Be not afeard.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about Shakespeare and artificial intelligence.  You’d think that would be that, but no.  AI will not let be.  In the last few weeks, AI has again moved to the center of the national conversation, and so once again I am summoning Will to apply to the artificial his 400-year-old natural intelligence. 

Here are some thoughts to add to the prior post:

First, AI is an incredibly powerful tool and will touch all our lives, mostly, one hopes, for the better.  It can make our days more productive, help solve intractable problems, and, by freeing us from the mundane, give us an extraordinary opportunity to grow as human beings.  Whether that happens depends on us and our commitment to use the AI tool to make of ourselves – not the machines – something great and worthy.  Shakespeare would say (Richard II):  “The means that heaven yields must be embraced / And not neglected.”

Second, the men and women who are creating AI’s infrastructure are brilliant.  It is a testament to their brilliance (and growing power) that they can arrange an audience with none other than Pope Leo.  But there’s another, stranger side to all this:  the AI titans used their papal audience to argue fruitlessly that the Church should recognize that their computer program is a conscious being and, indeed, that it has a soul.  The papal audience was part of an ongoing effort by Anthropic and other AI companies to convince religious leaders that AI models represent a new kind of living, thinking being.

This proposition – that the AI companies have created a sentient and ensouled being – is of a piece with their warnings that they are creating superpowered AI entities that will destroy humanity in the next three years. I am not in the same intellectual league with the founders of these companies, but these propositions strike me as defiance of common sense.  AI programs are immensely complex algorithms, but that is not the same as life or consciousness.  At best, they mimic consciousness, which is, in the Pope’s words regarding art, “ontologically different.”   We know life and the mind when we see them, and AI is neither life nor mind.  If we begin to think otherwise, and believe we have created a new being, we will find ourselves well down the road to one of the greatest examples of hubris in human history.  All of that history – from the Bible to the Ancient Greeks to Shakespeare – gives an ominous warning to human beings who possess such hubris.  Shakespeare would say (Troilus and Cressida):  “He that is proud eats up himself.”

Third, AI may be little more than an extraordinarily sophisticated tool, but that does not imply that it is utterly benign.  One can imagine a terrible day of unintended consequences when an evolving AI algorithm pursues a beneficial task in a way that causes real human suffering.  The machine, being mindless, would not even be aware that its actions in pursuit of its assigned goal were destructive.  But more importantly, as with all powerful things, the greatest threat of AI is found in the darkness of the human heart.  Like every human tool from the first hammer to the internet, it can, and undoubtedly will, be misused by human beings to exploit others for evil ends.  Shakespeare would say (Julius Caesar):  “Th' abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.”

The possibilities of AI are extraordinary, and we should find hope in its ability to help us meet the most vexing challenges of our lives.  But its threats are not insignificant, and we need more real (human) wisdom to direct its development and deployment without blunting its innovative possibilities.  That wisdom is found the ancient things:  in faith, philosophy, and our cultural heritage. It is found especially in the writings of people like William Shakespeare.

I’d like to think you can distill some of Shakespeare’s philosophy and wisdom from my book, A Memorable Honor:  Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the Art of Leadership.  Order today on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Until next time (unless vengeful robots read this post and come to my door to smash my computer).

Frank

P. S. If you haven’t done so, please add your name to the “Who Art Thou” link below to receive updates on A Memorable Honor:  Shakespeare, Lincoln and the Art of Leadership.