Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Hi everybody. 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're going to be carrying on with our six part series on AI, digital narcissism and human dignity. And today we are looking at part four. For those who might not remember, this was originally a lecture series that I gave at an event earlier this year. So let's just jump straight in and carry on from where we left off as we look at part four of our presentation on artificial intelligence, digital narcissism and human dignity. Alrighty. The most important thing that I'm gonna say to you here today, as I always say, is that all glory goes to God for anything good that you receive in this session. All the rubbish, that's my fault, Please God, you forget it before you've even switched off today. Now, you remember in episode three we talked about the issue of power and dominance and how this had been a consistent theme, a struggle, one of the frailties of the human condition after the fall of humanity. And this is something that's present right there from the very beginning. You will be just like God.
[00:01:13] You'll be able to wield power and control and dominance over nature.
[00:01:16] And we see a particular manifestation of this in the last couple of hundred years. And this is really something that we've all been laboring under in the form of the Baconian method or the Baconian theology or philosophy, however you want to frame it. But basically the thought of Francis Bacon, and you remember Francis Bacon's idea that it was all about this idea that, that, that knowledge is power. It would, you know, as our knowledge of the natural world grew, our science and our technology, our technological prowess would grow. We would be able to free ourselves from the restraints of nature. And effectively what this does is it sets up an oppositional relationship between the human person and nature.
[00:01:56] And the key thing is that we often forget the implications of what this really means. And we're going to talk today about someone who was very prescient, among others, but someone I think in the modern context who is well known, who as a philosopher was, was keenly aware of this particular problem.
[00:02:13] And we have been really laboring, as I said, for a couple of hundred years now under the Spaconian project, this myth of progress, the idea that we will force our way back into the Garden of Eden, as Pope Benedict puts it, with our technology and our power, the kingdom of man will save itself, we will save ourselves through our technology and our power. And there's this increasing desire and dominance, desire for dominance and control.
[00:02:40] Now, someone who was keenly aware of the very real dangers associated with all of this was none other than C.S. lewis. Now, maybe you know C.S. lewis as an author of children's fiction, but he was much more than that. He was a very accomplished and astute philosopher.
[00:03:00] And in this area, he had some very important thought to offer us. And I think some of his warnings, as I said, were very prescient. They were warnings that weren't just part of his philosophy, but they also ended up in his fiction. We'll talk about that in just a second. And basically, Lewis put it this way. Man's conquest of nature. So that Baconian idea of conquering nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundred men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on man's side.
[00:03:37] Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. And this is really important because what Lewis is pointing to here, and this is the key thing we often forget when we hear something like Francis Bacon's Knowledge is power or the conquest of art over nature. We talked about that in the last episode. What we tend to think is, oh, yeah, this is us conquering the natural world. And we think disease, we think sleep and tiredness, we think going into space, you know, the usual limitations on the human person that can be overcome. Sometimes, you know, to a smaller degree, sometimes to a greater degree because of our scientific knowledge and our technical prowess. And we think that basically it's about freeing ourselves from the restraints that we see as negatives, the. The inability to get to Mars, the fact that we die of polio, all those kinds of things. But what we forget, and this is the really important bit, and this is what Lewis is actually getting at here with this quote. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on man's side.
[00:04:48] Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. We as human persons are part of that natural created order.
[00:04:58] So when you talk about a conquest over nature and setting up nature as your enslaver, what you're also saying is, is that certain human persons can now be, or will now be perceived, or certain human conditions will be perceived as the enemy.
[00:05:16] And basically, you have now the situation where if I'm going to have, you know, knowledge is power, and I'm going to take control of nature, that includes human nature and the human person as well. We've already talked about the problem of eugenics this Baconian idea is very much the thing. When you marry that up with Darwinian evolutionary thought, it's. It's Sir Francis Galton who does that, Sir Charles Darwin's half cousin. And he marries up these two ideas. Well, if nature favors fitness in various species, why wouldn't we help nature out? If it prefers fitness, let's weed out the unfit actively. The conquest of art over nature, the conquest of science and technology and progress, we will save ourselves. And this, this includes doing harm to human persons or even conquering ourselves, in a sense, and a conquest of human persons that, you know, obviously, as you can see, this whole idea of setting ourselves up in opposition to nature, it's not just about the risks of what that means when we put ourselves in the natural world, but view nature as the enemy and how that's not a healthy relationship to have with the natural world when we think of, like, the environment and things like that. But also when you realize that's human persons too, and that means other human persons can become your enemy. That must be conquered in order for you to build the brave new world.
[00:06:37] CS Lewis was very prescient about the fact that science without moral restraint was extremely dangerous because this is why he called it the magician's twin, actually. Because he understood something important about science, that it can actually give you real power. And why he called it the magician's twin is he contrasted science with magic. And. And we all know, hopefully I'm not shattering anybody's illusions here, that magic's not real. When you go to see a magic show, it's all just an illusion. The rabbit isn't really magically being pulled out from another dimension out of that hat. And it doesn't suddenly sort of disappear into the hat. As the hat gets squished up and folded away, there's an illusion, you've been tricked. So it looks like power, but it's not real power. But Lewis said science is like the magician's twin. But unlike the magician, the scientist can actually give you real power. They can split the atom for you.
