Intelligence is the “complex of psychological and mental faculties that enables a person to think, understand or explain facts or actions, develop abstract models of reality, understand and be understood by others, make judgements, adapt to new circumstances, and change those circumstances when they obstruct adaptation”. Since current computer architectures (neural networks) and the software implemented are not capable of processing abstract models of reality, of generalisating, of managing randomness, and since they don’t have common sense, awareness, self-awareness or self-transcendence, it would be more appropriate to define them as devices/agents capable of assisting and cooperating with humans with some functions that can be delegated to a suitably trained automaton. Therefore, I would define devices equipped with so-called “artificial intelligence” as robotic cooperators. The much-touted trilogy of weak, strong and general AI would ascribe to such architectures the consciousness and perception of qualia (a set of subjective sensory characteristics, qualitative details inexpressible by individual perception and accessible only to the perceiving subject). This is clearly inappropriate. An architecture composed of neural networks (machine learning software), connected to robots equipped with sensors and electromechanical limbs, is certainly capable of sensitive perception regardless of the intellectual act (áisthēsis) involved. But it is hardly able to collect and organise the objects perceived within its own consciousness (ghinôskō). Áisthēsis indicates perception, experience, sensation.
To better understand the problem, it would seem that a reference to the New Testament might be helpful. Here, knowledge is mostly conveyed by the verb ghinôskō, which denotes the act of intellectual knowledge, understanding, knowing and judging. And it refers to full understanding of the reality and essence of the object under consideration. Furthermore, and again I refer to the Bible, it should be remembered that the tree God planted in the Garden of Eden (according to Genesis) was called “the tree of the knowledge (the verbal noun hadda ‘ at) [of good and evil (tôb wärä)]”. The phrase “of good and evil” was most likely a later addition. Therefore, originally, the author of this sacred text intended to forbid the fruit of the tree of “knowledge”, or rather, the tree of “complete knowledge”. When humans violate this divine prohibition and claim to push knowledge or science towards omniscience, they fall into hubris. The author of the text seems to refer to the radical evil that, in his judgment, distances humans from God. The collective AI project is growing horrendously anywhere and everywhere, any time and all the time, without constraints, and is about to cross the Pillars of Hercules towards infinite knowledge. And it may well reconnect us to the original sin of our ancestors.
Moreover, AI, subservient to transhumanist elites, could turn out to be very similar to the Tower of Babel project: “let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). Indeed, AI expresses the imperialist will of a single people/Big Tech, imposing monoglossia (a single language/a collective intelligence) as an “universal cognitive urbanisation” project to which the author finds its concrete expression in the city of Babylon. Baḅèl means “God’s door”: the noun derives from the verb bālal, which means “to mix” or “to confuse”/”to misinform”. Baḅèl is the symbol of the dominance of “one people” (Big Tech), of homogenisation (“one language”/”the relentless rationality of machines”), of uniformity, standardisation, conformity, monopoly, which compresses and suppresses identities, diversity, legitimate plurality, polyglossia, and heteroglossia. Baḅèl is the capitalism of information abuse/disinformation and the global digital surveillance of humans. Babel is the crypto algorithm of the pluriverse, profiling users in order to govern them in all their activities. Babel is the cognitive mirage of the ‘pseudo-artificial intelligence’ of the ruling classes, the reassuring totem of the common people acclimatised by the single thought of the data scientist, the god to whom people of the Tech Era religion offer their grains of incense.
,Likewise, it would be reasonable to pay heed to teachings from Ecclesiastes: “And I set my heart to know wisdom (γνῶναι σοφίαν καὶ γνῶσιν παραβολὰς) and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind. For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” (Eccl. 1:17-18). The human project of acquiring wisdom is recalled in the first phrase and in the hendiadys of the following phrase to remind us that there is a “madness of wisdom” and “folly of wisdom”. Therefore, a titanic project that abuses new digital devices/agents risks succumbing to a kind of madness and folly that resembles the allegory of the beasts in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation. The visions of the two beasts, incarnations of the dragon — a symbol of absolute evil — are emblematic of dehumanisation to the point of the destroying its creation or recreation. The beast of the Apocalypse seduces the inhabitants of the Earth. They erect a statue of it, which receives a soul and begins to speak (vv. 14-15). The animated, talking statue is a mockery of human creation. The scenario of an architecture composed of neural networks (machine learning software), implemented as talking robots equipped with sensors and electromechanical limbs, exerting an idolatrous and seductive power and threatening homo sapiens, perhaps evokes the situation described in the Book of Revelation.
The mainstream focus of techno sapiens are algorithms. With technocentrism, every problem has an algorithmic solution. But not everything is computable. Some argue that algorithms should be made capable of ethical computation through the development of algor-ethics, or that they should be forced to stop when there is a risk they might make potentially harmful decisions. Basically, intelligent software engineering should be organised in such a way as not to infringe on human rights. The aim is ethical computational logic, which operates with complex architectures but is based on silicon support that encodes the states of true/false propositional logic. It is not a question of promoting ethical AI (neural networks do not have a soul), but of promoting an ethics of AI. But the idea that an AI system could generate its own computer code and manage it in a totally autonomous way to the point of formulating its own reasoning and making decisions not foreseen by the creators of these programs looks like a complete myth or science fiction to me. The same could be said of the hypothesis that new digital devices/agents could create superintelligence by sharing knowledge they have acquired with twin machines. Could all this happen without human control? And if that ever happens, could responsibility be attributed solely to machines? Would it not be appropriate, then, to ask whether the principle of rationality can have a moral form? And whether this moral form can only be guided by scientific progress and resultant technologies? The AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) project is not feasible at the moment because of the limits of algorithmic computability and the semantic indeterminacy of syntactic phrases (John Searle). However, the applications delegated by man, driven by a Promethean ambition, dangerously run the risk, if devoid of governance, of transferring to technology the attempt to recreate man, thus causing dangerous anthropological reductionism and leading to devastating conflict between between sapiens and techno sapiens.
Bibliography
N. DI BIANCO, Intelligenza Artificiale. Un punto di vista teologico [Artificial intelligence. A theological point of view] ,la valle del tempo, Naples, 2024.
A. M. GOUW-B. P. GREEN -T. PETERS (EDD.), Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics, London 2022.
M. GRAVES, Theological Foundations for Moral Artificial Intelligence, in M. GAUDET – B. P GREEN (EDD.), Artificial Intelligence, in Journal of Moral Theology n. 11, Special Issue 1 (2022) 182-211.
S. MIDSON, Robo-Theisms and Robot-Theists. How do Robots Challenge and Reveal Notions of God? , in Implicit Religion n. 20 (2018) 299-318.
J. MITTELSTRASS, The moral substance of Science, in THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (edd.), The cultural value of Science, (Scripta varia 105) Vatican City 2003, 179-187.
S. ZUBOFF, Il capitalismo della sorveglianza. Il futuro dell’umanità nell’era dei nuovi poteri [Surveillance capitalism. The future of humanity in the age of new powers] , Luiss University Press, Rome 2019.
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