The question about AI

A reminder for myself as much as for anyone else:

The relevant questions to ask about AI and any and all usage of the variety of tools that go under its name are moral, theological, and formational. What kind of person is it likely to make me to be? What virtues or vices will it develop or diminish? In what ways is it likely to expand and enrich my (our) humanity—the good life—and in what ways is it unlikely to do so?

By contrast, starting from the practical, much less from the assumption that AI-usage is inevitable, forfeits the race before the pistol shot. I hear Christians of all people saying, “We can't just expect people not to use it.” But we can expect just that—if, that is, we judge it to be hostile to their humanity. We expect the same regarding, e.g., porn, drug abuse, promiscuity, and other hugely popular legal vices. We know that the prohibition will be honored as much in the breach as in the observance, yet we maintain the prohibition anyway, on principle. We don’t say, “Well, go ahead, we know you will anyway, even though it’s bad for you.”

I'm not claiming to know that every possible AI-usage falls into this category. Maybe not. But it might. It could. That’s the point. And therefore, that’s the question to be asking about this absolutely brand-new, over-hyped, ubiquitous technology—“How will massively integrating this tool into daily human habits shape us into the kinds of people we ought to be—or will it do just the opposite?” Not, “Since everyone will use it anyway, how do ‘we’ do it ‘well’?” That's not good enough, because, among other things, it's not patient enough. It begs the relevant question. More than anything, it’s just naive.

And Christians have been naive about new technologies for far too long not to have laerned the lesson by this point.