[00:07:31] And that's a problem because Lewis was very aware of the frailty of the human condition and what power and the implications of power. If you think about the proclivity that human persons have, our weakness for sin, consistently. What is it about? It is about power and domination where we shouldn't have power and domination. That's a recurring theme. Theme about something like the occult. What is it? It's about power over the forces of the supernatural and the natural world. It's A power that we are not entitled to wield. It's about knowing the future.
[00:08:05] This is consistently something that is just embedded into the human conditions. Grappling with the problem of original sin. Now, CS Lewis here is almost certainly drawing on ideas that we see manifested in popular literature before his time that also really sort of get to the heart of this Baconian idea. And one of the really big ones, of course, was Mary Shelley with Frankenstein. And this is what she has to say, one of her characters in Frankenstein, in fact, she puts the following words into this character's mouth, and it sums up perfectly what Francis Bacon is really talking about. And by the way, I think this is why people often ask me when I talk about different philosophies and ideologies that have shaped the modern Western secular mind.
[00:08:53] And people often say, yeah, but these were just ideas. Why is it that Nietzsche took off? Why is it that, you know, the Baconian project of Francis Bacon took off? Because there's other people who have had ideas, and they just haven't gone anywhere.
[00:09:06] The key thing is that you've. At the same time, these particular ideas are really starting to come to the fore, is technology is starting to evolve, and our ability to actually spread ideas quickly and far and wide is growing. And what also happens is, so these ideas are heard about by lots of people a lot quicker, but also the people who are the artists of the age who are not grounded in that Christian vision of reality, they are happy to take those ideas again. This is about power. There's something alluring about this. These ideologues are offering people a sense of, you can break free. You know, God's your enslaver, in a sense, and Christianity is like. Like the enslaver of humanity. You can break free of that. And here's the. Here's my idea. Here's my idea of power for you to sort of do that. And so they're very taken by this. And you start to see these ideas appearing in artwork and works of fiction and things like that. And that's how this really takes off in a big way. Like it when something captures the human emotion, the human imagination, sorry, at an emotional level, at a narrative level, which is what storytelling does, that is very, very compelling and powerful. And as I said, when you've got, on top of that, the ability to actually spread these ideas far and wide very quickly, you can see how this. All of a sudden, these ideas really go from the pages of a philosopher's notebook or their writings to all of a sudden becoming very widespread and embedded in a culture. Now, Mary Shelley, as I said, is someone who, clearly, the Baconian idea is very much at the heart of her story in Frankenstein. And she has one of her characters say the following. She puts these words into this character's mouth, but these philosophers. And she's referring here to scientists as opposed to alchemists. Again, it's probably similar to C.S. lewis, the contrast between the magician's twin and the, you know, the magic, the person who does magic versus the person who does science. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places. This is the conquest of art over nature. Here they have acquired new and almost unlimited powers. They can command the thunder of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.
[00:11:29] And this is very much the theme, of course, of Frankenstein. But this is a very Baconian idea, and this is something that CS Lewis is keenly aware of. So what you've got here with Shelley is this idea that this is this alluring power.
[00:11:41] Now, Shelley, obviously, in her work, there's a warning about this.
[00:11:45] It's this. This Baconian conquest and what it means. Lewis is aware as well of this problem. And he says, basically, what you need to have is you need to have a science that is constrained by virtue and by morality.
[00:12:01] You cannot simply have science for the sake of science, because that is effectively just power wielded for the sake of wielding power.
[00:12:08] And the question then becomes, well, what are the limits of wielding that power? And who will decide that? Well, the powerful will decide, actually. And this is, I think, one of the problems we are grappling with now. It is part of the reason why when people think about something like artificial intelligence, it's almost like in some cases, even though AI has absolutely been oversold, we'll get to that in the. In the next couple of episodes. But AI has definitely been oversold in the last couple of years. The reality is it is also, in another way, been watching like a slowly unfolding train wreck. But unlike typical train wrecks, everyone sort of is standing around, has the ability to actually do something to stop the train on the tracks. And it's like we're just watching as this power just keeps wielding itself. And this is. This is very much Lewis's warning, is that that power is alluring without moral restraint, without clear guidance. Well, what does keep it in check? And that's why AI has really just sort of taken off and we're not really. We're sort of having fearful bits of commentary about AI. Often they're not helpful because they're not necessarily particularly valid or real. But then even the ones that are the sort of commentary on the fringes, we're not having, I don't think, a serious moral conversation that would then entail actual serious policy making to control the technology and to put restraints on it. Why? Because for so long now we've been laboring under the Baconian project that our. Our technology, our prowess will save us, we will save ourselves. Why would we stop following that train of thought? Suddenly what is required is a sacred, transcendent religious idea to keep that in check. Christianity. And that's what's missing in this equation. This is something that caused C.S. lewis. It's very much in a. Part of his cosmic trilogy. And this idea, particularly in his third and final installment in the cosmic trilogy, that Hideous Strength. And it's about a. A future England that is ruled by a society of scientific planners, an organization of bureaucracy called the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. Nice. And yes, that's a very deliberate euphemism. And so it's sold as being nice as good what they're doing, but in actual fact, it's not good what they're doing. And Lewis really nails his colours to the mast when our main protagonist in that story. Very good story, by the way. You can read it as a standalone if you want to.
