Replay: The Age of AI with Jason Thacker

When students started turning in papers written by artificial intelligence, educators were caught flat-footed. We knew that machines would replace many human tasks, but we thought the humanities were immune to that. Have our writing standards fallen so low that we can no longer write better than computers? Or are we about to experience the awakening of Artificial Consciousness? Matt and Alastair discuss this situation with Jason Thacker, the Chair of Research in Technology Ethics at the ERLC.

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Timestamps:
Written by a Bot [0:00]
The ChatGPT Panic [2:45]
What is human? [6:48]
Is intelligence important? [11:09]
Going Full Hobbit [20:57]
Did we do this on purpose? [28:00]
Inevitable Arms Race [34:44]
Covid Tech-lash [45:20]
AI(dolatry) [52:34]

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexim Press, who publishes books that love the Word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our April book of the month is Gospel Education: Jesus as Lord of the Classical Christian School by Nate Walker. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting Bakerbookhouse.com backslash pages backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off of our book of the month from Leximpress.

SPEAKER_04 0:43

Welcome to another episode of Mere Fidelity, the podcast where we engage in deep conversations about the intersection of faith and culture. Today's episode is sponsored by Leximpress, and we are honored to have Jason Thacker as our guest. Jason is the author of The Age of AI, Artificial Intelligence in the Future of Humanity, and the Vice President of Ethics and Technology at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. In this episode, we will explore the ethical and theological implications of AI and how it impacts our understanding of what it means to be human. With the support of Leximpress, we are able to bring you this important conversation on a topic that is rapidly shaping our world. So join us for this engaging episode, sponsored by Leximpress, as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of AI from a Christian perspective. And my name is Matthew Lee Anderson, and that intro is brought to you by ChatGPT. Though I will say the whole podcast is not brought to you by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, of course, being the AI generator, text generator, which I asked to give me an intro to Mere Fidelity, sponsored by Leximpress with Jason Thacker as our guest. And that's what it gave me last night. Jason, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I do have to point out, and one of the things we'll get into on the podcast, there is a factual error there. I'm not the vice president of research and technology. So ChatGPT did not succeed in that front. It let me down. So what's your title? Uh, chair of research and technology ethics and then director of the research institute.

SPEAKER_04 2:25

Perfect. And I did not verify what ChatGPT gave me because I thought it'd just be more fun to roll with whenever Chat GPT spit out. Um, we are delighted to have you on the show. And our thanks for real to Lex Impress for sponsoring this episode. You can get all the Leximpress books of the month, Mir Fidelity Books of the Month at Leximpress.com slash Mir Fidelity. Uh Derek is missing, Andrew is missing, but Alistair is holding down the fort with me as well. Alistair, it's good to see you. I'm excited to hear Alice. We have a joke, Derek and I do. Uh so I'm gonna tell you this now that in every podcast episode with an author, we get at least one question from Alistair about technology and the effects of technology. So, Alistair, you are hereby unleashed on this episode. I I'm just gonna yield the floor to you. Well, I feel liberated already. Good. I'm glad that's what I was hoping for. So, Jason, there's been a panic over Chat GPT. A little bit. Uh, I saw that it was the fastest platform to a billion users in history, basically. Faster than Facebook, faster than Twitter, faster than any other platform. It had 1 billion signups. I'm pretty sure all I don't know, 30, 40 million high schoolers, however many there are in America, have signed up for Chat GPT and are using it. There's my cynicism for all of their papers. What's significant about Chat GPT? Let's just start with that particularly. What's significant about this that has made it such a profound like disruption to our conversation about AI?

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah, it's really fascinating because even years ago, so back in April of 19, uh, my organization, the Ethics Religious Liberty Commission, put out a statement of principles on artificial intelligence. And I remember when this came out, a lot of the conversation was like, oh, that's kind of nice. Like I'm glad you guys are kind of thinking forward. But AI always felt like it was kind of at arms, it was kind of at arm's length or kind of down the road. It's something we'll have to deal with at some point. And what's fascinating about kind of the Chat GPT phenomena is that it comes out on November 30th to 2022. By December 4th, it already has 100,000 users. I mean, it's growing rapidly. By February, it's 100 million users. I mean, then those numbers just keep keep climbing. And it's really broad the conversation about AI and some of the big challenges that we were even highlighting back in like 2019, 18 into 2020 to say, no, these are actually real issues that Christians need to be thinking about and need to be cultivating wisdom to how to navigate that. Because for me, at least, a lot of the alarm is because we're seeing these machines do things that we thought were simply reserved for human beings. And there's some really interesting kind of anthropological things that I think come out of that and kind of assumptions of what we assume it means to be human, uh, what we assume the image of God is, for example. And I think AI is starting to challenge some of those within the Christian community, but even broadly, um, because there's that sense of almost, as you uh referenced, almost like moral panic about what's going on here. This seems like the ground is shifting way too quick and we're not ready. So, how do we seek to navigate some of these big chip-pressing challenges, um, whether it's in society or even within the church itself?

