The promoters of Artificial Intelligence (AI) like to portray it as a tool for navigating our increasingly hectic and complex world. The data-crunching apps help users organize, create and make sense out of things.
Some attribute even greater powers to AI. They claim its chatbots can provide helpful interaction and emotional support. The power of these apps allows people to insert themselves into narratives that entertain and offer excitement.
Thus, the praise for AI focuses on how it enriches our individual lives. Promoters believe that AI can help us develop our full potential, to be everything we can be.
Framing the Debate
I don’t think that we should frame the debate around the practical tasks that AI helps people do. This is not the main issue.
What is at stake with AI, ChatGPT, and chatbots is something much deeper. It involves our perception of reality, not practical needs. It can affect how we interact with others and organize our lives.
What makes AI so intimidating is not that it lets people be everything they can be, but rather makes them be what they cannot be.
Attacking the Sense of Being
AI represents a revolution in thinking that can change the processes by which we come to know things with certainty.
Every individual has a sense of being from which comes a person’s perception of identity. A man, for example, senses his being and distinguishes it from others. He can therefore say “I am.” By this affirmation, he defines his identity and acknowledges his limits. He affirms an otherness that only he has. He senses other beings through his own perspective. From this foundation, he constructs an objective reality.
The AI mentality works from different premises. It refuses to define identity or recognize limits. The AI perspective tends to reduce everything to matter, data and algorithms. Adam Kirsh, a Wall Street Journal editor, summarizes this AI vision of reality in his book The Revolt Against Humanity. He holds that traditional ways of constructing reality through the powers of the soul are false. He says that the human mind is completely material. “There is no intangible soul or spirit that occupies our bodies; the experience of being an ‘I’ is produced by chemical-electrical processes in the brain.”
Challenging Our Sense of Being
Thus, the AI revolution challenges our sense of being by turning everything into processes with no objective limits. AI facilitates changing identity so it no longer corresponds to reality, but to whatever the person wants or imagines it to be. In an AI-directed world, a man can be what he is not—an animal, an avatar or a woman.
In this way, AI can undermine certainties. It catapults us into a realm where false identities, deepfake portrayals and AI-generated narratives develop to the point that we do not know what is real and what is not.
People can be made to say things they did not say and to be in places they never were. People can, for example, act within AI applications, committing acts of extreme violence without immediate consequences.
Annihilating the I
When AI dominates, a man becomes incapable of thinking outside of these new processes of perceiving and interpreting reality. AI becomes the solver of all problems to which anything might be asked. The soulless AI can also take on the human role of comforter and advisor.
We no longer think in the concrete terms that come from observations that are derived from the affirmation “I am.” By obscuring identity, AI annihilates the “I” and the “am,” immersing everyone in an imagined world of uncertainty and fantasy.
Dazzling Speeds
All this is done with the massive computing power of AI applications that simulate an alternative reality in real time.
AI can present all this on a scale never seen before. It can broadcast these depictions, actions and identities across multiple platforms at dazzling speeds. It can do this without human agency, being directed by algorithms and Big Tech programming.
When these perceptions become generalized, people will no longer have the elements to make sound judgments.
Three Things AI Cannot Be
Thus, AI cannot be three things.
It cannot be the arbitrator of reality. If it assumes this role, it takes control, employing processes we cannot understand and generating actions imposed by an interplay of algorithms we cannot stop.
AI cannot be an enabler of the imagination, allowing unbridled passions free rein. We then become capable of changing identity and simulating corresponding actions without consequences. Such a scenario would reduce us to savagery fueled by the vilest desires or most irrational models now made possible by AI imagery.
Finally, AI cannot be a substitute for all that is human. We must recognize definable limits to what is possible or what we permit.
The Powers of the Soul
AI must not be allowed to supplant the powers of the soul, which are the intellect, will and sentiments.
Thus, we must not give up those exclusively human intellectual processes that allow us to think, ponder and wonder about the most important things of life—like our salvation.
AI cannot be allowed to dictate our moral decisions since it recognizes no set of moral values but only the interplay of data. We must reserve for ourselves those moral decisions that strengthen the will and forge character.
AI bots must not displace our human sentiments, affections and loves.
All these things define our humanity and were given to us by God to help us know, love and serve Him. We risk losing them when AI dominates our lives.
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