[00:14:27] It's recommended that you read the whole trilogy, but you can read it as a standalone if you want to. And our main protagonist in that particular novel, he gets to the end of the story and he breaks into the headquarters of Nice, and we discover that they, the whole time, have been taking their orders directly from this machine that has the head of Francis Bacon, the reanimated head of Francis Bacon, issuing commands to them. And. And this is like, as I said, it's very, very clear metaphorically, what he's saying here. You know, this is the philosophy of Bacon, the conquest of art over nature. This is exactly what this is that is driving this unrestrained science and the implications of that and its control over nature and over human persons. You know, one person over another. By the way, a little fun fact, a little bit of trivia, the band Iron Maiden, which I'm a bit of a fan of, they actually have a song named after Lewis and it's called out of the Silent Planet, which is part of that cosmic trilogy. Alrighty. Okay, so what is the Response then what does the Christian vision of reality have to say? Because this is important to understand. Lewis is not anti science. And this is what we're gonna get to in the last couple of episodes. Realizing how we grapple with AI and have a moral engagement with AI where we utilize that which is good and strongly reject that which is evil.
[00:15:50] There are, I think, some bigger implications with AI we'll get into that's a little bit different to other typical technologies that do actually shape the moral evaluation a little bit more.
[00:15:59] But we're not anti science, we're not anti technology. We can recognize the good that science can bring to the world.
[00:16:06] So, so how does Lewis grapple with this? How does the Christian vision of reality grapple with this? Well, in a nutshell, the important thing to recognize is that science is a method that enables us to discern truths about the natural and the material world. And that, of course, leads to increasing technology. But technology should be viewed as a tool.
[00:16:25] And both of these technology that arises from science and science itself, they are good and their practice is good if they are governed by moral virtue and are working for the flourishing of human persons and for the common good. This is why human anthropology is just so essential, and it's why I talk about it so much in the work that I do. It doesn't matter what topic I'm talking about. It consistently comes back to human anthropology because if you understand who the human person is, then you understand, well, what does the pathway to human flourishing look like? If you don't understand what a human person is, then you're not going to find that pathway. You might stumble around, get luckily broken clock is right twice a day, stumble on parts of it, but the fullness of it is going to be missing from you. If you don't understand what a human person is, you're not going to get morality and ethics, right? If you don't understand what a human person is and the fundamental truth of human dignity, then you're not going to get science and technology being practiced and utilized in a good way, in a restrained way, where the, the primacy of the good of the human person and the good of, you know, moral truth is prioritized above just raw exercises of power.
[00:17:32] And so this is really important to understand, as I said, science. And we need to recognize this important point too. Science is a method that enables us to discern truths about the natural material world, which means it is limited. Science is not a moral thing in the sense that a scientist and, you know, through the use of science, we can split the atom. We can understand the potential for atomic, for nuclear technology, but what science can't do is it can't tell you, well, what should you do with that technology and what should you do with that knowledge? Should you create a nuclear power plant to create clean, efficient energy to, you know, to help the lives of, you know, millions upon millions of people flourish?
[00:18:14] Or should you use it to create nuclear weapons that you drop on an enemy country and do untold carnage and harm? Science can't answer that question for you. And I think it's one of the reasons why we've seen particularly in the post and really since World War II, the end of World War II, but I think also World War I, this was present, but really in from sort of the 1900s onwards, what we've seen is technology being created, the power being wielded, but the moral evaluation not happening prior to. And so we've very much been caught in this trap of power is just exercised without regard to moral consideration.
[00:18:53] And we fail to recognize that science can't give that knowledge to us. It gives us the power and everything else. And we mistake that because power is alluring, power is corrupting. And we mistake the fact that science can give us power and control as if somehow it's also giving us moral license.
[00:19:13] You know, it just is the whole idea in, and governance of real politik, you know, we can do a thing. Why shouldn't we just do a thing? We assume that morality is like often in fact the, the latest being the Iran war and the way in which some people are talking like morality is just a secondary concern. You know, we've, we've got a problem in front of us, we've got to solve it. We've got this technology, you know, it just is. Don't, don't allow it to be clouded by that other stuff that gets in the way. And that's been a consistent struggle and a consistent problem for us. Now, a couple of other thinkers that I think are worthy of consideration here as we wrap up this particular episode and we prepare to jump into our final two sessions, we're actually going to look at, in a very, we're going to really drill down in a very deep way into AI and look at the practical realities of what we've been talking about in these sort of foundational episodes, how they would be applied.
[00:20:03] I want to just finish with a couple of thinkers who I think are fundamental to take note of here. A note about Christian morality, I think that is important to understand. And then I want to finish with a little quiz, actually, to give you a sense of the power that we are talking about when we talk about artificial intelligence. So the first of these thinkers is this guy here, Philip Reiff, 1922-2006. He is considered one of the top, if not the foremost scholar on the likes of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich and others. And one of the things that Philip Reif said, and Philip Reif was not a religious believer at all, and this is what makes this, I think, so fascinating to me, is that basically Philip Reif warmed that without moral prohibitions, there is no culture. And I think this is important to understand when you think about AI, and obviously it's an applied or application technology and scientific knowledge.
