Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:04] Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And today we are carrying on with part three of our six part podcast series on artificial intelligence, digital narcissism and human dignity. So let's jump right in, shall we? Now, as per usual, the most important thing that I'm going to remind you of in this episode is that all glory goes to God for anything good that you receive here by listening and tuning in today, all the rubbish that's my fault, Please God, you forget it before you have even tuned out. And before this episode, well and truly before this episode has even concluded. Now you might remember in parts one and two, we explored specifically the issue of human dignity. We laid that foundation and we contrasted that to artificial intelligence and why there is something profoundly different going on there. In these next two episodes, I want to talk about the issue of morality and technology.
[00:01:02] They are two fundamentally important things that really should be paired together, but tragically. And we'll explain why as we go through this episode in our modern context, often they are not. And that creates big issues, especially when you are talking about a new and exceedingly powerful technology like artificial intelligence. And then in the final two parts, parts five and six, we are going to really take a laser focus and take some of those key foundational points that we have crafted and woven in episodes one through four, and we're really going to start looking at some specifics around artificial intelligence and how this all might apply at a practical level and what some of those important considerations are from a Christian anthropological perspective. Right, let's just jump straight on in to this episode by taking ourselves all the way back to a very important moment in human history.
[00:01:58] And that moment happened on Good Friday. Good Friday, of course, is not good because what happened was good. But in the sense that it is holy Friday, it is good because it is holy. And on Good Friday, there is a particular incident that happens in the Passion of Christ when Pilate, who's desperate to basically get rid of Christ and doesn't really want to have much to do with him at all, he knows that there's a local custom on the Passover and, and there's a potential to have a prisoner set free. And so what he does is he brings out Jesus and he puts him alongside Barabbas and he asks the crowd to choose Christ or Barabbas, who do you want me to free? And in one of the first recorded incidents of a democratic referendum in the ancient world, in fact, in all of human history. We discover the terrible flaws in democracy. And the mob screams for Barabbas, and obviously he goes free, this convicted criminal. And Christ, who is the pure and innocent son of God, he is obviously sent off to the cross. Now, when I was younger, and in fact, for most of our life, when I actually heard that particular account from John, read out each Good Friday from the the Gospel of John, I always just thought that that incident was yet another ignominy, another moment of injustice that was perpetrated against the pure and innocent Son of God. So Christ is being victimized and yet another way on this awful day of, you know, torturous and inhumane treatment that he receives. But in actual fact, there's a whole lot more that's quite profoundly important, really going on here. In fact, this is what I like to call the Imitation Game, because what we have here is Christ, who's not just put alongside an ordinary typical prisoner. He is put alongside a particular type of prisoner, Barabbas.
[00:03:50] And if we look at the Gospel accounts and we consider his name, it's some important things become clear about this man. Barabbas was actually a political revolutionary and almost certainly obviously a political revolutionary leader, if we think about his name as well.
[00:04:05] So the name Barabbas means son of the Father. And this was very typical of Jewish political revolutionary leaders, like the final failed Jewish uprising, if I remember my history correctly, it was somewhere around 129130 A.D. don't quote me on the exact dates, but that final failed Jewish uprising was led by a man called Simon bar Hokbar, which meant Simon, son of the stars. So Barabbas means Son of the Father. And this is a very typical revolutionary thing to do, to give yourself this kind of a name.
[00:04:38] Now, what that means is that in this moment, it's not just Christ put alongside any prisoner. Christ is actually being put alongside a prisoner who has claimed for himself a title that he's not entitled to have. He is calling himself the Son of the Father, but we know that he's not the real Son of the Father at all. Christ is.
[00:05:01] Barabbas is a pretender. So what you've actually got going on here is a profound moment where you have Christ and a type of Antichrist, and. And the crowd is being asked to choose, will you go with Christ or will you choose the Antichrist, the pretender? And what's really important about this is that the Antichrist here, in this case Barabbas, he is also promising the crowd their salvation, and he promises the crowd their salvation through what, through revolution, through politics, through power.
[00:05:32] This is a moment where it is all about power.
[00:05:36] If you follow me, I will give you power. I will give you dominance. And can I suggest to you that this pattern is a continual pattern that repeats itself throughout human history. It is still ongoing for us today. You can trace this all the way back to the beginnings of things in the garden. If you eat of this fruit, you will be just like God. You will have absolute power at the Tower of Babel. Come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. It's about power. And that same issue is still with us today. In fact, it really is almost like an issue, a challenge for us as human persons that is now on steroids for us in the modern era. And it is what we would typically refer to as faith in progress.
[00:06:28] And really, faith in progress and human progress and technology.
