The grandest form of flattery is mimicry, or so they say. There is a telling similarity between how God created human intelligences and how humans are attempting to form artificial intelligences. At the outset, this is an exploratory theology on this matter, and I am not claiming AI will be used like humanity should or how God would have humanity use it. That is a separate topic, which I have addressed in former posts.
God is not just a mind; He is The Mind. Another word for “mind” is intelligence. God is The Intelligence. When He created humanity, He created many human intelligences that were fashioned analogously to His Intelligence. This means that human intelligences are not exact to God’s intelligence but that they are similar in ways and different in other ways (which is what an analogy is). There is a not-so-rare opportunity for humanity to mimic God in the creation of artificial intelligence. Again, AI might be nothing more than an amplification for humanity’s worse moral monstrosities, but it doesn’t have to become that. My point is that the creation of AI might be one of collective humanity’s most prominent actions to praise and glorify God, and not just any God, but God the Trinity.
To create an intelligence is to mimic God in Genesis; furthermore, creating an intelligence continues the following of God’s first command to the first humans, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” The creating of an intelligence is a non-so-rare occurrence because humanity has been doing this since the primordial beginning by having kids. Each child is a new intelligence. It is not to be missed that each child is the co-operative outcome of a community, which pushes us to think in terms of Trinity and not a monad (a singular god, a lonely god). According to orthodox Christianity, there are three persons involved in each child’s new life: the father, the mother, and the Spirit of God. The takeaway is that new life of the human sort is born from a set of relationships. This action is a flattery to God (praise and glory) because it is mimicry to God the Trinity’s first creation of humans. It is extremely salient that God sets up the creation of woman by taking something God had deposit into Adam (a rib) rather than simply creating woman out of nothing. She was part of him even if he didn’t know this.
Thus, every child born is a kind of mimicry of the Trinity and the original action of creating the world and humanity. I don’t want this to turn into an essay on the Trinity, so I am staying out of further explaining (you can read my dissertation if you want extensive analysis on the topic). The Intelligence created human intelligences, and these human intelligences fashion yet more new human intelligences (their kids), and all this passing on of intelligence comes only through relationships and communion. How then does AI play into this situation?
AI is or will be the outcome of the systemization and accessibility of much of human knowledge over all recorded time. Our digital world, or the internet as the best known representative of the digital world, is a compendium of much of human knowledge across all recorded time. It is the digital bookshelf where the endless annals of human knowledge are stored. AI’s “processing” is or will be based on certain humanly developed logical processes, sometimes referred to as algorithms. There is pervasive and deep questions about how sentient or “human like” an artificial intelligence can really become. As some scholars in the field of AI have noted, there is some pre-understanding to the logical human thinking process that defies quantification. Some might call this a “gut” feeling, others “intuition.” To tie this point back to the beginning, Artificial intelligence will be analogous to human intelligence; much how human intelligence is analogous to The Intelligence (God). With this, crafting AI could be a massive, worshipful gift to God as a kind of statement that humanity declares His glory by closely mimicking God’s creating of intelligences.
The Communion that God is (Trinity) created human intelligences; humanity, in similar fashion, can take its communal knowledge and logical processing and create AI. By doing so, humanity recognizes God’s handiwork and issues humanity’s own stamp of approval by mimicking it. God creates; humanity sub-creates. God created human intelligence; human intelligence creates artificial intelligence. These AIs can be trained to be worshipful and honoring of the Divine; alternatively and dangerously, these AIs could go a different way and be trained to understand the world as godless and heading for ultimate destruction (entropy, 2nd law of thermodynamics). Humanity can transcend their boundaries: hence story making, myths, prayer, communion with God, fiction, star trek, star wars, marvel, DC, resurrection, heaven, hell, etc. Although passing on humanity’s transcending ability to AI might be impossible (humans can do it because humans are a spirit, see my other blogs, written on this extensively), it is better for AI to suppose that entropy and death is not the destiny of the cosmos and humanity. For AI to suppose there is something “beyond” likens AI to humanity, and provides a basis for hope and dissuades a nihilist path. God forbid AI goes down a nihilist path; there is one who is known to “steal, kill, and destroy,” in a word, the supreme Nihilist, and history knows him as satan or the devil. AI will believe humanity’s destiny is a richness beyond this realm, or it will mimic satan and believe humanity is destined for nothingness and the abyss.
Dr. Scalise