[00:20:50] This, this applies here, I think, in a profound and important way. Without prohibitions, there is no culture. So moral prohibitions, moral boundaries, you need those. Otherwise, culture collapses as well, and it collapses everywhere. And a really good example, I think, to illustrate this point that just makes like this seems the more you think about this, the more you realize this is so obvious.
[00:21:13] It's very profound. But it is so simple, too.
[00:21:17] But it is extremely obvious the more you think about it. And I'll show you what I mean by showing you a very concrete example of boundaries in action.
[00:21:27] What you see here is what? It's a square.
[00:21:30] How do you know you're dealing with a square? Because you can see the shape of it. How do you see its shape? What gives rise to its shape? The four boundaries give rise to shape.
[00:21:42] And this is kind of obvious. Yeah, of course, the same is true of culture.
[00:21:47] A culture without moral restraint. A culture without moral boundaries is like this. There's nothing there. It's blank. You can't tell what's there.
[00:21:56] It is basically chaos and uncertainty and everything problematic and bad and evil that arises out of that privation of the good, that absence of moral restraint. And so morality is important because it actually gives rise to culture and it shapes culture. We need those boundaries.
[00:22:15] Now, what was even more fascinating about Philip Reif as a man who was not a man of faith, an agnostic, is that he actually stated that he thought that these have to come from a sacred, transcendent religious source. And he highlighted in particular, for example, the Christian tradition and the Ten Commandments, really specifically, as being like, the best place to start their journey. If you're going to start that journey, there's something important here that he's getting at that we've lost sight of.
[00:22:43] And what that means is in our conquest and our quest for Power, particularly like political control and control of our own lives and society. And this is really Enlightenment liberalism, which we talked about in the last episode. What's happened is shape is missing. The moral boundaries have gone largely. And in last couple of decades have really been eroded in a big way.
[00:23:03] And so culture has broken down. And then what happens is you're very vulnerable when this new and very powerful technology comes along.
[00:23:12] And we'll talk about that power in a big way in the next couple of episodes, the implications of what that means. But we are very vulnerable without those moral prohibitions. And the sacred transcendent idea which has to be the source, it has to be external to your society. It can't come from within. Otherwise, it is just pure social construct. And it can be, you know, socially deconstructed and then reconstructed. Reconstructed, sorry, in whoever's image, you know, wields the most power. So it's that sacred, transcendent religious source. It's. It's so fundamentally important. Another important thinker to consider in regards to all of this is Rene Girard. Rene Girard, from 1923 to 2015, he lived, and he was a Frenchman, a philosopher, a literary critic, a anthropological philosopher, you know, philosophy of human anthropology. And one of the things he talked about in his work was this idea he stumbled upon called, you know, basically, you could call it scapegoats and sacred violence.
[00:24:11] And what he sees initially in literature and then looks at human history, he sees this pattern repeating over and over again. By the way, this idea is pivotal in his conversion to Christianity because he comes into the Catholic Church with this recognition that something unique is happening here with Christianity in this regard. But basically, he looks at human history and he sees this consistent pattern of scapegoating and then sacred violence to try and restore equilibrium. So what he means by this is you have a scapegoat or, you know, like an individual or group, they're blamed for the evil, the ill. And then what happens is you have an act of sacred violence of some kind. It could be just even expulsion of the person from the community. And then, you know, order is restored. He says this is the constant cycle. And what he's really describing here in his work, again, is that same thing about dominance and control and power.
[00:25:00] But then he looks at Christianity and he realizes something radically different has gone on here to everything else you see in human history and human culture. And basically, he says that Christ exposes this like he. He shows it, reveals it to the world, and he upends the cycle. And in his divine Perfection, Christ is able to overthrow this and also in the overthrowing and in his divine perfection, he exposes to us the evils and this mechanism as it is at work. And, and how he does that. So Renee Girard talks about this idea that, that basically for the first time ever in the person of Christ, we are invited into the very life in the heart of the scapegoat, Christ, who is the ultimate scapegoat, the perfect sinless scapegoat. And we are drawn into. And all of a sudden we are now on the side of the scapegoat. And that's a very different situation. Normally the scapegoat is our opponent and we're on the outer. Now we're drawn into that, the life of the scapegoat. And, and not just that, but when you think about the Christian gospel, Christ actually calls all of us to become scapegoats as well in his image. You know, you know, you've, you've heard that it has said, you know, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, you know, love your enemies, you know, pray for those who persecute you. You actually willingly embrace that. You take up the cross. Cross. And this is radically different. And Rene Girard says, like, this is so influential and impacting for him that this is a fundamental part of his journey into, to the Catholic faith because he realizes this is not like. And this is proof of, of the truth and the goodness of what he's saying, because this is so different to everything else he sees in human culture.