[00:06:32] It has a specific genesis. We'll talk about this in a second. But really, what we're talking about here is faith in our own power and our own dominance over the natural world. This begins really in a big way with Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the modern scientific revolution. And one of his famous maxims was knowledge is power. And what he means by that is basically, as our knowledge of the natural world grows, so will our power over nature.
[00:07:01] As our scientific knowledge grows, so will our technological prowess, and we will free ourselves from the restraints of nature. Knowledge is power. In this scheme, effectively, what's being set up here is a very unhelpful idea. And that ideology is that nature, effectively, that we are in an oppositional relationship with nature, that nature, in fact, is our enslaver, and that it must be overcome.
[00:07:29] He described it like this in his Novum Organum, his famous work, the Triumph of Art over Nature. Victoria cursus artis super naturum. So this is the key idea, that our scientific prowess will give us power and free us from the restraints and the enslavement of nature. This obviously invites a very important question.
[00:07:53] Are there limits to this liberation from nature?
[00:07:56] And if so, where the heck do these limits come from? So this is a fundamentally important question. When we think about technology, is this simply about our freedom and enslavement, you know, by nature and our freedom from that?
[00:08:12] And should we actually be thinking about what the limitations on those kinds of behaviors might actually look like?
[00:08:18] Basically, what this does is this puts us on the pathway to what we would rightly call today faith in progress.
[00:08:25] It's this idea that effectively, we will no longer seek our redemption through faith, we would now effectively force our way back into the Garden of Eden. Through faith in the Kingdom of Man, faith in our own prowess. Our science, our technology will be our savior. It will deliver for us a brand new era of humanity. In fact, even now, with something like transhumanism, there's this idea that we will evolve beyond mere humanity. What this idea does is it gives rise to things like empiricism, the idea that only empirically provable things should be considered to be true. Of course, being the astute watchers and listeners that you are, you will know straight away the problem with that.
[00:09:07] Empiricism is a principle. Therefore it can't actually be empirically proven to be true. It's not like you can put a principle under a microscope or test it in a lab, or subject it to the laws of science. Ironically, it doesn't even pass its own sniff test. But this idea is a very compelling idea. It leads to things like scientism, the idea that science is the ultimate source of truth, the only source of truth. And on the back of this, we start to see things like technocracy, the idea that basically we should be trusting governance of our societies to the technical experts. And it's not just in the area of something like the material sciences that we're talking about here.
[00:09:46] It's also in just in general terms, like the modern managerial sciences. We forget they're actually sciences. So bureaucracy is something that grows out of this managerial science. It's this new way of controlling and corralling populations to the outcomes that you desire. So the technocrats should govern us. Transhumanism, of course, something we've already mentioned, but there's a huge emphasis now, a focus on this. And it's a growing movement, this idea that we will evolve beyond our humanity with the implantation of either, you know, technological artificial devices like chips in the brain, or perhaps we will use pharmaceutical products and we will live on for hundreds of years, or possibly even indefinitely. This is the final great nut that has not yet been cracked by the Baconian method. The fact is that we all still die. But that was, you know, something that the transhumanists would love to really see us overcome. Here's how Pope Benedict XVI put it in Spey Salva, his encyclical that he wrote on hope. It is not that faith is simply denied in this view of the world, this faith and progress. Rather, it is displaced onto another level, that of purely private and otherworldly affairs. And at the same time, it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. And this is profoundly important that, and this is really something that we labor under today. But we don't even realize often that we are laboring under it. We are frogs swimming in a pot and we don't realize the actual color or form of the water that we're swimming in. Often it's just almost like second nature to us. And so in this scheme, like Pope Benedict says here, it's not simply that that faith is being denied or disputed by someone now. It's, it's, it's rejected altogether. It's placed on this otherworldly level. It's like, okay, that's the, that's the other worldly, that's the supernatural stuff. If you want to believe in that stuff, sure. But we're focused on the worldly stuff, the real stuff, the material stuff. And this of course, is the beginning of the public private divide where you get this idea that effectively only empirically provable things, only scientific things should be in the public square. And that faith stuff, that's purely private, it should be somewhere else other than the public square. It's been a disastrous outcome for us. But this is one of the realities of this particular ideology, this Baconian view of the world. It sets us up, as I said, in an oppositional relationship to nature in the natural world.