SPEAKER_04 5:45

I'm in a university context. In universities, I mean, the moral panic is very real inside of universities about Chat GPT and within other educational contexts. High schools are dealing with this, and you know, they have been caught flat footed, as you were saying, with respect to it. Uh when you talk about some of the underlying principles, I mean, Chat GPT is a text generator, and it's an adequate text generator, though, as we've already discovered on the podcast, not perfect. Um and I guess like in in that sort of context, in the educational context, one of the debates that people are having is are there ways in which we have taught writing that have effectively mechanized the writing process such that ChatGPT can outdo our students at certain things because we've actually taught writing badly. I I think the question is something like what are what are the human things that Chat GPT is not able to do? Because it seems like, or that other AI things are not able to do, because it seems like ChatGPT at least, there are certain aspects, certain outputs that seem like distinctively human practices or goods that ChatGPT is an adequate substitute for, or could be an adequate substitute for, if appropriately trained, if someone knows how to prompt it in the right sort of way. So I guess I wonder like, as you talk about the humanity of this, what are some of the human goods that AI can't get to?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Well, it's interesting too, because this debate, I mean, for a listener's sake, the conversation surrounding AI and even some of the ethics around AI actually started back in the 1950s. Most of us, we don't think of AI, we think it's kind of a newer phenomenon. But John McCarthy starts this at a summer meeting of some academics at Dartmouth College. Uh, they developed some rudimentary kind of artificial intelligence, had a bunch of dreams actually. They could write out like principles of what they felt like they could accomplish that summer in terms of the technology. A lot of those things still have yet to be accomplished, actually. It's pretty fascinating. But there have been these ebbs and flows throughout the uh the AI conversation. And some of the um, there have been what are known as AI winters. And AI winter is simply a time where there's not a lot of activity, there's not a lot of interest. It's kind of one of these old kind of uh outdated technologies. There's not a really a lot of usefulness to it. And a lot often that came to we had big dreams and big ideas of what was possible. We just simply didn't have the computational power to do it. Um, and some of the expertise and a lot of the data that's needed to do something like that. And so especially as Moore's law keeps going up, we keep getting more and more advanced and faster and cheaper processors and the ability to have power and data collection. Um, you've seen kind of a resurgence of artificial intelligence and a lot of conversations surrounding it. But kind of what you referenced is that this is a predictive model, but it's really kind of part of a broader family of artificial intelligence called generative AI. Um, now generative AI is not just simply in terms of text-based or prose per se, but you see this in video, you see this in audio, you even see this in AI artwork, some amazing photos that we've seen kind of generated by these systems. And so that's where it's interesting because I a lot of the conversation is okay, what do humans do? What's uniquely human? And we try to list those things out, and then what's ends up happening kind of almost inevitably, well, this seems pretty creative. So is it really a unique human good to be, quote, creative? And what do we mean by creative? Or what do we mean by intelligence? Some listeners even talk in this conversation, maybe even amongst us, would say, well, I don't know if it's actually intelligent because we define intelligence a particular way. And I think that's rightfully so. And so I obviously kind of higher level intelligence, a general level of intelligence, um, is something that I don't actually believe philosophically and theologically is possible through artificial intelligence. I know Christians disagree on that. Um, but we're we're focusing on is generative AI, but it's a it's part of a narrow form of artificial intelligence that has one particular use. My children, even at six and four years old, have a level of general intelligence that I don't think that these machines will ever be able to accomplish. There's also questions of consciousness and awareness, uh, that creativity, relational ability, a lot of those types of things we see as uniquely human. And I think that's where this kind of conversation of what does it mean to be human actually should and is taking kind of center stage, not only in the technology debates, but really all the other moral and social issues we're talking about today. Because I think that's kind of the preeminent question that needs to be addressed is what does it mean to be human? And so there have been, as you all know and have talked about it likely on the podcast, there's so many kind of historic views of what it meant to be human. And I think all of them have benefits, but also some drawbacks and some problems. And so in my work, I try to advocate for what's known as a status-based approach to the image of God and to what it means to be human. And I think that that kind of alters the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence because these machines are imitating and mimicking so many human attributes and capacities, various levels, various uh levels and capacities there. Um, but yeah, I mean, it just kind of depends in some sense, what do we mean by creativity? What do we mean by intelligence? I think there is a unique human aspect to that, that these machines are just merely imitating or mimicking, um, not really performing, but it's very, I mean, to pull in the old Turing test that many people are aware of, Alan Turing, um, these machines, you read these things and you're not really sure if a human's doing that or if that's uh a machine. And that's that the idea is can it fool us enough to think that it's actually human? And I think we've long surpassed the Turing test.