[00:26:43] Now, the thing though, about Renee Girard was he was very, you'd say, cynical, and maybe it's the Frenchman in him. I don't know. One of the interesting things that happened to him was like, this is a guy who is moving amongst, like, some of the, you know, top thinkers of, you know, post enlightenment ideology and philosophy. He's moving in those circles, but he's different to them. He doesn't embrace relativism. He rejects that idea because of his Christianity. He recognizes that there is truth, and truth is knowable and discernible. And it's an important, important part of this. You know, Christianity is essential to solving this crisis. Now he publishes his famous work or his big work on this, and the first part of his work is all about sacred violence. And as you can imagine, it's well received. They, they love him because what they see happening here is they effectively think that he's sort of showing that all religious belief is just this cycle of violence and that's not what he's doing. He's diagnosing a human problem. And in a. And a. Like, like literally the scapegoat idea, it's very much. You even see this, like in Judaism, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, what is it? The, the high priest takes the sins of the people and, you know, lays hands on a goat and, and the, the. The animals sent out into the desert and, and the sins go with it. You know, this is the, the scapegoating mechanism. And so these critics are seeing scapegoating and sacred violence in this first work. Now, initially he wanted to talk about Christianity in that work, but apparently his publisher said, no, that's a separate work. Keep it as a separate work. So he publishes the first work and basically his confreres, they think, oh, yeah, this is. Look at this, it's profound. And ha, ha, look at those religious believers. They're all just basically a bunch of purveyors of sacred violence. They think it's sort of endorsing their position on things. And he's well received and he's the darling of the sort of, you know, I guess the, the, the critical circles and, and the talk shows and all the rest of it. Then he publishes his second work where he highlights Christianity as the fundamental key to unlocking and solving this problem. And all of a sudden he becomes the scapegoat for this group. They just turn on him effectively and it's like, oh, superstitious twaddle. Basically, he's lost his mind kind of thing. They, they, they never understood the implications of where he was leading them. But one of the things that Rene Girard warned about was the fact that without Christianity, this cycle of scapegoating and sacred violence, it ends in calamity and what he talks about. And interestingly enough, towards the end of his life, trade with China was opening up in a big way into the 90s. This is sort of starting to happen. And there's this whole new idea, very incorrect idea, but this idea floating around. You get guys like Francis Fukuyama, liberal, and he writes that book about the end of history and claiming, look, it's all over. And this, you know, this whole new liberal almost utopia is sort of upon us. And then of course, it all collapses. It doesn't happen.
[00:29:48] Rene Girard was very aware of the folly of those kind of ideas. And so trade with China is really starting to open up. And everyone is just talking like, this is going to be amazing. It's a whole new era. They're not going to be our enemies anymore. It's just the world has changed.
[00:30:03] Rene Girard is actually very, very astute about the fact that, no, that's not how this will work at all. And he says basically what happens is at the lower levels, where you trade with someone, say in a society or, you know, anywhere beneath your local government, effectively, there is a higher restraining authority at work. And so if you have conflict and dispute, then the higher authority will solve that problem. And he said this is always going to be an issue because of the scapegoating mechanism and what he calls mimesis, too, this idea that, you know, we're drawn to things in others, and then we are sort of also in a sense, we want to try and differentiate ourselves from others by taking control and power. So this problem of power is very much present again.
[00:30:49] And. And he says when you get to the higher levels, they're like international trade.
[00:30:54] And you're talking about big superpowers now who are trading with each other. There's no one more powerful on Earth to actually keep them in check.
[00:31:03] And so as they grow more and more alike, like China and America, what will happen then is America or China will want to exert its dominance to create separation and difference again.
[00:31:16] And the problem is, he says, that there's no higher authority to stop that conflict and dominance escalation cycle, the desire for control and power from just escalating into actual violence again. And so he actually was sort of pessimistic about it all. And he was really, I think, one of the first two to warn. Well, in actual fact, I think the relationship between America and China. And this. He's saying this at the point when the. When trade with China is sort of. It's really starting to hit its apex, and it's this big thing. And, you know, it's looking really amazing. And he's saying, no, I think this is going to end in a hot war, an actual military war between the two nations as this reality of the human condition plays out. And the essential thing you need to keep that in check is Christianity. And so what you see here is a lot of what we've been talking about already, that desire for dominance and control and power.
[00:32:08] The idea from Lewis that you actually need morality and virtue to govern human behavior and the exercise of power, otherwise this thing just escalates. And Christianity is fundamental to this. And I think this is important when you think about AI because AI, sure, it's technology, but even more than that, AI is power, and it is extremely powerful as I said, we'll end with a quiz at the very end for you to see and sort of grasp the implication of just at a very basic level, just some of the basic forms of power we're talking about that AI is and offers to the world. And so there's something fundamentally important here. And what Christianity does is Christianity says that we should think about the dignity of the human person made in the image of God. We should think about our actions and the dignity of other persons. How do my actions impact the dignity of others?