[00:12:17] We are now at war with nature. And I don't have to convince you, we'll talk more about that in the next episode. But I don't have to convince you why that's not a healthy way to think about the natural world. And of course, we've seen recently incidents where technocracy has now become more of a thing. You know, trust the experts certainly in recent years has become more of a dominant idea. This is something very much that was a part of, you know, Bacon's vision of the world. In fact, he wrote an unfinished utopia called the New Atlantis. And the New Atlantis was about a group of expert scientists who governed this society and governed it with excellence because they were the technical experts. But we can't just blame all of this on Bacon either. There's another issue we need to think about. When we think about technology and its interplay with morality and the human perception person. And that of course is Enlightenment liberalism.
[00:13:10] And Enlightenment liberalism is a, is really, this is the dominant ideology of our age. I mean, there are several ideologies all at play. It's like a perfect storm of ideology. But this is very much the dominant way we think of ourselves. We think of ourselves primarily as autonomous, self choosing individuals.
[00:13:30] There are scholars and minds far smarter than I, who have made a salient observation about the men who gave us Enlightenment liberalism.
[00:13:40] Men like Descartes, Emmanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Day, Spinoza, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and of course we could add to that list someone like the philosopher David Hume as well. The point though that these scholarly minds, smarter than mine, make about these gentlemen is that they share something interesting and I think important in common.
[00:14:03] These men never knew the community of family life. Rene Descartes had a daughter, an illegitimate daughter, who died of illness before she had even turned five. Jean Jacques Rousseau infamously abandoned all five of his illegitimate children to orphanages in their infancy. At a period in history when it was known that to abandon a child in their infancy to an orphanage was pretty much an 80 guarantee of a death sentence. And Jean Jacques Rousseau is absolutely a genius and it's, it is indisputable that he would have understood this. And then the other gentleman concerned that I've referred to here, none of them actually had children.
[00:14:43] And so what these scholars point out is that these men who never knew the authentic community of family life, they left the world with a bachelor philosophy. What does a bachelor do? They tend to think about themselves first and foremost. And that really is how we tend to view ourselves today. We are autonomous, self choosing individuals. No prior tradition, no prior community can lay claim to us. We can choose for ourselves those things if we want to.
[00:15:09] But again, I, the autonomous self choosing individual is really at the center. And what tends to grow out of this and this way of thinking about ourselves and structuring our societies is obviously you experience a breakdown in community and among other things. But what you also tend to do is you end up with situations where basically you need increasing amounts of technology, for example, to try and bring about personal comfort to, to, to keep you safe, to keep you, I guess, as a human person experiencing things that previously you might have once relied on the wider community for. And we also tend to think of ourselves in regards to morality in this way as well. And our interplay with technology. Well, if I, I'm an individual, why can't I choose to, to use a technology a certain way? We, we tend to think this way in general.
[00:15:57] And then of course we could talk about someone like Karl Marx 1818-1883 and Karl Marx, of course, you know, socialism, communism is the, is the fruit of Karl Marx and his Marxist ideology.
[00:16:14] But what people often forget about this is they forget that this really is again, this attempt at power. We see the same thing with Enlightenment liberalism, It's about power. It's about I.
[00:16:24] I will chart my own course. If you're a liberal. Bacon. It's about power over nature. Karl Marx. It is about power and control over entire societies and economies to bring about this brave new world. Here's how, again, to quote the Catholic Pope, the former Catholic Pope, Pope Benedict, here's how he talked about Karl Marx. And again, I think this is a very prescient insight. Together with the victory of the revolution, though, Marx's fundamental error also became evident. He showed precisely how to overthrow the existing order, but he did not say how matters should proceed thereafter. He simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political power and the socialization of the means of production, the new Jerusalem would be realised. Then indeed, all contradictions would be resolved. Man and the world would finally sort themselves out. Then everything would be able to proceed by itself along the right path, because everything would belong to everyone and all would desire the best for one another.
[00:17:25] We know how it then developed, not ushering in a perfect world, but leaving behind a trail of appalling destruction. Marx not only omitted to work out how this new world would be organized, which should of course have been unnecessary, his silence on this matter follows logically from his chosen approach. His era lay deeper. He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism. Man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment. And with that excellent assessment of the problems of Marxism, we actually start to get to the core issue here that again has raised its head. It's about power, it's about dominance, it's about we forget this, that there's this idea of technology and control of the world for utopian ends that is absolutely, consistently at work here through these different ideologies, whether it's Bacon, whether it's Enlightenment liberalism, whether it's Marxism, and in fact, it's not just Marxism. Obviously, Marxism often gets a bad rap. I think one of the reasons why Marxism persists is even to this day, despite its awful track record, is that Marxism is very good at actually pointing to injustices and describing the flaws in the capitalist approach to things.
[00:19:00] Now that doesn't mean, though, that its solutions are good at all. That's the failing of Marxism. Its Solutions are terrible. But Marx is very good at critiquing things and I think that critique is still relevant today.
