Artificial Intelligence

We are living in an age of AI - artificial intelligence. 

Kind of. 

It seems to be everywhere we turn. Try searching something on the internet, and you'll be given AI's best summary of all of the results. Turn on the television, and there are commercials advertising the tech company's latest version of AI, usually doing things like summarizing an email you didn't read or preparing a project you ran out of time on. Ask AI, and it will generate a new image for you or craft a paragraph or draft an email. 

But...

There's no such thing as artificial intelligence. 

This thing that we are calling AI isn't really intelligence. At least, it's not artificial; it's human intelligence. AI is nothing more than an algorithm created by a programmer somewhere that has "taught" the computer to pick up on certain things or to identify certain trigger ideas or to summarize content based on frequency of appearance - i.e. the more times you find a particular keyword mentioned, the more likely it is to be important and therefore, the more likely it is to make it into AI's management of the requested information. 

But at the core of it, it's still human intelligence. The algorithm is created with the designer's intelligence. With the designer's biases. With the designer's interests in mind. So if the designer of AI is inclined toward this or that idea or way of thinking, the AI product will also trend in that direction. Even if the designer has the best of intentions and seeks to the best of their ability a "neutral" programming, the designer is still a human being and therefore fundamentally has a bias and a perspective and all kinds of things he or she cannot possibly know about him/herself (and of course, we all tend to believe we are more neutral and more "right" than everyone else, so he may believe himself to be truly neutral....even though he cannot possibly be). 

That's one reason AI doesn't really exist - it is always a reflection of the intelligence of its designer; it cannot truly "learn" its way out of its inherent biases. 

The other reason AI doesn't really exist is because it is dependent upon its input. That is, ask AI to summarize the content on a certain topic, and the only information that it has to draw from is the content that already exists...which was created by humans...with certain perspectives and biases. So if there is an overwhelming bias in a certain direction, the AI will simply summarize this bias as fact and present it as truth. 

There are a lot of folks who simply believe AI because "the computer can't lie." It's just bytes and bits and digital information. It isn't human, with a thinking kind of mind.

But there is a thinking kind of mind behind it, and that thinking mind is human. And thus, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. 

At best, what we have is "automated intelligence" - the digital shortcut to doing the human work, but it's the human mind that is behind it all. And always will be. There is not a way for a human to create anything that does not have a human intelligence at its core. 

Even if we were to someday successfully train computers to learn, they would only learn the very specific way that we program them to learn. So even their learning, which would appear to be independent, would be a model of human intelligence. We just can't get away from it. 

We should be mindful of these truths as we enter deeper into this digital reality that we are now living, and it should temper us to be cautious about what seems so easy to take for granted. 

But this is also an important reflection for our faith and our understanding of God and humanity. 

(Stay tuned.)