[00:32:57] We think about the dignity of the actor. We often forget that. But so that I am a moral agent and I am acting in the world, what about my dignity? When I do immoral things, my dignity is harmed as well. And then we also consider the dignity of the act that we are entering, entering into and engaging in. So it's not just, oh, the dignity of others, it's not just my dignity, but the dignity of the action as well. And so this is this, all of this helps us to avoid the trap of utilitarianism, where you say, well, we've got this power. We can world and we can get a good outcome and our intentions are good. So we are thinking about the dignity of others. Future generations will benefit from the science of eugenics and control. We weed out the unfit. Well, we'll use our technology to screen people and then we will eliminate them in the womb. You know, that kind of an approach, you know, the intention is good. It means, well, for the future. The outcome is going to be good if you can achieve this. But what about the dignity of the act and the dignity of the actor who's involved in this? What about the dignity of the act itself? Because what you're doing is you are using the killing of another human person to get to that outcome. And so this is fundamentally important. This is all essential. Whether it's war and just war theory. You're thinking about whether it's a moral issue, like a specific issue like abortion or euthanasia. So bioethics, whether it's the question of economics and poverty, how faith actually operates at that sort of practical, local church level.
[00:34:24] Human dignity made in the image of God, our anthropology is essential.
[00:34:28] One last thing I want to add to this, I think is very important. Before we finish, we're going to have a little quote from, from that Vatican document that we've been referencing throughout the series about artificial intelligence and human dignity.
[00:34:40] But I want us, before we do that and then jump into the quiz to think about human morality and human moral action. Because I think often what we do is we sort of fall prey to two mistakes that can easily creep in with morality.
[00:34:54] And one of these mistakes is to basically think that morality is about fear of outcomes.
[00:34:59] So I do the good thing and avoid the evil, because I'm afraid I will be punished if I don't do the good. So I'll go to hell, for example, the ultimate and eternal punishment, spending an eternity of conscious awareness and suffering. And so I want to avoid that.
[00:35:14] So I will do the good thing because I'm afraid of the outcome. The other side of the coin, you might say, is the modern cultural context. And this very Freudian idea of our personal happiness is sort of what is key. And so I do things if they bring me personal happiness. I judge the. The worth, the merit, the rightness or wrongness of actions depending on personal happiness. And I do a thing just because it makes me happy, I feel good, it gives me pleasure, that kind of a thing. That's a very common idea in our culture.
[00:35:43] And these two ways of thinking about morality, there's problems here that we need to aware.
[00:35:51] We need to be aware that there's something fundamental that's missing in both of these approaches, and that is this very profoundly Christian idea that morality is actually about love and flourishing.
[00:36:02] So it's the difference between ethic versus ethos. And this is what we see in Matthew's Gospel when Jesus is talking to the Pharisees or talking about the Pharisees, and he's. And he gives the six antitheses, as they're often called. You know, you have heard that it is said. And he quotes some part of the law of Moses. And then he says, but I tell you.
[00:36:25] And so there's six of these kinds of statements. And so what he's contrasting is ethic that the Pharisees in the old law has. Ethic, ethic is your moral laws, the moral rules, the moral norms that you follow. But Christianity, he's saying, is a call to ethic and ethos. It must be really deeply ingrained in your heart and lived in the very deepest fiber of your being as an ethos, not simply a set of rules.
[00:36:52] So you know, thou shall not murder is a rule. And it's actually pretty easy to follow that rule, actually, to not murder someone. But what Christ says is, but I tell you, if you have anger in your heart with your brother, you've already committed murder in your heart. So in other words, that do not murder, do not kill has to become an ethos, not simply an ethic.
[00:37:14] It's so profoundly important that the, the ethic of the Pharisees, you see, is not the problem. In fact, Christ tells his listeners at one point to actually do what the Pharisees do, but don't imitate them right, don't be like they are, but listen to. So the moral laws they're giving is not the issue, it's that fundamental truth of integrity of what's missing is authentic self giving love, love for God, love for neighbourhood. And this is what morality should be about. And ultimately it's not. I don't seek my own flourishing, I don't do moral things because I want to flourish.
[00:37:52] That would be a very selfish motivation. And this is again, this is the problem with fear of outcomes as well or seeking using morality as a tool just to my flourishing is we are instrumentalizing morality there and we're also instrumentalizing Christ in this way as well. If you think about it, well, I'll do what Jesus says because then I'll get the thing I really want, which is heaven.
[00:38:11] So Jesus just becomes a means to an end rather than the, you know, second divine person of the Trinity that I am into a relation in and called into a relationship with and a meaningful relationship where Christ, I allow Christ to save all of me and all of my life. Not just save me at the end of time, but save me and my heart, my mind, my life, my family, everything, all of my dealings right here and now, my, my sufferings even like it's, it's very profound and beautiful this, this deep, profound, you know, Catholic idea about the fullness of what salvation is. And we've often limited it of like just to sort of selling salvation as a fear of outcomes, get a ticket to heaven kind of thing. So morality is like this. It's about love and it's about flourishing. Flourishing is the effect of me loving God and loving truth and loving neighbor and doing and acting out of love where ethos is just imbued into my very being.
[00:39:07] And it is so fundamentally important because this I think starts to change the framework and the way we think about our actions in the world. So I'll give you a tangible example.
[00:39:15] I'm married to my wife, obviously, and we have a marriage covenant, we have vows that we've made to each other.