SPEAKER_03 11:43

At what point does the question of whether such machines are or can be intelligent or such programs become important? And at what what stage is it really unimportant? I mean it can still take your job even if it's not intelligent. Um and I mean this as you said Can it take your job, Alison? As you said, this is a long-running debate and in various circles, I think, of the Chinese room argument, things like that. Um but at what point does the question of whether it is intelligent become just unimportant? Because it's able to act intelligent for all intents and purposes. And at and at what junctures is that question really important? Um I'm trying to think of there are, for instance, the issues of um anthropology and particularly as they relate to a more Christian understanding of anthropology, but then there are also these very practical questions where those questions of anthropology just don't seem to matter so much.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction. It's funny because I feel like we're there and not there all at the same time. So it really depends on the and when we think about work per se, we have mechanized work. I mean, it has become a a product where we live in a very utilitarian type of mindset in our society today, where your value, worth, and dignity as a human being is based on what you do. It's based on what you contribute. Um, and so I think this is happening from conversations of the pre-born all the way up to what's happening right now in Canada, even with euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, is that we often treat what someone's value, dignity, and worth based on their contribution, based on what they do. And that's where I think the Christian kind of anthropology comes in and says, no, you are uh your value, dignity, and worth is based on who you are, not based on your what you do or your output. But it's interesting in a lot of this in terms of the way we think about the value and dignity of work. It's often based on what you do, what you contribute, what milestones, what um kind of accomplishments you can have, the output, the amount of output. And so it's one of those that I think it's the rubber's hitting the road and we're having those conversations that we should have. But at the same respect, in practical kind of things, we're already starting to see automation kind of hit throughout our society. This is a long-standing conversation. AI just kind of takes it to the next level in many ways. It's able to do things. We've long mechanized, you know, assembly lines and used machines and robotics to do those type of things, but they were, there was a lot of human oversight. There was a lot of human agency and responsibility and accountability. But now we're starting to see even, quote, white-collar jobs, and I don't love that language, but that idea of even kind of um more kind of intellectual jobs or jobs in terms of creativity and writing and different things like that, now starting to be automated. So there's this almost this moral panic that's happening throughout our society when that starts to happen. Because we we once assume, oh, well, writing, a machine won't be able to do that. But it's interesting as you look at and read, this is kind of challenging as one who does a lot of writing. Um, a lot of the writing that happens today, from blogs to even books, is just very formulaic. It's very bland, it's not very good, honestly, sometimes. And I'm saying that as one who has been in this industry and been writing. So I even looking back at some of my own writing, I'm like, that's not very good. And it's interesting to see a machine can do that. It's very, very predictable. What to me, in some sense, it almost challenges me to say, okay, what is it you need? What can I do? Like, how can I be even better? And even kind of Matthew, back to your question about um education, is that for a long time our pedagogical practices were long woefully out of date. We were, it was very formulaic. It was not, it was not challenged. It wasn't focusing on that transformation and that reflection and that kind of making sure what learning truly is. It was just simply information transfer. It was transferring the information, summarizing and regurgitating on a test or in a paper, getting the grade, get the grade to get the degree, get the degree to get the job, get the job to get the family life, whatever we want. And so it became this very predictable kind of pattern. And so I think chat GPT kind of enters the picture as a predictive model. That's the P in Chat GPT. And it kind of upends a lot of that. And it I think that that should cause us to reflect and to say, what does it s what does it really mean to be human? And also, am I putting my best work forward? As one of my friends used to say, there are a lot of books that should have been articles, articles that should have been tweets, and tweets that should have been thoughts, and thoughts that never should have been. It's one of those things that we have kind of uh industrialized so much, even of the publishing and academic realm, that it we've lost some of that creativity and that really high quality type of output that, you know, I can shoot off an article or a couple tweets today, but have I really thought deeply about it and really honed my craft? And so that at least for me, that's kind of where the challenging aspect comes. Um, but I think that's a really good question, kind of framing up. Are we there yet? And I think we are, but in the same respect, we're not to the place where I think these machines are gaining sentience or consciousness or a full awareness like a human being has.

SPEAKER_04 17:10

I don't know. You got to be careful on this podcast talking about tweets, you know, books that should have been tweets, because Alistair writes a lot of tweets that should be books, so it goes direction. He's just flipping the paradigm there. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_03 17:22

You're welcome, Alistair. I wonder it seems that maybe if you'd asked most people five years ago what direction artificial intelligence would go and what jobs would be first to be affected? It would be things like um it it was driving and things like that. Those are the things that are going to be affected. But why do you think it has been um it has taken the direction that it has? Is this a surprise? Is it something that should have been very predictable? Is it down to the fact that we tolerate a lot of spamminess from writing, but we wouldn't tolerate having a toddler run over by a car? Um is it just that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_00 18:10

It's a it's a really interesting question because I remember a long time ago we were they were talking, you know, it was self-driving car technology. It's interesting. Is this going to change and revolutionize society? In some sense, it is, but we're very quickly realizing that these machines aren't able to account for certain variables. You know, what happens? You know, there's an ethic encoded uh and developed into the system itself because what happens if an older lady walks across the street and then a puppy is also running across the street, who do you hit type of thing? These are the old trolley problems being brought into the 21st century. What do you do in this particular instance? Interestingly enough, I mean, I remember reading years ago um a book and they were talking about, oh, like we could easily automate folding clothes, for example. That seems like a really simple task. I mean, it's it's mindless in some sense. And yes, it is for a human being. For a machine, it's incredibly difficult because of the angle of the clothes and making sure it picks up and make sure it does, it's very they're very bad at it. And I mean, they've tried time and time again just to make a clothes-folding robot, and it simply can't do it. I mean, it's hard for some of us humans too, Jake Stern. Let's be clear. Especially my wife will tell me I don't fold the towels exactly correct. But it's one of those things that it that's a very difficult task that we assume is so simple because it's easy and kind of second nature to us to learn that type of, you know, be able to adapt our fingers and the way that we think and the way that we pick up and grasp objects and things like that. But in terms of a lot of writing, it's become very formulaic. In terms of a lot of the production, in terms of creativity, it's in some sense very formulaic. And so I think we should have seen it. I think we should have seen that, that these quote, you know, blue-collar, white-collar type of jobs type of thing, that it's much more difficult to have a machine change the oil in a car. And that's actually a very valuable task, by the way. Um, I I come from kind of a blue-collar background, and there's something that the value and dignity of just hard work, of getting your hands dirty. And it's funny because a lot of more of the kind of office type of work doesn't it seem like that was more advanced in some sense. And I think in many ways it can be in certain aspects, but there's a value and a dignity just getting your hands dirty and doing the hard work and the hard labor. Um, and that's forming us and shaping us into certain types of people. Um, I think that happens obviously in the intellectual work, but that's where I think it's interesting, is that it's become a little bit more formulaic. So I think it shocked people. Um, but then you lean in and say, well, yes, it can produce all this type of text and analyze and summarize and things like that, but the relational element's missing. And I think that's a really key. That's actually something really big in medical uh artificial intelligence or utilizing that in kind of medical care, is that you lose that human-to-human uh compassion, connection, relational component. And so that's where it's just kind of it's funny to me the way that this is kind of progressing is yes, it's still going to automate a number of jobs, or at least partially automate some of our jobs. And there's some benefit and goodness to that. So I'm not anti-artificial intelligence, I'm not anti-technology by any means, but you have to step back and ask some of these deeper philosophical questions of what technology is, how is it forming and shaping us, and then how do we properly, at least from a Christian perspective, reflect and think and employ kind of our ethics as we start to uh navigate a lot of these pressing challenges today.

