AI vs. Human
Artificial Intelligence is pretty amazing. Certainly a lot of people with money are investing in it, worried that if they don’t, they and their products will be left behind and swept away. I’ve played some chess games against computer programs, which I don’t think were even AI generated, and I learned quickly how I stand next to a good program. I was check-mated me over and over, usually in about 20 moves. Pretty humbling.
But we need to be mindful of AI limitations. This is an AI-generated response to the question: “How does AI recognize the difference between good and bad information?” “It’s important to remember that AI models…are essentially statistical pattern-matching machines. This means that they can make mistakes and that their ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ information is limited by the quality and breadth of the data they are trained on. For example, an AI might be fooled by a sophisticated piece of misinformation that uses similar language patterns to factual information.” That seems like a right answer to me. Of course, I cannot be sure because the AI source might have been fooled by right-sounding data.
This doesn’t mean we should discard AI. Humans also are beset with the problem of recognizing the difference between good information and bad. In fact, I would argue that this problem gets us very close to the most fundamental of all human problems, namely, the capacity to recognize the Truth when he stands in front of us and looks us in the eye. AI is a human product. This means it will always be corrupted by human thought. Let us see it as it is: a sophisticated “hammer”, and keep it mind that just because we have a hammer does not mean that all problems are nails.
It’s also worth taking a moment to consider the difference between human beings and AI. Here’s my layman’s idea of what AI is: an easily accessed super-library of information. Humans are good repositories of information, but our memories are limited both in capacity and quality. AI easily beats humans in this particular way, but humans are far more than answer machines.
People have “feelings”. “Feelings” can mean different things but the word is most often used in reference to emotions. What are emotions? One idea is that they are physiological manifestations of value judgments. If my wife wrecked the car and called me on the phone to tell me about it, if my first question was, “How bad is the car?” instead of, “Are you okay?” this might well set off a flood of tears from her. (“He values that stupid car more than he values me!”) God has put into all humans a sense of valuation. We constantly make value judgments about all we see. It drives what we decide to do with our time.
In a similar way, God designed us to evaluate everything on moral bases. The war between the Left and the Right in this country is a battle over defining morality. Both sides look down on the other for their moral inferiority. (Of course, the habit of looking down on the moral failures of others is not a strong indicator of moral maturity. I would also argue that neither side has done well in coming to grips with what morality actually is.) The point is, God has designed us to be keenly aware of the moral implications of our decisions, our words and our thoughts. We can be horribly wrong in terms of understanding true morality, but we can’t escape our nature as moral judges.
Another human inclination is operational evaluation. We like to know how things work. Some of us want to tinker with the machines until we know all there is to know about them; some of us want to know no more than what we need to know to make the thing do what we want it to do. Still, it is a human characteristic to be curious about how things operate.
Humans have the need to contribute. We want to build, we want to create, we want to help other people. We can’t help it. We are fulfilled by these things.
Humans are very interested in stories. There is something in us that is attracted to conflict, to overcoming, and to seeing a plot through from beginning to end. Perhaps we are story writers. Perhaps we recognize that each one of us writes a story with his or her own life. Perhaps we recognize that we are all part of the grand story of human history. We all have assigned some explanation for it and we order our lives in accordance with our explanations. Some say it doesn’t matter what explanation we come up with; others argue that it is crucial that our explanations line up with reality.
Humans are embodied. We experience joys and frustrations and pain through the exercise of our physical capacities. We are not brains on sticks. Our thought processes are intermingled with our bodily functions.
Humans long for human contact. We long for intimacy, for friendship, for being understood and accepted. Lots of us like to be alone much of the time but none of us want to be alone all the time. We are made for relationships.
Finally, Augustine, said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” I’m sure people don’t all feel the presence of God in the same way; I’m sure they don’t all feel the absence of God in the same way. Perhaps this is the great lament of the human race: that though we sense God all around us, since the Fall we are also keenly aware of his absence.
To sum up, if your in the hunt for factoids, AI is pretty useful. But there is something truly artificial about Artificial Intelligence. In contrast, humans are multi-dimensional, full of surprises, and have the potential to be a lot like God.
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