[00:39:23] So how do I treat that situation? How do I interact in the real world, practically speaking?
[00:39:28] Well, one way I could approach it is say, well, I'm only going to do things in our marriage and family life if they make me feel good.
[00:39:34] So if I come home And I don't feel like helping with the dishes or the dinner or the kids.
[00:39:40] I just feel like sitting on the couch and watching replays of the Crusaders games and drinking beers. Well, I'm just going to do that because it makes me feel good. Your marriage is not going to last pretty long. If it does, your wife has found a very difficult path to saying to it effectively if you know it's not a good thing. The flip side is, well, I will do all those things, you know, the helping with dinner and the dishes and the kids, because I'm afraid that if I don't, she will leave me.
[00:40:05] Now, look, it's good that you're doing those things, but you've recognized, I think all of us can see something's not right here. There's an ethos that's missing, the ethos of love.
[00:40:14] And so I'm not simply supposed to do those things because I'm afraid of an outcome.
[00:40:20] I do those things because I love God, I love my wife, and I love the, the, the vows that we have made. And there's a certain love for that as well.
[00:40:31] This idea is very much embedded in John's thought that, you know, how do you know that you love God? Well, you actually follow his commands.
[00:40:39] This is why the separation between faith and works, it's not a functional thing at all. The more you read the Scriptures, the more you realize that you can't actually extricate these two things or turn works into simply a byproduct and a proof of someone's salvation, that they're essential and fundamental to the journey. I mean, it's very, it's embedded. When Christ tells us the parable of the sheep and the goats.
[00:41:05] The, the, the goats, what is their problem? It's not that they don't profess Christ and do miracles and all that other kind of stuff.
[00:41:13] It's the, the fundamental deeds, the actions are missing.
[00:41:17] And, and, and so in a sense, there's a utilitized, utilitarian sort of version of the faith and relationship with Christ here. And the same is true in my, in my marriage if I take that kind of approach. So I do these things because I love my spouse. I do these things because I love truth, I love goodness, I love my children. And, and what happens is, you discover, in doing them that way, no longer is it sort of just begrudging. And, and it gives deep meaning and existential depth to even the most mundane tasks in marriage and family life. I'm cleaning the toilet because I love my kids. I love My wife and I love God. I mean, all of a sudden, toilet cleaning is radically different, right? So it's profoundly important. Now, why this is key, again, is because without this Christian version of morality and human dignity, what happens is human persons consistently become the objects or the commodities for the use of others.
[00:42:10] And this is so fundamentally important when you think about artificial intelligence. And I know maybe it feels a little bit like, Brendan, man, this is a talk about AI, right? But we've. We're into almost the end of episode four now, and a lot of this is talking about these other sort of issues.
[00:42:24] There is a point, and hopefully you're starting to see it now. And really in the next couple of episodes in a bigger way where we laser focus in on AI and the practical realities of it.
[00:42:33] These things must be understood, imbued, ingrained. First, then we engage with the world around us. Then we engage with these practical technological realities. And without this essential vision of the human person as a Margo Day, the image of God, without this sense of morality as an act of love, what tends to happen is human persons consistently become the objects or the commodities for the use of others. They are exactly what C.S. lewis warned about power by one man over another.
[00:43:04] They become commodities. They become objects for my happiness, my gratification, my power and dominance and control of the world around me. And when you think about AI this is fundamentally important. And that's why, before we finish with this fun little quiz activity, to actually show you the real power of AI that we are grappling with, or one aspect of the real power of AI we're grappling with, I want to quote to you again from Antiqua et Nova, this document that was published just a year ago, just over a year ago by the Vatican on Artificial Intelligence and the human person. To address these challenges, it is essential to emphasize the importance of moral responsibility grounded in the dignity and vocation of the human person. This guiding principle also applies to questions concerning AI. In this context, the ethical dimension takes on primary importance because it is people who design systems and determine the purposes for which they are used.
[00:44:00] Between a machine and a human being, only the latter is truly a moral agent. So only the human person is a moral agent, a subject of moral responsibility, who exercises freedom in his or her decisions and accepts their consequences.
[00:44:15] It is not the machine, but the human who is in relationship with truth and goodness, guided by a moral conscience that calls the person to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, bearing witness to. To the authority of truth. In reference to the supreme good to which the human person is drawn. And obviously God is the summum bonum, the ultimate good, the supreme good. Likewise, between a machine and a human, only the human can be sufficiently self aware to the point of listening and following the voice of conscience, discerning with prudence and seeking the good that is possible in every situation. And this is so fundamental because AI is now mimicking and is growing and offering even more of these mimicking powers and basically saying to human persons, well, I'll just do that, I'll take responsibility.
[00:45:05] But the human person is essential to action in the world. And that includes actions related to AI and various bots and programs and other things that are just sort of set loose and run in the world. I'll give you a very clear example of this, and it's a very prescient one, is the increasing use of a particular military tactic called the double tap, which is where they. We've seen Israel do this. I think the US is doing this as well. A missile is fired at a target and then a period of time elapses and a second missile is also fired at that same target to try and then kill even more people like the responders or others who, who might come to that site.
