, that means it is done socially. No one recites the sagas to themselves. Memory was more communal, less individualistic. In modern times, I could research a topic by myself. Write it up by myself. Publish a book and move to another topic without ever speaking to another person.
Moving on, organ transplants and air travel are two other technologies that caused grave concern when they were new. People have wondered whether we should do those things just because we can do them. “Aren’t we playing God?” But we eventually get used to the new things. We start to appreciate their advantages and then we begin to rely on them. The big question is whether there is anything wrong with that?
Not necessarily. The key is to be aware that almost every technology changes us in some way. There was a communications theorist popular in the sixties and seventies named Marshall McLuhan. He is famous for the maxim: The Medium is the Message. And one of his principles was that every tool which we create enhances one human capacity while also weakening another one. Simply being aware that this is happening permits us to evaluate it and hopefully manage it.
But not all technologies are created equal. Let us consider shoes. The shoe is a technology that helps me to walk more efficiently and avoid injury to my feet. The tradeoff is that the soles of my feet never get calloused enough to do much hiking without the footwear. Without question, shoes enhance my ability to travel by foot, but they do weaken my natural unaided mode of personal transportation. I am willing to make that trade, however, because there is nothing intrinsic to human nature in having calloused feet. Shoes, as a technology, don’t insult your humanity. If you put them on your feet, they help you walk but they don’t do your walking for you. And even if they did, walking is not an essential aspect of a human being in the same way, or to the same extent, that certain other activities are.
Now let us leap to artificial intelligence. Generative A.I. tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and many others can bring tremendous benefits. For example, if A.I. can help a physician diagnose symptoms more quickly, then I may get healed sooner. If finding the right treatment takes months of trial and error, then there is more suffering. But if A.I. can interpret mountains of data instantly, then it will take some of the trial and error out of the art of medicine, which would be good for the patients.
Also, if you have a lawyer that can use A.I. reliably to go through all the precedents of all the court cases in an evening, rather than having to task ten paralegals to slave for days, maybe you will get a better judgment. That seems helpful, especially if you are the one on trial.
Thus, as a tool, A.I. can amplify human thinking, calculation, communication, and problem-solving. But what capacity might it undermine? Well, human thinking, calculation, communication, and problem-solving. We have to be careful because A.I. does not just supplement human thinking, it can replace it. Or at least it appears to have that ability. This means that A.I. has the potential to alter human life in a way that is more personal and with greater potential for harm (and gain) that many other technologies.
Maybe there are just some things that people should do for themselves even if there is something which could do it “better.” This is because the one thing that makes humanity most human or most distinct from other living creatures is the word. And reasoning. Logos. The Bible says that the eternal divine Logos, God’s Son, became incarnate in Jesus Christ. The Word became flesh. One way that human beings are like God in Christ is that we are embodied reasoning beings. Humans are pretty special. Therefore, anything that could diminish our natural reasoning ability, risks insulting the dignity of human beings and dehumanizing them.
At one point as a professor, I concluded that I did not really like my students to use spell-check because they were not learning how to spell. I noticed that my own spelling has gotten worse when I want to write things on the board. I am waiting for the whiteboard to show me what’s wrong with my rendition of Connecticut. I am forgetting how to spell things. All unused muscles atrophy. And my students are never learning how to spell words correctly in the first place because the thing changes it for them and that is all they have ever known. Since we learn by making mistakes, something that too easily erases our errors is actually making us stupid. I never tried to enforce a ban, but you don’t learn how to spell if you don’t ever need to know how. And the same goes with grammar checks. I did not want my students using anything for grammar because I wanted them to learn how to write well on their own.
Think about it. One can put together a careless draft of an essay and then tell the tool to “improve this text” or “polish this rough draft,” and then it does those things for you. Most of the time, that is not good. The fact is that clear writing and clear thinking are the same skill. If you cannot write your thoughts clearly, then you do not understand your thoughts clearly. And so when a person writes a really suboptimal paragraph, they might run it through A.I., and it will make it sound a lot better. But then their brains are not exercising the skill of putting their thoughts into lucid prose. They are depriving themselves of the opportunity to learn by means of the struggle to craft intelligible text.
As a tool, A.I. can amplify human thinking, calculation, communication, and problem-solving. But what capacity might it undermine? Well, human thinking, calculation, communication, and problem-solving.
Well then, does generative A.I. upgrade or degrade human life? Yes and no and the ramification are hard to see. Look at it this way. One very key thing that separates human beings from the animal kingdom is our ability to think, reason, and communicate with words. It is not that animals have no reasoning abilities. My dog, Banjo, is smart. He knows that certain sounds mean food and other sounds mean walk. He can evaluate my tone of voice and detect my moods. Sure, Banjo is pretty smart, but he will never become a standup comedian, and he is never going to appreciate a sonnet. Those are things which dog brains will never be able to do. Even if I, as an individual human also cannot do those things, I am the kind of creature who could do them. Jokes and sonnets require a different kind of brain, which only humans have, even if particular individuals possess varying levels of skill. The human brain, in general, can do those things. So, ask this question: Is A.I. helping me to be a more authentic human or is it being a human for me? It is a discussion worth having.
Some people claim that our caution about A.I. is just the latest chapter in a long history of technophobia. But my dual argument is that no technology is neutral and how it affects our nature should always be scrutinized and, secondly, that generative A.I. is unlike other technologies in that it mimics personhood most closely. The fact that some people are having “relationships” with chatbots shows that the A.I., in those cases, is not being used as a tool. It is being used as a person.
The concern with generative A.I. is that it separates word from flesh, from human flesh. Is it going too far to say that we are attempting to undo the Incarnation? Probably, but the separation of word, logos, reason, mind, from the flesh – as far as human beings go – is dehumanizing. This is because humans are, by definition, embodied reasoning beings. That makes us different from every other living entity in the universe, whether angel or animal. Well, different from almost every other living entity in the universe. The exception is the one Being whom we are most like and who is most like us, the perfect embodied reasoning person, Jesus.
[1] Phaedo