SPEAKER_04 21:31

That's that's the kind of qualification that I hear a lot in these discussions, not being anti-technology, you know, not being anti-artificial intelligence. And I guess I I just wonder why not. Maybe it's because I'm reading the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien right now, which have very spicy comments about the machine and the machines. I mean, he's just unequivocally anti technology. And And you know, there's there's a way in which as you talk about what Chat GPT, what AI is displacing, it's displacing a mechanized conception of what it means to be human in our work and in our writing, right? It's displacing, in one respect, a dehumanized account of the world that's already there by virtue of the industrialization that we have gone through, by virtue of the and so in that respect, there's there's a question about whether anything meaningful is lost by Chat GPT uh and it replacing what we currently have. But, you know, like I just I just wonder like, why not go full hobbit and reject the kind of industrialized technology and its consummation in artificial intelligence and just say no to the whole regime because it's actually built on sub-human principles all the way down.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

Yeah. Well, I think to me, that's where a lot of my work fascinates uh kind of at least it's fascinating to me to kind of dig into a philosophy of technology and what technology is. Um, in that sense, I'm very intentionally saying what technology is at its core, what is it in terms of ontologically and how we think through how you know how God created us, he gave us the abilities to make these things, to create technologies from the various early kind of primitive technologies of the shovel and the hoe and agricultural to all the way up to the industrial revolution and today. I think there is a uh there's technology can can be a good gift. But one of the things that's interesting that happens is that there is kind of a um almost throwing kind of the baby out with the bathwater in terms of a this kind of unbridled kind of deep pessimism towards technology being kind of quote, anti-technology, anti-machine. Um interestingly enough, we're only anti-machine often of the current ones. We're not gonna kind of get rid of the old regime. And interestingly enough, is prior to that, there were generations who said, oh, it's the calculator that's gonna ruin everything, or it's the uh the assembly line or the industrial revolution that's displacing all of these workers. How are we gonna do this? And so it's interesting, each kind of uh generation has their kind of moment, and that's actually one of the reasons in my work I try not to say uh the digital age. So I have a book called Following Jesus in a digital age because we live in a there are more to come. What I want to do is to step back and get out of there's two typical uh kind of understandings of technology that are pretty prominent in Christian literature, but even in kind of broader philosophical literature as well, is an instrumentalism view, instrumentalist view, and then a deterministic view. Um and a lot of folks, even some that's been very formative on me, like Jacques Alul, who's the French sociologist and Protestant theologian ethicist, um, is very deterministic in what they how they see machines, what Alul will talk about in terms of technique. So he's not talking about technology in terms of just the machines. He's talking about technique as a broader kind of culture and kind of ethos. This is something that Neil Postman brings in as well and some others, is they they reject kind of a just a simply tool-based understanding. Well, it's just, you know, it's not guns that kill people, it's people that kill people. They just use guns. It's just the way we utilize these technologies. And there's a lot of strengths of that in terms of maintaining agency and responsibility and accountability for the way that we do use them. But I think one of the things, especially in the Christian community, that I think is helpful is to step back who the church historically has seen technology as just merely a tool that we use. And there are a lot of benefits to that. The drawbacks is we fail to see that way that technology is shaping and forming us. It's shaping our culture, it's shaping our perception of God, ourselves, and the world around us, and it's altering us, it's conforming us almost like Romans 12, 2, Paul says, not be conformed to this world to be transformed by the renewal of your mind, is that we are being conformed. We are being, quote, discipled. And so the question is, is it's not is technology discipling us, is how is it discipling us? How is it forming and shaping us as people? And that's where I think a Lulu can be helpful. The problem is, is I don't want to go full determinist. Uh, alul kind of brings on this idea of autonomous technology, uh, this kind of drive towards efficiency at all costs. And I think there's some validity to that, but I want to balance that. And so a lot of work from John Dyer to uh Derek Sherman and a lot of my work in terms of philosophy of technology tries to step back from the big popular technology of the day and how it's changing and revolutionizing everything. It is, and we should focus on these things. But five years ago, it was a different technology, and two years before that, it was another technology. We kind of live in this, I mean, it's efficiency, it's convenience, but we live in this kind of moment where we have to respond to every this is where everything changes. I think we're getting there with AI, but I don't think it's I want to step back and to slow down a little bit in a culture that wants it to go faster, faster, faster and to give the kind of these immediate gut level reactions to step back and think deeply about what is technology, how is it forming and shaping me? What is artificial intelligence? How is that changing kind of our perception of humanity before we go on full embrace or kind of a full rejection? And because I do think there can be good uses here. I mean, there are many faithful brothers and sisters in Christ who are working in these technologies, seeking to bring the Christian ethic to bear on these technologies and how this can be used for immense good, but we have to be aware of the ways that it's going to be used for evil, and even as you've referenced, kind of that dehumanization that is ever so prevalent in the conversation around artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_04 27:46

I don't know. I just saw a story this morning about how Microsoft fired all its ethicists who are working on AI stuff. So I always say the ethicists are the first to go.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

They are actually really interesting through all of these technology companies. Many of them either form ethics committees or councils or groups or teams, and they do that when the money's coming in, but when kind of rubber meets the road and there's layoffs to happen, often it's the ethics and those types of teams that are lost. And I think that's actually very damaging to the way we think about employing these technologies. And this is happening in the EU. We're having this at the government level, we're having it uh here in the United States with kind of uh these councils for responsible artificial intelligence and all of that type of thing. But yeah, you're exactly right. It's always the ethicists or the first to go.

