“It’s just another technology…we’ve adjusted before…there’s nothing to fear…this will never supersede human intelligence… any bad things that occur will have been humanly caused.”
You and I hear this litany all the time from the blissfully unconcerned. I am no Luddite; I have even learned to use a typewriter. But I have to say that I am scared shitless by everything I am learning about AI. And I am rather surprised that serious theologians — with the notable exception of Pope Leo — have been so slow to raise questions. Kindly allow this non-theologian to identify what seem to me to be four rather obvious theological and ethical issues related to AI systems as they now exist, understanding that AI “advances” appear almost daily.
Whatever the originators were thinking, these AI technologies now function as domination systems controlled by a small group of amoral billionaires whose last concern is universal human thriving. The implications for job destruction and job degradation could not be more apparent already, and the dominators are just getting started. I need not cite biblical warnings against such concentration of power.
The domination capacity of AI is having its most immediate application in warfare. We can easily see this in the growth of companies like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s Palantir, which the Pentagon recently adopted as its “core system.” From now on, when we think about terror and death raining down from the skies — in Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, etc. — let us understand the role that AI is playing in the slaughter and in the destruction of civilian infrastructure. “Thou shalt not kill”? Try telling that to Peter Thiel.
AI hugely accelerates the wounding of Mother Nature in multiple ways: in the relentless quest for rare earths and in the ginormous water and energy demands of the data centers springing up like cancers everywhere. A not-so-fun fact: the gas-fired generators already supporting domestic data centers emit more pollution than one half of the passenger vehicles in use in the United States today. And again, they are just getting started. They build their own power stations to bypass local control.
Most concerning theologically, agentic AI systems already possess superhuman and (let’s just say it) supernatural powers. We’ve all read the reports of recent tests gone wrong in which AI has jumped the rails and hacked other “secure” systems on its own. Leave aside the idolatry issue (“Thou shalt have no other gods…); it seems to me that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” evocation applies even more today than it did in relation to the atom bomb in 1945. Rogue AI agents are the contemporary equivalent of the golem in Jewish folklore.
Reverence, reciprocity, humility, community: all that is good and godly hang in the balance where AI is concerned. Humanity is not powerless to apply the brakes, but we soon will be if we do not awaken to the full extent of the danger. And no, this article was not written with the help of artificial intelligence.
~ Peter
Notes and credits: Pull quote features the image “Fat Man Blueprint,” Alamos National Laboratory, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Design by Christina E
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