[00:19:12] And so this whole idea of thinking of the person in material terms, thinking that if we apply the right experts, often that could be economic experts, for example, the right, you know, town planners, whatever it might be, the right experts will come and we will use power and we will create a better world. But this idea of these, you know, of economic planning, it's not just a Marxist issue, it's also a challenge for capitalism as well, where often the human person is now thought of in matters of governance solely in terms of economic outputs, economic well being, their relation to gdp, how GDP is going for them, etc, etc.
[00:19:52] And so what we see here is the same pattern repeating itself again.
[00:19:56] We've forgotten that man is not homopoliticus political man, man is not homo economicus, instead of man is. And as human persons we are relational beings. As St. Augustine says, Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord.
[00:20:14] And then of course when you add someone like Friedrich Nietzsche into the mix, you have a whole other set of issues going on. But again it comes back to this issue of power. Friedrich Nietzsche is someone who proudly wears the nickname the Antichrist as like a badge of honor. He is not someone who simply disagrees with Christianity. He has absolute disdain for Christianity. He views Christianity as something that is held back, has weakened society. He calls it a master slave mentality.
[00:20:48] He says, you know who's obsessed with compassion and mercy? The slavers, because they're weak and they are controlled and they don't have power. But you know who doesn't have to worry about compassion and mercy? The Master, because he's powerful. And he says we should look back to the pre Christian pagan cultures and recognize and celebrate their, their commitment to strength, to power. It's effectively power that he worships. As I said, he doesn't just disagree with Christianity, he has absolute disdain. Christianity is the greatest of all imaginal, imaginable, sorry corruptions. It is the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed. It is the most repugnant kind of degeneracy that civilization has ever brought into existence. It is the only unquenchable infamy of mankind. Tell us what you really think, Frederick. So no holds barred there, it's pretty clear how he feels about all of this. And so for Frederick Nietzsche, he looks with Christianity, looks upon Christianity with disdain and he sees it as something that has weakened society because we don't celebrate strength like the pagans did. He says instead we need to look to the Ubermensch, the overman, the strong man who will actually lead us from forward and who will take us into our fullness of humanity. And obviously that's also something that's applied at a local level to the human person as well. You know, God is dead, he famously declares, and we have killed him. And he recognizes two things about this. One is he's celebrating this. He also recognizes there is a problem here because he's astute enough to know that our ethics and our morality have come to us from the Christian vision of reality. So if God is dead and we've killed him, then where the heck are we getting our morality from now? And this is the Ubermensch, the strongman who will lead us forward.
[00:22:30] And Friedrich Nietzsche is often wrongly called a nihilist. But really it's about self creation. For Friedrich Nietzsche, we are the new gods now, effectively, and we will create meaning for ourselves. We will create the world in our own image. What are we seeing here? A repeat of that same problem. It is all about power. We could talk about someone like Sigmund Freud, who is huge, hugely influenced by Frederick Nietzsche, by the way. In fact, Sigmund Freud once said that I had to stop reading Friedrich Nietzsche because I was afraid that if I didn't, I would not have an original thought of my own to give to the world again. Sigmund Freud is someone who also looks down upon religion. He thinks it's just this outdated superstition. He's hostile to it. But he also recognizes that there's something good about Christianity, that basically Christianity has produced societies and people of virtue. And it's a good thing to live in those kind of societies. It's, it's a really good thing when your neighbor is basically not a barbarian who just up and decides to hit you on the head with a club and steal all your stuff. We all like to live in a world of harmony and peace. And he recognizes that Christianity gave that to the world. But of course, being hostile to it, he says we don't need this anymore. Instead, if we find our personal happiness, then we won't want to rise up and be barbarians and mistreat our neighbors. And so our personal fulfillment, our personal happiness, becomes the way in which we will create the world for ourselves again. It's about power. It is about control.
[00:23:54] It's about us taking control. It's about us finding our own and self, creating ourselves in our own image. And when we come to something like morality, we also need to talk about this guy here, John Stuart Mill, he's the most famous student of Jeremy Bentham, who is considered to be the father of utilitarianism. And Bentham, here's how he described utilitarianism, this particular moral philosophy that if you are confronted by choices, you should actually choose to do whichever will bring about the greatest happiness in the world. Because according to Bentham, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people is the measure of right and wrong.
[00:24:31] So in other words, whichever choice you are confronted with which will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, which will maximize pleasure in the world, that's the right thing to do. Effectively, what this is, is the end justifies the means. If you can show that a particular action will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, then it becomes okay to do that thing. Even evil things.