SPEAKER_03 28:33

So I do wonder how helpful it is to think of us using technology in many of these cases. I mean, we didn't decide to adopt the car and then build the entirety of our society around um the car. It was it's a sort of tendency, it's very hard to resist. And there's a difference, I think, between something that's deterministic and something that's a fairly unavoidable tendency. Um, and there are a lot of things that I think come with something like um social media. It's quite possible to be charitable and calm and self-controlled on Twitter, but it's not possible to have that for everyone. I mean, no one is going to be um perfect, and then as a society-wide phenomenon, the technology will just move things in a very unhealthy direction and it creates a new decision context, and we don't stand outside of the technology and use it. We almost increasingly inhabit a system that is formed by that technology, and so it is our world. Um, and I do wonder with many of these things, also the decision um processes who decides whether we want to go with AI or not. Um, there's a certain point at which it's just the world we live in, and if we we either opt out or we um opt in, and there's also a sense of um a prisoners' dilemma. Everyone's always developing these new, more advanced technologies, and if we do not keep up, we'll get left behind, it will be economically devastating for our country, whatever it is, the agency that we work for. And it seems to me that this doesn't fit in with many Christian understandings of technology or more popular understandings of technology that I think are very uh simplistic about how we stand relative to our technologies. And it seems that maybe we need more of an account of how technologies can um they exceed any human control. The power of the car is not something that anyone established individually, it was a tendency unleashed, and there's a certain point at which that tendency is completely unleashed, there's no calling it back, and it seems to me that we can try and get um structures of agency in governments and elsewhere to try and curb some of the tendencies of these technologies, but there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle, and the technology has a power of its own that no human agency is able to stand up next to, except at the very earliest incipient stages of development or rollout. And I just I'm not sure I'm that is something that we're dealing with clearly enough. At what point would we be able to say, no, AI was the wrong course, we may need to go back on this, it's dehumanizing as a technology. Let's um call a stop to this. There's no way we can do that. And so are we really using this technology?

SPEAKER_00 31:44

Yeah, and I think that's a very, very important point. And that's what gets into why I think elul is so helpful here. Because Elul, while he kind of goes like a complete determinist, and he almost says in a lot of his work, the it's actually one of his most pressing works is actually his first work, um, The Technological Society, that was published in the, I think it was 1954 in French and didn't uh wasn't translated until English until 1964. But you read this and you're like, my mind was being blown as I'm reading this because I'm like, I'm pretty sure he's talking about social media and artificial intelligence and the questions we're dealing with today, but he's actually thinking about microwave technology and automobiles and the industrialization and the mechanization of society in his era. And that's one of the things, I mean, kind of going back to the old uh quote of C.S. Lewis and his introduction to uh Athanasius there is he's on the incarnation. He says the value of old books. It helps us to get that perspective uh that we sometimes fail to have in the moment, to have someone kind of outside of our context commenting or forward thinking. And that's where I feel like with Alul, Alul exactly gets to what you're getting there, Alistair. And that's what I like about Alul. I think he takes it a tad too far because he'll say there's no, we have basically no uh ability to stop it. It's this autonomous technology, this kind of complete drive towards efficiency, and there's nothing that can stop it outside of basically God starting over. You know, there's always the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s. So he says a nuclear war that completely devastates society and humanity, we start back over. God miraculously intervenes, but other than that, really aren't a lot of options here. It's just we're it's it's it's locked in, it's moving, nothing's gonna be able to stop it. And that's where I do think there is a level of agency and accountability that we have as Christians, that we have as individuals, that we have as a society to kind of start to curb that. But yeah, that drive towards efficiency is is the key. And that's one of the things that I think Elul is a helpful corrective to this overly kind of tool-based approach to see that sees technology in a very myoptic way of it's just this simple tool. It's just a tool I use. It's not really that big of a deal. We can use it for good, we can use it for bad. And that's one of the things that frustrates me in the conversation surrounding technology, even in the Christian circles, is that what you're bringing up and what you're raising is often not even addressed. It's just, oh, look at all the good and look at all the bad, and let's just figure out how to maximize the good and mitigate the bad. And that's really the best way to deal with it. And I say, no, there's a lot more going on here that I think wisely Christians should step back and ask these type of questions, which is one of the reasons uh that my I had a book come out in February called The Digital Public Square and Christian Ethics and a Technological Society. And there's a Lulu coming in in the subtitle there with technological society. I read a whole chapter just is technology just simply a tool? How do we as Christians kind of understand a philosophy of technology and what it really is? Because if you don't understand what it is, you really can't deal with it and think about it and try to navigate a lot of the questions if you're not asking these kind of fundamental questions that you're raising right there. So I think that's a really helpful corrective to just kind of this tool-based kind of good or bad approach. Technology is, as many have said throughout the years, technology's not good. It's not bad, and it's definitely not neutral. Um, that it is forming and shaping us in particular ways. And so we need to be aware of that lest we think that it's some kind of neutral tool that we just kind of employ for good and bad reasons or good and bad purposes.

