Ahead of Ourselves
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s new book takes seriously the ethical precarity of an AI-inundated world.
Review by Moriah Hawkins
On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay, an AI chatbot described as an experiment in “conversational understanding,” on Twitter. The bot was designed to interact with and learn from Twitter users via machine learning algorithms. The premise was simple: what Tay tweeted would reflect what it had read and processed on Twitter. The hypothesis was that as the bot chatted with users, its conversational abilities ought to improve such that it became a more natural conversationalist, capable of understanding varied and innumerable inputs. Yet within sixteen hours of its launch, Tay had denied the Holocaust, advocated for genocide, and spewed sexism across the platform. Microsoft engineers, seemingly having gotten ahead of themselves, were left with no choice other than to shut it down.
Our world is plagued with similarly maladapted artificial intelligence. When optics research scientist Janelle Shane trained a neural network to write recipes, it delivered for her such delicacies as “Completely Meat Chocolate Pie,” “Whole Chicken Cookies,” and “Crockpot Cold Water.” It is often the case, though, that the outworkings of AI and machine learning are more depressing than they are perplexing, darkly humorous, or, in the case of the recipe bot, kind of cute. PredPol, a predictive policing company, uses AI to draw on data of past crimes to predict where new crimes will take place, highlighting whole neighborhoods in red for local police and effectively marking the residents therein as suspects simply because of where they call home. Other algorithms are used to determine a defendant’s likelihood of recidivism. One such algorithm, COMPAS, was launched into the public eye in 2017 during the trial of Eric Loomis, whose sentence to six years in prison was informed by COMPAS technology. When Loomis asked for an explanation of the criteria that were used to determine his sentence, he was informed that he wasn’t allowed to question the algorithm’s decision.
In God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn takes as her subject the ethical precarity of an AI-inundated world, as well as the many mysteries of our human existence and its future. As an ex-fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute–educated former homeschooler with an MFA, O’Gieblyn might not at first glance seem the best candidate for tinkering with our machine present. But there are, in fact, few better than O’Gieblyn to memorialize where we have been, and much more menacingly, where we might be going, in relation to technology. Her personal history, which involves discovering transhumanist philosophy just as she was losing her faith, gives her a perceptive edge as a critic of both religion and our ever-adapting technologies. She cites from the Book of Job and Thomas Aquinas as confidently as she quotes Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk.
Questions once restricted to the realm of philosophers and theologians now sit squarely in the realm of AI and IT.
O’Gieblyn also draws on the work of Norbert Wiener, who wrote in his 1964 book God & Golem that emerging technologies ask fundamentally religious questions. Wiener takes as one case study Samuel’s machine, a checkers-playing computer that was able eventually to beat its inventor at the game. When machines can outsmart their inventors, argue Wiener and O’Gieblyn, the entire framework of Judeo-Christian religion is compromised. That is, it is no longer safe to assume that a creator is always more competent and capable than its creation. Wiener argues from the first chapter of Job that God “played a game” with Satan, his creature, knowing that he “may very well lose.” It is with this example in mind that he concludes machine builders ought to acknowledge that unbroken “wins” for a creator are not an absolute given.
But O’Gieblyn’s analysis moves in a different direction than Wiener’s. She by contrast sees the machines and algorithms that surround us not as corresponding to the devil as depicted in the Job story, but to an “absolute sovereign who demands blind submission.” That is, God hasn’t lost a game: God has been usurped, and this new sovereign has no mercy for its subjects. As technological advancements in machine learning become more integrated into our lives via airport security software, credit applications, and medical labs (to name just a small fraction of possible examples), many people—like Eric Loomis above—will “find themselves in a position much like Job’s, denied the right to know why they were refused a loan or fired from a job or given a likelihood of developing cancer.”
Alongside O’Gieblyn’s pointed questions about where technology is going, there’s another eerie concern about our own trajectory. Questions once restricted to the realm of philosophers and theologians—immortality, free will, the mind’s relationship to the body—now sit squarely in the realm of AI and IT. And though O’Gieblyn confesses that she sees herself as “more or less a machine” and believes that “all the eternal questions have become engineering problems,” her grappling with these questions is, predictably, spiritual. She traces from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who prophesied of the “Omega Point,” at which he claimed all humanity would spiral toward a single universal mind and bring about the eschaton) to Elon Musk, whose 2019 startup, Neuralink, seeks to connect human brains to computers via fibers inserted directly into the skull. He hopes that this technology will help humans to live forever: “If your biological self dies, you can upload into a new unit. Literally.” Other advocates of mind uploading as immortality insist that in the future, the self need not even die before uploading into a new unit—some even envision that the ideal form of existence will take place entirely in the cloud.
Both the transhumanist and the Christian await something they expect will be, simply put, better.
Many transhumanist thinkers echo what the biblical prophets have to tell us about resurrection. A crude summary of both visions would read like this: dead people rise, the world is made new, and humans are transformed into immortal beings. It is appropriate, then, that in this volume O’Gieblyn analyzes the claims of transhumanist philosophy alongside Christian perspectives on immortality and the afterlife. To be a Christian is after all to long to escape this earthly vale of tears, to look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Both the transhumanist and the Christian await something they expect will be, simply put, better.
In his poetic dramatization of the afterlife, The Divine Comedy, Dante reaches heaven and struggles to describe his vision of the resurrected body. As he strives to detail an experience his audience cannot know, he opts for “trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria,” translated into English in 1814 by Henry Francis Cary as “words cannot tell of that transhuman change.” One can’t read O’Gieblyn’s book without experiencing a strange shiver down the spine, for “words cannot tell” where artificial intelligence and transhumanist ideology are taking us, or how these ideas will continue to shift and shape our reality in the years to come.
As for me, I think something far more glorious than what Musk proposes lies ahead. In the meantime, I continue here, dreaming that the more immediate future is one in which stricter regulations are placed upon the construction of and use of AI, and hoping that we do not—once again—get too far ahead of ourselves.
Moriah Hawkins is Program Manager of the Augustine Collective, a network of undergraduate journals of Christian thought, and Managing Editor of Fare Forward.
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning was published by Doubleday on August 24, 2021. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
