This is an adapted excerpt from Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith (Regnery, October 15).
With the award of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics to a pair of researchers in the field of machine learning, it’s coming to look as if the future truly does belong to AI. But what kind of future?
Widespread anxiety that machines will outstrip or replace humanity altogether are a natural outgrowth of a philosophy that has been gaining in currency at least since the days when Alan Turing, forefather of modern computing, suggested that human beings are functionally indistinguishable from highly functioning machines. If it’s true that we are merely biological processing units, then humanity is long overdue for an upgrade.
For the machines, at least, the upgrades have come thick and fast. Computer technology has soared to staggering heights of sophistication and complexity. Ever since the internet linked computer to computer at unheard-of speeds, these imitation minds have come to seem as if they could do almost anything.
As the personal computer caught on, the average household found itself occupied by a wakeful robotic sentinel, a box of unknown mathematical procedures hiding behind a colorful screen. “It’s an alien life form,” said the rock star David Bowie of the internet in 1999. The more indispensable they became, the more inscrutable computers were to their average user, the elaborate architecture of their programming hidden and compressed within the recesses of their sleek bodies.
It seemed they could do everything mankind had dreamed of doing all these years: they could share information across great stretches of space and commune with one another in an instant. The simplest of them could assimilate great troves of data that would dumbfound the human mind, sorting through it with the impartial rigor of mathematical logic. Computers assessed the world without the distorting mediation of passion or desire, just as the heralds of the scientific age had longed to do. Their only imperatives were those of necessity.
In the wake of these epoch-making developments, the old longing for a sublime fusion between man and machine has today taken on a kind of messianic fervor. “Our species has been rapidly acquiring superpowers in the form of unprecedented levels of control over our bodies, brains, built environments and ecosystems,” writes Elise Bohan of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. Just as Karl Marx predicted, humanity has risen up to reshape its environment in the image of its machines — and now, say the prophets of the cyborg future, man himself must become the object of his own unsparing optimization. “We’re loath to admit it, but the world is not set up for ape-brained meatsacks any more,” declares Bohan. “We’ve seeded an extra-human layer of thought. . . . The next step is to bring it to life.” These are no longer the fever dreams of a few tech enthusiasts or Soviet fanatics.
Transhumanism — the promise of a new generation with bodies and minds enhanced by machine technology — has become a millenarian aspiration among the magnates of the world. In 2022, President Joe Biden’s White House announced via executive order its intention to invest in technology that will make its wielders “able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers” so as to “unlock the power of biological data.” If man is a prototype computer, constructed from the raw materials of an uncaring nature, then his destiny is to update himself into eternity. Stretching out his hands to touch the blessed diodes of his most cherished creations, he will slot himself at last into the coiling network of information and electricity that is already snaking through the air and earth all around him.
As artificial intelligence programs have learned to mimic human language and creative output to an eerie degree of specificity, these kinds of predictions have only become more dramatic and extreme. One acolyte foretold the coming of programs that can store and process infinite knowledge: “WE ARE CREATING GOD WHAT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND.” Elon Musk, one of the world’s best-known advocates of the man-machine merger, replied: “Exactly.”
This dream is fast becoming a nightmare. For all the promises of liberation and triumph, our bodies and brains have not responded well to our efforts at treating them like first-generation meat computers. No matter how finely we calibrate our hormone levels with pills and injections, our existential despair and unease only deepen. Swapping out genitals and body parts like plug-ins and accessories has not yielded promising results. Transgender surgeries, which one enthusiast hoped would break a “lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human,” have instead worsened that curse unspeakably, leaving patients to suffer through infection and daily agony. And as artificial intelligence takes on levels of complexity that even its creators can’t predict or control, dire misgivings about its destructive potential have started to take hold. Because if we are simply suboptimal versions of our own machines, why should they meld with us at all? Why shouldn’t they enslave us, or scrap us for parts, or simply do away with us?
If the long-awaited advent of the cyborg world is upon us, we will be forced to consider whether this is really what we want — and what other choice we may have. Struggling like butterflies pinned to a circuit board, the skeptics among us are looking for some way out of a world made cruelly flawless by our own inventions. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a pioneer in the development of artificial intelligence, described his fears for what the technology might become: without the right stop-gaps, he wrote, we will end up with a situation in which “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” But this grim future is far from inevitable. It only feels that way to some of us because of ideas we inherited from men like Pierre-Simon Laplace and Karl Marx, who taught us to think of the world as a machine with a ghost inside called humanity—a ghost destined to evaporate, leaving behind only the ceaseless grinding of gears.
But these ideas are hopelessly outdated. Our philosophical assumptions about science are hundreds of years old. They have not kept pace with scientific knowledge — indeed, not even many AI visionaries (or dystopians) seem to understand this. We still think in terms of matter in motion, of atoms and energy, tiny chunks of material colliding, attracting, and repelling in an endless cosmic flow. And so of course we cannot see what should separate or protect us from our robot children.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that “mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” More than a hundred years later, this attitude persists in the back of our minds, like programming we can’t control: numbers are the most sublime truth, and matter is the most real thing.
But deep as these convictions have sunk into our bones, they have not proved correct. All these years, the very science that brought us the steam engine and the digital computer has been teaching us more about both matter and mind than has been incorporated into our popular understanding. The world is far more than a machine; the brain is something different altogether from a computer. These facts have been evident in the scientific record itself for decades. A rich white light has been streaming into what we thought was the metal prison of a purely material world — only we haven’t yet raised our eyes to see it.
The way out of our anxiety about humanity’s future is not to hearken back to a prescientific age, but to look ahead at what science is actually revealing to us, which is not the well-established mythology of matter. The discoveries of physics point to a more humanizing vision of the world — if we can take stock of all that they imply. We know more than we have yet realized, and our next enlightenment will be far more profound than the last.
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