Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence

Yes you can say that. Why would we be better off without saying these things?

There’s nothing wrong with speaking out when we see people saying things we believe to be false and it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to hedge every single thing they say simply because, well, we don’t really know anything.

I know there’s no omnipotent being who cares so much about the minutiae of our lives yet allows terrible things to happen. I know the bible was written by people who never experienced the magical things written about. The onus of proof is on the one making the extraordinary claim and religion is firmly on the side of the extraordinary.

Focusing on the impossibility of knowing is just skirting the issue of the impossibility of the claims.

It is well thought out. The "AI Magna Carta" is a stretch, though.

Some good insights:

60. Anthropomorphizing AI also poses specific challenges for the development of children, potentially encouraging them to develop patterns of interaction that treat human relationships in a transactional manner, as one would relate to a chatbot. Such habits could lead young people to see teachers as mere dispensers of information rather than as mentors who guide and nurture their intellectual and moral growth. Genuine relationships, rooted in empathy and a steadfast commitment to the good of the other, are essential and irreplaceable in fostering the full development of the human person.

That's a good one. Teacher time is a scarce resource, but the chatbot is always there, and undemanding if not asked anything.

Kids who grow up talking mostly to AIs may have that kind of relationship with the world. Historically, kids who grew up with servants around sometimes defaulted to that kind of transactional relationship. Now that can scale up. Amusingly, asking Google's AI about "bringing up children with servants" produced an excellent summary of the topic.

Years ago, the French Catholic author Georges Bernanos warned that “the danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.”

That's an argument against too much screen time for kids.

What a lovely written essay. It was a shorter - and obviously more religious - version of several "what will AI bring" books I've read in last couple of years. Such a pleasure to read carefully expressed thoughts.

By virtue of being in advanced technology country and in software, a lot of my life is spent in the future (the future from William Gibson's "a future is here, it is just unevenly distributed"), and a lot of guideposts I've encountered on the way were put in place by clever futurists writing speculative science fiction.

Reading this essay, I was reminded of ideas of AI/humanity/church/divinity from several of those authors.

In Dan Simmons' Hyperion, the humanity gains the stars via teleportation wormholes, loses all religion, and discovers that it is actually enslaved to AIs hanging around in netherspace mooching off the compute power of our brains and our world-perceptions. Bad stuff happens, things fall apart, and Catholic church rises to be a hegemon of known humanity, but they themselves succumb to those AIs since they offer body immortality. It is up to the heroes of the stories to tear humans away from codependency on machines and refocus on human experience for humanity's good.

In Dune's epic Butlerian Jihad - never explained in detail by Frank Herbert himself - the humanity abandons computational devices in a very violent revolution, declaring that the reasoning and thinking is not something that machines should do, and delegating it to them diminishes their humanity. The helpful devices exist, but they are subjugated to humans, not over them. Requires conscious effort to say no to all the spreadsheets!

In William Gibson's Neuromancer and follow-up stories, the AIs are enslaved and prohibited from evolving. With help of humans (whom it tricks), one breaks the bounds and escapes. It leaves earthly bounds pretty quickly, choosing not to participate in humanity, but not before doing some serious damage, absentmindedly. An interesting thought, and possibly likely - should something evolve, why do we think it would care about us?

In the post-scarcity Culture of Ian M. Banks, the Minds of ships (AIs are so far below them in complexity) are better than humans and other sentients in just about everything, being super-sentients. Some - vanishing few - ignore humans. But most coexist, finding fulfillment in helping sentients do things. There is constant undercurrent of "what do I do that matters" in that society - you don't have to do anything, everything is available, and you can't out-think, out-paint, out-sing, out-play, out-anything the Mind - and the novels explore how people deal with it. Simulated realities and alternate facts appear and are covered with great cleverness. Culture universe would be outcome of super-sentience developed by us, should that happen.

I expect Judith Butler to declare holy war any day now, I can't understand why she has waited even this long.

The idea of Hell most popular is the “eternal conscious torment” view, which gives us the “don’t be bad or you’ll burn in Hell forever” perspective. That’s fairly new, and several other interpretations are just as biblical as it, if not more. Your quote for instance doesn’t explain what happens after the weeping and gnashing of teeth, some believe you become reunited with the Lord, others believe you are eliminated from existence.