This is an adapted , excerpt , from Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith ( Regnery, October 15 ).
With the award of a pair of machine learning scientists this month’s Nobel Prize in Physics, it appears as though AI will certainly be the future’s domain. But what kind of coming?
The widespread fear that machines will completely outstrip or replace humanity is a natural result of a theory that has gained popularity at least since the days when Alan Turing, the creator of modern computing, made the claim that humans are essentially indistinguishable from extremely functioning machines. Humanity is longer late for an upgrade if it is accurate to say that we are simply natural control devices.
For the equipment, at least, the updates have come thick and fast. Computer technology has reached astonishing levels of sophistication and difficulty. These copy minds have come to appear as though they could do almost anything since the internet first connected computers to computers at unheard-of frequencies.
The typical home found itself occupied by a awake mechanical sentinel, a box of unknowable numerical procedures hidden behind a bright screen as the personal computer advanced. The rock legend David Bowie of the internet in 1999 said,” It’s an mysterious life form. The complex coding architecture hidden and compressed within the depths of their smooth bodies, the more impenetrable computers became for the average consumer.
They appeared to be able to accomplish all that humanity had aspired to do in all these decades: they could exchange data across vast space distances and make friends with one another in a matter of seconds. The most basic of them could sort through vast troves of data with the objective rigor of scientific logic, assimilation of which would dumbfound the human mind. The same way the pioneers of the medical era had longed to do, but computers did so without causing any twisting conflict between passion and desire. Their sole norms were those of need.
The old yearning for a magnificent merging between man and machine has now developed into a kind of prophetic fervor in the midst of these epoch-making developments. ” Our species has been quickly acquiring nations in the form of exceptional levels of control over our body, brains, built environments and organisms”, writes Elise Bohan of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. Humanity has risen up in the picture of its machines, as Karl Marx predicted, and, according to the bionic future’s prophets, man must now be the subject of his own unrelenting optimization. ” We’re unwilling to admit it, but the universe is not set up for ape-brained meatsacks any more”, declares Bohan. ” We’ve seeded an extra-human part of consideration…. Its rebirth is the next stage. These are no more the only ones that a dozen techies and Russian savages have dreams about.
Philosophy, the promise of a new era with bodies and minds enhanced by device technology, has become a messianic dream among the world’s magnates. In order to “unlock the power of natural data,” President Joe Biden’s White House announced in an executive order that it would invest in technology in 2022 that would enable its wielders to “write circuitry for cells and reliably system biology in the same way that we write software and program computers. If man is a design machine made of materials from an unkind nature, he will eventually be immortal. He did finally fit himself into the fastening system of data and power that is already snaking through the heat and planet all around him by stretching out his hands to reach the blessed diodes of his most cherished creations.
These kinds of predictions have only grown more serious and severe as unnatural knowledge programs have learned to imitate human speech and creative result to an unsettling degree of specificity. One disciple foretold the coming of applications that can store and process eternal knowledge:” WE ARE CREATING GOD WHAT Aren’t YOU UNDERSTAND”. Elon Musk, one of the country’s best-known advocates of the man-machine acquisition, replied:” Exactly”.
This vision is quickly becoming a problem. Despite their allure of freedom and glory, our bodies and brains have not been properly adapted to our efforts to treat them like first-generation foods computers. Our philosophical dread and discomfort only get worse, no matter how carefully we calibrate our hormone levels with tablets and shots. Eliminating genitalia and body parts like plug-ins and accessories has n’t produced any encouraging results. Transgender surgeries, which one newbie hoped would release a “lucky several free from the dreadful plague of being human,” have rather worsened that curse undeniably, leaving patients to endure daily infection and agony. And as artificial intelligence reaches levels of complexity that are beyond the power of its creators, dreadful doubts have begun to surface about its harmful possible. Why should our personal equipment even meld with us if we are just suboptimal versions of ourselves? Why should n’t they enslave us, or scrap us for parts, or simply do away with us?
If the bionic world’s long-awaited arrival comes to pass, we will have to ponder whether or not this is what we really want, as well as other options. The naysayers among us are looking for a way out of a planet that has been brutally beautiful by our own ideas, trudging like butterflies pinned to a circuit board. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a pioneer in the development of artificial intelligence, described his fears for what the tech may be: without the proper stop-gaps, he wrote, we will end up with a condition in which” the AI does not like you, nor does it love you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something more”. But this grim future is far from inevitable. Some of us only experience that feeling because of concepts we inherited from philosophers like Karl Marx and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who taught us that humanity must exist inside a machine that is only able to disappear with the helpless grinding of gears.
But these ideas are hopelessly outdated. Our philosophical assumptions , about , science are hundreds of years old. They have not kept pace with scientific knowledge — indeed, not even many AI visionaries ( or dystopians ) seem to understand this. We still think in terms of matter in motion, of atoms and energy, tiny chunks of material colliding, attracting, and repelling in an endless cosmic flow. And of course, we are unable to discern what should separate us from our artificial children.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that “mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show”. More than a hundred years later, this attitude persists in the back of our minds, like programming we ca n’t control: numbers are the most sublime truth, and matter is the most real thing.
But as deeply as these convictions have sunk into our hearts, they have not proved to be true. The science that gave us the steam engine and the digital computer has been teaching us more about matter and mind than has been incorporated into our general understanding over the course of these years. The brain is something entirely different from a computer, and the world is far more than just a machine. These facts have been uncovered for decades in the scientific record itself. We initially assumed the metal prison of a purely material world was a rich white light, but we have n’t yet raised our eyes to see it.
Instead of going back to a prescientific era, we can look ahead and see what science is actually revealing to us, which is not the well-established mythology of matter. This is how we can get out of our concern about humanity’s future. If we can take stock of everything that physics has discovered, we can have a more humanizing view of the world. We have more knowledge than we have at this time, and our next revelation will be much more profound than the previous one.
