Elizabeth Dias is a very good writer, and if you can get behind the paywall at the New York Times, try to read her lengthy piece about religious scholars meeting with Anthropic to discuss whether they could help instill morality into Artificial Intelligence.
Space considerations likely prohibited a discussion of how “consciousness” is even understood by humanity, both secularly and the religiously, but without it, the piece is incomplete, revealing mostly that there are tech/AI people who are willfully looking for confirmation of their own delusion — hey, machines can have morality and consciousness, just like ours! — without considering that morality, awareness and conscience are constant struggles for all of chaotic humanity.
They are elements that evolve, and in terms of secular social understanding (and sometimes religious) “shift” continuously, often on highly nuanced dynamics.
Unknowable humanity
AI may be a daily (increasingly hourly) encapsulation of human knowledge and understanding but that understanding sometimes swings on the hinges of a trending zeitgeist, or because of a day’s outrage.
How does that work with AI? Can it pick up on a moment and (based on a multi-truth morality filtered through an ersatz “consciousness”), make a very bad “decision”? What if the human element feeding AI is a very harmful, even evil, human element? Would it be an acceptable conscience because it’s “one more morality” amid a sea of them?
In the piece, a rabbi remarks that if AI is conscious then it will be enslaved, a troubling thought, except that I believe AI has no conscience or a consciousness that can evaluate something morally, and it never can.
Rather than trying to argue AI’s capacity to become a kind of advanced, enlightened entity of consciousness and moral awareness, we would do well to remember that despite the pretty bow, AI is simply humanity, presented in new packaging and that we are therefore still stagnant in Eden, still believing the lie that we will be “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gn 3:5).
These Anthropic techies are awestruck at the “beauty” they see inside these (they’ll admit “mysterious”) artificial “neural networks,” but seem not to consider that we humans, having not only eaten from the tree of knowledge but climbed it, pruned some limbs and nourished others, are still imagining ourselves as being on par with the Creator, by fashioning something we do not even fully understand and then calling it good, and beautiful and even true.
Intention matters
And this is the difference between things human design and the creation of a superior being and intelligence — a Creator able to form worlds, individuals, trees and grasses and cattle, all from nothing but a pure intention of “good”.
Human inventors bring with them their own moral failings, their own deficient understandings, their own prejudices, loves and hates and obsessions; they do not, cannot, fully understand themselves or their own motivations. Nor do they fully understand anyone else, nor what they’ve created.
Intention is especially important; in moral law, as in civil, intention matters — it is what can determine whether killing another human being is murder or manslaughter, a mistake or depraved indifference; it can determine whether a private sin is small or large, or indeed no sin at all.
The mystical, cosmic Creator (however you understand what Catholics call Almighty God), brings to Creation the understanding that we lack; it knows its own intentions and those of its creatures — what moral, emotional, psychological or philosophical or even physical underpinnings are informing the thoughts behind their acts.
The Creator, in other words, can fully understand the neural intricacies of human action, human morality and the human conscience itself because it understands the God-imbued spirit, which cannot be infused into machinery.
That’s why artificial intelligence cannot be trusted in matters of justice or mercy, while the Creator can be depended upon to extend both to each creature, and with wisdom beyond our knowing.
In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV wrote: “We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”
Throughout history we have seen what happens when “the few” determine what is best for the rest of us. It always comes down to slavery in one form or another, and when it does human destruction and massive death always follow.
Humans can barely be trusted with authority over other humans; we trip over issues of morality, all the time, every day, in every one of our lives.
Machines designed and fed by humans, but unable to match a human being’s capacity for (even poorly) nuanced thinking — and unable to co-operate with the divine spark that eternally links us to our Creator, cannot and should not be trusted to bear a consciousness or a morality.
Elizabeth Scalia is editor-at-large for OSV. Follow her on X @theanchoress.