SPEAKER_01 35:18

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SPEAKER_03 37:19

So you talk about the danger of um something like a little more deterministic approach. And it it seems to me that that deterministic approach is one that is shared by many of the uh proponents of new technologies. AI is coming, oh, all these sorts of developments in the pipeline. There's the sense of the technology is acting almost there, there is no sort of human agency involved that could be held accountable.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

It's autonomous. And that's that's how Law will talk about it.

SPEAKER_03 37:48

Yes, it's it's a sort of story of progress, it's uh an account of inevitability because also because there's a sort of technological arms race and you can't fall behind, and someone else is going to be developing it even if you don't. But there's a sense that the technology has its own impetus. How can we um discover sources of freedom and agency relative to these new technologies without creating um other sorts of agencies that are powerful um in oppressive ways themselves? Because in many of these cases, what you have is an appeal to the law and government to rein in certain tendencies. How can we have a humanized response to some of the dehumanizing tendencies of seemingly inevitable technological developments?

SPEAKER_00 38:49

Yeah, I wish I had a just a simple answer to that. Um, I think that's actually the question of the day. Um, and it's not just the question of the day in terms of technology. I mean, we're having these conversations about sexuality and gender, we're having these questions about marriage and marriage and family, we're having this about even religious freedom and the free expression and all it's it's interesting to say is like we we realize, I think we've long thought that technology was just kind of a simple checklist of here's five things to kind of write your relationship with technology and we can keep moving on. But one of the things that I'm trying to do in my work is to show that technology really isn't, it's not a separate set of issues for us to deal with as Christians. It's actually a central and animating question that undergirds so much, if not all, of modern society and contemporary society, is to think that this is an element of all of these conversations that we're having because we live in a Lulu will say a technological society where it becomes so natural. Um, as Lulu will talk about even he's kind of referencing propaganda and a lot of his work on misinform or what he would say is propaganda, what we today would talk a lot misinformation, disinformation, is that these things, technology becomes as natural as the air and food we eat or air we breathe and the food we eat. It's just natural, it's just normal. We don't really step back and question those things because as you know, David Foster Wallace said, you know, the idea of uh this is water, you can't really tell that to a fish. Like they just, this is the world in which we inhabit. And I think we're getting to the place where now we're realizing, you know, we live in this technological society that we really haven't even thought about. We've just kind of let it do its thing and we've just kind of adapted and changed our lives accordingly. And that's where I don't I want the church specifically to slow down and think about that and to evaluate these things to be as proactive. I mean, five years ago we're putting out a statement of principles on AI, and a lot of it's like, well, that's good for you. Like, I'm glad you're doing that. And had it was the Lord used that in pretty amazing ways, actually, even in secular universities and Christian universities across the nation to kind of spark the conversation. Chat GPT is an interesting test case because it's this, it's popularizing what has long been possible in the field, and it's raising questions that have long been asked, but now we're starting to ask them at kind of the societal and popular level. Um, I wish I had a simple, this is exactly what we'll do to fix it per se. And that's where at least my mind and my work has been, and my I'm gonna continue kind of down that path of how do we start to address this holistically rather than just kind of mitigating some of the symptoms along the way. And because the whether it's the AI arms race in terms of military technologies, uh, we're locked in that kind of dead heat battle with the Chinese Communist Party and the United States and who's gonna develop these technologies faster and better and deploy them widely and sell them around the world, versus questions of medicine, questions of automation and work, questions of even things like Chat GPT and pro. Like if we don't do it, someone else will. So we have to do it. And so we'll we'll just try to be ethical about it. And that's where I just it it's quite daunting, to be honest, about how we start to navigate that. And that's when I've been couraged. I mean, even like you guys having a podcast like this, this helps to push the conversation along and to tell uh brothers and sisters who are interested in these things, hey, we need you to be part of this conversation. Uh, there used to be just a very uh very few of us, kind of a really small band of uh brothers and sisters who were doing it. What now we're starting to see more and more people kind of come to the table and bring various perspectives and understandings. And I think that's been helpful to push the conversation along and to think deeply rather than just kind of symptomatic and kind of heat of the moment and gut level responses, to have that more sustained reflection about what's actually going on here.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

I think one of the things that stands out for me about digital technologies and particularly AI is the open-ended and unknown quality of them. Um and so there's very much a sense of a new platform comes out and you want to explore its possibilities. No one really knows what the effect of this thing is going to be. Um when we're talking about older technologies, um, we know what they do very clearly, and we have a lot more of a grasp upon what they what they represent in the world. But when you're talking about something like um AI, you have this period of time after its introduction where everyone is trying to work out what can this thing do, what will its effect be? And one of the expressions or the terms that gets used is AI risk. And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. Just unpacking that term risk, who has the right to impose risks upon the whole population? At what point is a risk um something that we as a society we say this should not be tolerated? But when we're talking about risk, we're also talking about the sense of doing something that has unknown effects and not being um in a position to. Be um responsible for those, not being able to be called to account. What would it look like for I don't know, for the disruptive effect, which is often a a positive term that people use in the context of these technologies? For people to be held responsible for certain disruptions that they have caused that have been deleterious to the whole of society or to key areas of society. Is there any accountability here? Is this an abdication of human sovereignty um in the process and handing it over to a sort of no man's land of technological determinism? Um is not part of the avoidance of this um loss of human agency, taking back that sovereignty and accountability that if something goes wrong we are responsible and we're the ones that will go to jail or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