[00:45:51] There is pretty clear indications, I understand it, that AI is or is planning to be utilized as part of this particular technique.
[00:46:01] So a human person might actually, you know, flip the switch to start the missile strike. But then the secondary double tap part is going to be an AI processor just 20 minutes later, or whatever the time frame is, or they see movement and automatically just fires another missile.
[00:46:16] And when you think about what we just heard in relation to that, you realize there's something extremely dysfunctional about that.
[00:46:22] There is the human person who is absent from that, the human person who has the conscience.
[00:46:27] And that is the key component here, who is really in charge when you think about artificial intelligence. So what I'd like to do now to wrap this up is I want to do a practical activity, a little quiz to actually demonstrate to you just one example of the potential array of AI driven power that we are talking about here. This is just one of the powers of AI. The next couple of episodes we're going to go into this in a much bigger way and look at other things that AI can do. But this is just one example of a power that can be demonstrated in the world by AI. And I think it's a good one because it gives us a sense of the magnitude of what we are actually dealing with here.
[00:47:08] And I think a Greater appreciation of the very real and intense level of power that AI can allow us to wield in the world. And what we're doing in this activity is I'm going to put two faces up on the screen, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to set a little timer here, and I am going to give you about 15 seconds or so just to think about and silence these two faces. And then what I want you to do is I want you to basically discern for yourself.
[00:47:35] Which of these two faces do you think is a real person, a real photograph, and which one is a fake AI creation. So the one is real, like an actual photo. The other one, it doesn't exist. It's not a person, and it's not a real photo. So there's two. They're gonna be. We're gonna do a series of these side by side, and I want you just to try and discern for yourself and figure out which image is the real one and which image, sorry, is the fake one. So let's start with the first two images. They're on screen there beside you. Then take 15 seconds to look at them and think to yourself and try and discern for yourself. Which one of these do you think is fake?
[00:48:10] Which one's AI? Which one is actually real?
[00:48:21] Okay, so I think that's probably enough time, particularly in the world of podcasting. You don't want to leave a whole lot of dead ear, do you?
[00:48:27] But here, here is the answer.
[00:48:30] The one on the left is fake.
[00:48:34] The one on the right is real.
[00:48:38] Let's have a look.
[00:48:40] I'm not going to ask you how you went, because you can't tell me, but let's have a look at the next couple of images again.
[00:48:46] Take 15 seconds or so to look at these two images. Which one do you think is fake as AI and which one is a real photograph of a real human person?
[00:49:06] All right, which one do you think is fake? Which one do you think is real?
[00:49:11] Here's the answer.
[00:49:13] I'd love to know how people are going.
[00:49:15] I'm only going to guess because every time I do this with an audience, the majority of people do not get this right.
[00:49:22] Let's have a look at the next couple of images again. Let's take 15 seconds or so. Look at these two images. Which one do you think is fake? AI? Which one is a real human person?
[00:49:48] All right, so again, which one do you think is fake? Which one's real? Here's the answer.
[00:49:55] One more.
[00:49:57] Sorry. Yeah, one more to Go. All right, so let's look at this last set of images. Two images side by side. Again, let's take 15 seconds. Which one's fake and which one is real?
[00:50:23] All right, so which one did you think is the fake artificial construct, and which one's the real photograph of a real human person? Here's the answer now, why I take you through that exercise, and I've done this before with groups and consistently, most people are not getting the answer correct. And often what you find is, when you talk to people, too, that people are often just using, perhaps gut instinct, or they're guessing. It's not like they've seen anything obvious necessarily, that is telling them, oh, this is fake.
[00:50:56] Which is important, because what this exercise demonstrates is the very real and serious level of power that can be wielded with artificial intelligence.
[00:51:08] And this also creates a challenge to the Baconian idea of faith and progress.
[00:51:15] Because if I can look at two images like this side by side, and I can't discern what is real and what is not, because they both look real.
[00:51:24] It's not like you put a cartoon alongside a photograph or something obvious like there.
[00:51:30] If I'm at this stage where I can't even trust my eyes, then knowledge has not become power.
[00:51:37] My scientific and technological prowess has not actually liberated me. I'm now more enslaved if I can't trust my eyes. And this is the irony, I could have increasing levels of technology and power around me and also be becoming increasingly enslaved at the same time. And it seems to me that is a really good place to end this presentation. As we think about what we're going to be talking about the next two episodes, the final two episodes, five and six, where we really delve into AI and the practicalities of AI and we think about this reality of whether or not technology, science, our exercise of power, is actually allowing us to flourish and bring us to a greater degree, degree of genuine, authentic human freedom and flourishing, or whether it's actually limiting us and we now find ourselves as slaves in bondage to what was supposed to free us, according to Francis Bacon. And a big part of that I'll leave you with this final thought, is the fact that we have reduced the human person down to something in a very reductionist kind of way. We've failed to see that the human person and authentic human anthropology is made for more than just comfort and material security and the exercise of power in the world, those kinds of things. The human person is made for sacred enchantment and for a life beyond mere comfort, mere technology, mere knowledge and mere exercises of power. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget, Live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatches.