[00:24:56] And people often forget or are not perhaps aware of the fact that the reason why utilitarianism first actually came about was because on the back of Charles Darwin's ideas, there were philosophers who began to think, well, okay, morality and virtue must also be explainable in naturalistic terms. It really is this idea of morality as a type of science, a type of technological way of thinking about morality. In fact, some of the utilitarian philosophers even had mathematical calculations they thought that you could apply to determine which decisions would bring about the greatest good for the greatest number. Now, effectively, what utilitarianism is asking us to do is to do something that we cannot do. It's asking us to actually know the future. Which choice should I make if I'm confronted by a moral crossroads, or which way should I go to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number? I don't know the answer to that question. None of us do. We are not God. We do not know the future. It might initially seem obvious to us in this moment. Well, if I. If I do this thing, then it will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number. But in actual fact, in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 years time, over the span of history, it might turn out that that is not the case at all. But we don't know we can answer that question. That's why our focus should not be on trying to figure out future outcomes, but instead looking at the means that we use. Our actual actions. Are they moral? Are they just?
[00:26:20] Are they good? Again, what are we seeing here? It's about power and the exercise of power. If we go back again to Bacon and you think about this Baconian approach to technology, to nature, to the world around us to science. When you marry up Francis Bacon to someone like Frederick Nietzsche, who's all about self creation, it gives rise to things like the surgical mutilation of healthy bodies as people literally try and recreate themselves bodily now in their own image. When you marry the idea of Francis Bacon to Darwinian naturalism, it gives rise to eugenics. This idea in, in Darwinism that nature prefers fitness. It's always working towards the fittest, surviving.
[00:27:04] Therefore, why shouldn't we take our new technological prowess, our new scientific knowledge, we, why shouldn't we actually help nature out? Why shouldn't we weed out the unfit? And this is precisely how you end up with something like eugenics. When you marry Francis Bacon up to something like utilitarianism, it gives rise to situations like Fritz Haber. Fritz Harbour was the guy who has. There are two major aspects of his life. One of them is wondrous and important. The other one is truly despicable and horrific.
[00:27:36] He is the guy who comes up with the Haber Bosch principle, this idea of, look, we can take nitrates and we can take them from the atmosphere and we can put them into the soil. And by doing that, it's fertilizer. Basically what you end up with is a situation where that same patch of land can now yield a lot more crop.
[00:27:54] And so the outcome of that is hundreds of millions of people who are saved and lifted out of starvation and hunger as a result of being able to reuse the same plot of land more than once. That's a profound good in the world. But Fritz Haber is also the guy who invents chlorine gas. And some of his discoveries were also later used in the creation of Zyklon B, the gas that was used in the Nazi concentration camps. But chlorine gas is a particularly horrific way to die. What happens is it creates such a, a strong inflammation reaction in the body that as your body is fighting this inflammation, you know, obviously in your lungs, you end up drowning in fluid and you drown on dry land. A truly awful piece of military weaponry.
[00:28:43] Now, Fritz Haber knew this and he argued along utilitarian lines, though, for why he thought it was okay to use it. He said, sure, a lot of people will die with this chlorine gas, but the war will end a lot quicker. And so this is a good thing. The end justifies the means. He was later awarded the Nobel Prize and some of the same people who were also awarded that year refused to take it on principle because of the fact that he had been awarded this. And also he'd been the man who had created this horrific and evil torturous thing called chlorine gas utilitarianism. Another example of this. As you think about something like the atomic bombing of women, children and elderly people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or perhaps the U.S. torture program, the end justifies the mean. And again, there's a technological component at play here, too.
[00:29:33] There's an idea that experts will give us tools to overcome the usual limitations of nature that are there. It's very much present and is with us today in a very big and powerful way. And on that note, that's where we're going to conclude this episode. And in part four, we're going to come back and we are going to look at the other side of this equation, this Christian vision of anthropology and the important things that it wants us to consider and has to say about morality and in particular, morality in relation to technology, our technological prowess.
[00:30:06] What are and how should we limit our behaviors and how should we think about technology? And I think this is a profoundly important thing to understand when you think about the amazingly powerful technology that is artificial intelligence. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatchers. Hi there. If you're enjoying our content, then why not consider becoming a paid supporter of our work? You can do that at either Substack or Patreon, and the link for both are in the show notes for this episode. If you do become a supporter, then you'll get access to exclusive content, early release content, and also you'll be helping to fund all of the offline work that we do as well, all of the youth camps and the events that we speak at and all that other stuff that happens that you don't see online.
[00:30:57] A huge thank you to all of our paid subscribers. It's thanks to you that this episode is made possible.