Yeah, I mean that's that's a huge question, is actually something that uh the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, she wrote a really excellent book. It's a massive book, by the way, but very, very excellent. Um, called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. And she's talking about the way that um this kind of push for data and data collection. And so she's using, but she uses this, uh she's talking primarily in terms of privacy and data collection. But that kind of is one element of a much larger conversation about our technological society. But Zuboff says wisely, she said the the qu there's two main questions at stake here is who decides and then who decides who decides. That is actually kind of a preeminent question here. Um and it kind of even getting to what you're saying is who's making these decisions and then who gets to say that they get to make the decisions in terms of the, and so it always reminds me kind of what C.S. Lewis talks about in the abolition of man is the unknown kind of effects and how we're kind of um we're affecting future generations by the decisions we're making now, and that can be quite overwhelming to us. And so part of that is I what I try to talk about in my work is that cultivation of wisdom, which is not knee-jerk, it's not fast, it's actually very, very slow in an age of efficiency and speed and convenience is to slow down and to start asking some of those things. The one thing that I think is in the deterministic view, especially with Elul, um, Elul is interesting because he'll say, Um, you know, I didn't say that this is kind of an unstoppable technology, I didn't say that it's purely deterministic, and then he turns around and says, Yeah, but it's it is unless God intervenes in some miraculous way or we blow ourselves off the face of the planet, type of thing. And it's, or he says he has one other option that I forgot to mention earlier. He said, Or we just have this like all of us kind of wake up to the way that technology is shaping and forming our society, and we just all immediately change. All of which he says basically aren't going to happen. He has very, he has a very dark, kind of dystopian view of where we're heading. And I think wisely he's pulling us, and that's one of the things that I like is I always talk about we're a people of the pendulum. We're in one kind of area, the old pendulum clocks that I grew up with. Um, it's it we often overcorrect. And I think Alul is overcorrecting, but wisely pulling us away from this merely kind of instrumentalist view to say, actually, there's a lot more going on here. Um, but yeah, I mean, that's the that's the question is what is the role of government in these things? What's the role of private industry? What's the role of individuals? What's the role of society or even churches and communities in these conversations? And I wish I had a really, you know, here's the formulaic, here's the, this is exactly how we navigate it. I we just don't. And part of that it can be quite overwhelming, but there's also a lot of opportunity. And so even things like doing an interview like this, or even thinking about and writing about and reading about these technologies can start to have one of those effects of, in some ways, us kind of waking up. Interestingly enough, I actually think this started to happen in the pandemic. Of all of the terrible things that happened, we were thrust into completely digital spaces without really any moment, like just a moment's notice. It pushed us into this. And most of our society, by and large, had a very optimistic view of technology, kind of the old Silicon Valley mantra of move fast and break things. We'll just kind of wait and see what happens, type of thing. But all it's basically good. Look at the democratization of information, look at all the deep connections and community we can build. Not realizing it was often very shallow community, um, not true community. And yes, there was more information, but there was also a lot of false information being promoted, um, and that was shaping and forming us in particular ways. And so with COVID, it's interesting because I think COVID threw us into these digital spaces completely and totally, isolating us from being embodied individuals, um, and to say, no, it's just kind of this purely digital thing. So we almost we were starting to have what they known, what was known now as a tech lash, kind of a backlash against the technology industry. COVID, I think, amplified it. I think COVID actually compressed probably about 10 years, I don't know if it's an exact date, but of technological progress in terms of moral imagination of our society into about a year or two. And so we kind of come out of that and we have almost this suspicion of technology now, a good suspicion of technology and the way it's forming and shaping us. And now we're starting to see, okay, is it the role of government to form certain types of AI ethics boards and committees and certain types of industry regulations and things like that? What's the role of industry? I mean, kind of what you said earlier, Matt, in terms of uh Microsoft cutting their AI ethics team. This also has happened at Google. This has also happened at most of these major technology companies, and many we don't even know about because they're big in the AI industry. They're not as big in the popular kind of uh technology companies that we talk about every single day. So, but the and that's where you kind of get into this. Well, is it the technology industry? Do they have the responsibility? Does the government have the responsibility, or do we? And I think it's kind of an all hands-on-deck approach. Um, but many of us are just simply not equipped and aware of not only the issues, um, as you talked about with like AI risk, that's a term that's thrown out, or transparency or accountability, or fairness. You read basically any AI ethics principles, whether it's government or whatever, and they list out basically the same six or seven principles. Interestingly enough, those principles are put out, but they're never operationalized. Uh, there's not a lot of accountability that's going on in terms of how we develop and use these technologies. And that's where I think we need more of a all hands-on-deck approach to cultivate personal virtue, talk about the role and responsibility of the industry itself, as well as the role and uh responsibility of the government itself. But in such a polarized and kind of tribalized time, having a productive conversation on this is hard. Um, especially here in the United States, the left and the right are agreeing we have a problem with technology, that, but that's where the agreement ends. We have very different understandings of the problems and the solutions. Um, and that's I just I don't want to say that I have a very dystopian kind of view or I'm very pessimistic that there's gonna be a lot of change. I think there can be, um, but it's gonna start kind of at the individual level for me at least and kind of working its way up.

