SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Artificial Intelligence

Is artificial intelligence good or dangerous? It depends on what exactly one means by "artificial intelligence" (or "AI"). The "artificial" part is pretty unambiguous: it means that we (humans) have created it ourselves, rather than discovered an instance of it in nature. So the really thorny part of this concept is what is meant by "intelligence." There are basically two kinds of "intelligence" that AI researchers distinguish between: weak AI and strong AI. Strong AI is what most people think of when they read science fiction which discusses AI: it means that a computer, created by humans, can do any cognitive tasks (i.e., solve any problems) which human beings can. It involves consciousness and perception of the outside world, in the same sense that God created us to perceive the world. Weak AI, on the other hand, refers to computers which can only perform tasks within a small range encompassed by human abilities. Generally speaking, weak AI machines can only do a few of the things humans can, and then only by way of imitation. Strong AI is only a theoretical concept at the moment; no one even claims to have been able to generate such a machine, and doing so is still a long way off. All modern day examples of AI are of the weak variety, and are not genuine examples of consciousness or self-awareness.

A good example of weak AI is the iPhone application "Siri." Siri is in no sense of the term self-aware or conscious. Rather, "she" is a program intended to imitate the way a human being would traditionally function in the same role. It is truly impressive the extent to which human activity can be emulated by such a program. The essential idea is to mathematically model human techniques of reasoning, and teach the computer to respond in pre-programmed ways to given stimuli. For example, when asking Siri for directions, people will almost always begin the question with "where is..." or "how do I get to...", meaning that Siri can use speech recognition to know when a person is asking a question of this sort. Everything that follows the opening words of the question is then treated as the place that the person need directions to, and Siri conducts a Google search to find out the best way to get to that place. All of this is relatively easy to teach a computer to do, and there are many more techniques for expanding Siri's ability to answer even more difficult questions. The important point to realize is that none of these techniques involves Siri thinking for "herself"; "she" is merely a machine which has been programmed to handle pre-specified forms of human interaction in as general a way as possible. Siri is completely incapable of doing anything except exactly what "she" has been programmed to do, so don't expect "her" to voluntarily order you a pizza any time soon.

So all currently existing examples of (weak) AI are basically just glorified computer programming, and are therefore perfectly compatible with belief in Scripture. Things start to get a little sticky when we ask questions about strong AI. In particular, is it even possible?

Before I try to answer this question from a Christian perspective, let me first note why the idea itself is even plausible to many people. Since most scientists believe that life (including human beings) originated and evolved, unassisted by any higher Intelligence, from completely physical substances by undirected, entirely natural processes, the expectation is that we should be able to replicate this purely physical procedure in some sense today. On this view (known in various circles as naturalism or materialism), the human brain is nothing more than a highly advanced, incredibly complex super-computer which arose ultimately as a result of stochastic processes operating over extremely long periods of time. If this is the case, then one would expect to be able to create other computers like it, given sufficient time and resources. This is the goal of the strong AI program: to create consciousness from purely physical materials and by means of purely physical processes, just as evolution is thought to have "created" human consciousness. So, on the naturalistic worldview, it must be possible to produce consciousness from raw matter, since this is, after all, how we got here.

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Published 6-27-16