Four Lutheran Lenses to Look at an AI World

 

              A Lutheran/Augustinian definition of sin is “incurvatus in se”—to be curved in upon oneself, to be bellybutton gazers. This concept gets to the core of my worries about AI. AI is by its very nature self-referential. There is a corpus of information that the machine has been fed, and then this information is synthesized and re-synthesized; we have created AI with the sole function of re-creating information out of old information that is then fed to still more powerful AI so it can “learn.” Since I first got an inkling of how this process would work back in the late 2000s and looked into it a little more while writing Silicon Soul in 2015, there has been a little Lutheran alarm bell going off louder and louder in the back of my brain. We’re creating a thing curved in upon itself. If “original sin” in Scripture is tied to gobbling an apple, the “original sin” of AI is the snake gobbling its own tail.

              Fundamentally the 10 commandments are about idolatry. Those things we fear and are in awe of, those things we love and in which we put our trust, that aren’t God, are idols. Out of misplaced love, we will commit adultery; out of misplaced fear we will murder; out of misplaced trust, we will witness falsely against our neighbors. As John Calvin once opined, “humans are idol makers.” And it would be foolish to assume these old verities don’t apply in the age of AI. AI’s ability to mirror us and the sycophantic “personalities” with which they are programmed can be confused with loving relationships. AI’s seeming objectivity is seemingly trustworthy. The edge it promises to give us, and any corporation that adopts it completely, surely that can relieve our anxieties and our fears! If humans are made in the image of God, and AI is a remix of the image of humanity, then a simulacrum of a summation of Man will surely be the image of ambiguous awe! AI is a compelling funhouse mirror easily put on a pedestal, perhaps to be worshipped, invested with our fear, awe, love, and trust.

              One of the challenges of algorithms is that they encourage us to lie, or at least broadly believe the worst of those not within our information silos. I believe breaking the 8^th commandment will be even easier as we embrace AI technology. Self-referential machines, spitting out truths that are just probable next words and pixels harvested from the Aether of the internet, assumed to be omnipotent oracles, programmed to anticipate the answers the questioner desires, programmed to increase engagement and use—that’s a danger to truth. As we offload thinking (there is already talk of creating units of thinking, to help with billing of AI services rendered) buying an idea or line of logic, we will get further and further away from the actual struggle to discover what is true, and become alienated from thought itself. I’ve already run across the frustrating, John Henry-esque, experience of reading through documents with people who are using AI, and having AI assessments weighed more heavily than the actual words on the page and how the words have been used in the real world. At a certain point it feels like gaslighting, AI claiming there are five lights, when I can see with my fleshy human eyes that there are only four. In short, as we enter an AI future, answers and the seeking after truth may drift apart, and that’s not even getting into “Deepfakes” or anything on that end of the 8^th commandment.

              Finally, it is worth talking about vocations, that is, the web of roles, relationships, and responsibilities where we can regularly experience and practice our baptized identity. A life calling is not simply for the ordained or rostered minister, but for everyone. Our jobs and professions ought to profess something about the God in whom we put our trust; the way we care for our neighbors points to Christ who cares for us; the duties and joys we take on in community point to the joyous communion we have with God. And we’ve been told that AI will eliminate a wide array of jobs, it’ll do to lawyers, doctors, teachers, and administrators what automation did to the Union class. Additionally, the goal of AI is to create a frictionless life, ease to the point at which AI, not our human connections, will provide for our every need. This is a vocation-less life, called into the self-referential miasma of statistical prediction, instead of community. The ultimate vision of AI is the elimination of jobs and community, two areas where we get to be Christians in hard and meaningful ways. I worry ubiquitous AI will form people to ignore and lose their vocations, foisting upon folks a scriptless, lonely, and irresponsible life.

              So, those are particularly Lutheran concepts that I think rub up against AI in some interesting ways. Here is another Lutheran Perspective on AI, or at least reading of the Pope’s Encyclical. “why does the human person seek out the machine precisely where it relieves them without judging them — consoles without standing surety — and answers without ever pronouncing absolution?”

I’ll continue to poke at this subject, after all I’m the guy who wrote a resolution on AI.