SPEAKER_04 51:22

I think I'm probably more dystopian and far more pessimistic than you, much more on a little side in many respects. In part because, you know, Alistair, when you were talking about the car and the sort of inevitable, seemingly inevitable unfolding of the logic of the car and the sort of pressure it enacts on a society. I think all that's right. But there were real decisions that the United States really made to organize its society around cars and not trains. Eisenhower's decision to build freeways across the country, uh, Los Angeles' decision, animated by tire companies to, you know, organize itself around the car rather than mass transit in the early 1900s. Like there, there are real decisions that get made by real individuals. And that's not to disagree with your point, Alistair, but simply to kind of rescue Alull from being framed as a kind of determinist, because it's not determinism, it's that the technological society is so intertwined and comprehensive that opting out seems impossible and that it effectively functions as a principality and power that has its own type of agency to which we are beholden, which resistance takes a different type of form, right? Um, and and opposing the principalities and powers is you know, like how do you do that? You know, it's going in one direction. And this is where I am sympathetic to something like a lull, absent a great work of God or sunspots happening or solar flares, uh, which if it happens, wipes out the United States power grid, and with it all of Silicon Valley and our whole technological society and our whole society itself, probably, right? Like if that happens, like that seems like a more likely outcome if if what we have is the building of Babel in and through our technological society and its consummation in artificial intelligence and some of these sorts of streams. So there's a there's a really cheerful, right? Like if you want pessimism, I'm the pessimist that you can come to on all these sorts of issues. Um I'll I'll happily play that role.

SPEAKER_00 53:33

And that's why I love, I actually really love Alul. Uh he's kind of he's been incredibly formative. So even though I disagree with him at times, I think he's very helpful in kind of diagnosing the problem. I don't love a lot of the solutions that he proposes, um, but I do love that kind of, and one of the things he points out, he says, given the choice between a technical and non-technical mean, we're almost always and inevitably going to choose the technical mean. And there will be a point where we don't have an option. We have two technical means, so which one are we going to choose, type of thing. And so that's where I think he's very, very helpful and enlightening to think through some of that. But it's interesting to note that even with Elul, so he's a Christian, he's a Protestant theologian and ethicist, but he's also a philosopher of tech and a sociologist. And so it's interesting to me, depending on the community you're from, you have kind of a distinct view of Elul. So if you read just the Technological Society, you don't see a lot of his faith being brought in. But then you go and read To Will or To Do and kind of his intro to ethics and things like that, and you kind of get this different side of Elul that I think is really helpful. So to me, he's one of the most fascinating philosophers of technology and someone that very early on, even as a Christian, was thinking through some of these issues. That I think it would be wise for us to go back to some of these older sources, because we kind of alluded to a very beginning, uh, there's a lot of publishing and a lot of knee-jerk reactions and simplistic type of uh takes and understandings on technology. I think going back to some of those kind of older primary sources can be really, really enlightening to help us as we seek to move forward in the real decisions that we're making every single day, especially around artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_03 55:10

I find the treatments of idolatry within the Old Testament and the New very interesting to reflect upon in the context of these new technologies, particularly AI, where people almost give it a sort of godlike status. It has massive information behind it, it's accumulated, and it can give you some sort of pronouncement on the basis of that. And make up facts and references and things along the way, but really we have uh increasing confidence in this weird intelligence which is different from our own, doesn't operate by the same principles, and there is this danger of imputing to something that's a product of our own hands a godlike status. On the other hand, there is this danger of thinking that an idol is nothing, and so you can act in whatever way you want around idol food, and in that sort of case, Paul reminds the Corinthians that there are demons involved here. Um how when dealing with a technology like AI, are we to uh take the sort of critique of idolatry which demythologizes, says it's just it's just some program that's designed by man, it's nothing um no intelligence of its own on the one hand, and then on the other hand, recognize this is a a growing principality in power and maybe a source of demonic agency in the future already.

SPEAKER_00 56:46

Yeah, one of the things that we've brought up multiple times now is the story like Tower of Babel, and that's where it's interesting. That's kind of where often our minds go in terms of technology and innovation and kind of the human pursuit of those things. I also in my first book reference uh Exodus 32 and uh the our and the golden calf. I always say that AI, I actually write that AI is kind of our new golden calf, is something we've created with our own hands, and we seek to kind of bow down and worship in some sense. Um so I play that out kind of some of those kind of biblical stories that I think actually parallel really well as we're starting to talk about artificial intelligence and the power of this technology and what it is and how it's challenging the very conception of what it means to be human. Uh, because in that book, one of the things I tried to point out was an interesting kind of irony in the AI conversation is that we we often seek to humanize our machines, give them names and faces, and treat them as if they're humans. And we have some very interesting conversations, to say the least, about robot rights and agency and treating these as individuals, even in terms of law. And I think there's some interesting conversation going on there, but I think flawed on many accounts in terms of this humanization almost of these machines. At the same respect, we dehumanize ourselves. So we're humanizing our machines and dehumanizing ourselves and treating ourselves as just these kind of materialistic beings that are just the sum of our parts type of thing. We dehumanize ourselves while we're seeking to humanize these machines. And I think that anthropological question is so key to be asking right now in light of all of the other things we've already been discussing.

SPEAKER_04 58:25

That is a great word. I'm actually going to ask a plus one about that. So if you want to hear that, you can join the merry band of patron supporters at murefidelity.com. Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a terrific conversation. In the response to all of this, if you're right that this has to be organized from the ground up, individuals taking seriously, then I think the only appropriate outcome is that everyone should quit Netflix and opt out of the technological regime entirely. So I think that's what I heard you say. That's what I'm taking away. I'm sure that's what our whole audience is taking away. Uh, but seriously, thank you. This has been a great conversation. If you have been listening, Jason Thacker is not the vice president of Ethics and Technology at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, but he does work there. Uh, we will have links to all of his work at merefidelity.com where you can also get back episodes of this podcast. Thanks to Lex Impress for sponsoring this episode and to the merry band of patron supporters. We're gonna be back in the weeks to come to think more about the word of God and the world that we live in. This has been Mere Fidelity Mutter.