If You Don't Like Change

You’ll like irrelevance even less. 

The greatest challenge humanity will face in the next 50 years is a challenge that Christian theologians have barely begun to consider, and which Christian preaching appears to not address at all. That challenge will be the removal by artificial intelligence of many realms in which humans find unique self-worth. 

The term “artificial intelligence” really says it all in this regard. Up to today Christians have understood that their unique value within the order of creation is precisely intelligence. Traditionally the divine image in us, what sets us apart from the other creatures, is our intelligence. This neatly avoids anthropomorphizing God while setting us apart from the beasts. Indeed, when analytic philosophy is used as a means of apologetics it is through the assertion, simply put, that our minds are uniquely shaped to resonate with the existence of God and even the specifics of the Christian gospel. 

Of course we make room for variations in this characteristic. Not all minds reflect exactly the same characteristics of the divine mind. And we recognize that all humans, regardless of variations in this thing called intelligence, are recipients of God’s love. That could change. Genetic research going on today (SA Feb 2019) will develop therapies to alter structures in the brain as a cure for “diseases” and “abnormalities.” 

But just as increasing understanding and appreciation of animal intelligence is narrowing what humans can uniquely call their own in some realms, so Artificial Intelligence is reducing the realm of observation and analysis where heretofore human intelligence has been unique. We justly celebrate the human “computers” whose skills in the middle of the 20th century ushered in the age of modern science, but realistically the computer on which I type this is carrying out thousands of times more calculations in a second than an army of such “computers" could accomplish in a year. And when it comes to higher level analysis? 

Right now with relatively few inputs (my keystrokes) this laptop computer and the appropriate software can look at everything I’ve written and suggest not mere words, but complete sentences that finish my thoughts. Computer algorithms already create art (musical and visual) in almost any style that is indistinguishable by non-experts, and even experts, from that created by humans. 

But who will write those programs? Who will conceptualize them? Well the writing of many types of computer programs is already in reach of AI. Indeed software engineers depend on these virtual helpers. Conceptualizing what needs to be written is of a higher order, but is still based on analysis that can be accomplished by AI. All that AI lacks is an inner motivation to do anything at all. Once given most tasks, however complex, AI is capable of accomplishing them. And don’t think people aren’t building motivation into AI systems.

At a recent conference on AI we heard that there already exists machine intelligence that will create thousands of possible clothing designs, use virtual focus groups to test their popularity in all dimensions with various demographics, work out the processes necessary to both create the designs and market them, and finally manage the machines that create the garments and those that produce the various forms of advertisements and deploy them in various media. Robots will package them and deliver them to stores. Or when they are available online, deployed from fully automated warehouses, what’s left? Accounting in this realm is a trivial task requiring no humans - mere interactions between computers. 

The only task left for humans is to buy the product.

In short, in the long economic evolution that led from being hunters and gatherers to being producers and consumers of industrial products, to being producers and consumers of services and entertainment is leading us to become only consumers. Machines will be the producers. This is why the coming period is often referred to as the “fourth industrial revolution.” 

Naturally this poses profound economic challenges. If most of us cannot compete with machines in the market for producers how will we have enough money to purchase products to consume? The question won’t be about redistribution of wealth, but about redistribution of dwindling opportunities to produce and how we pay for supposedly "non-productive" human interactions. 

Right now, for example, we depend on volunteers for a lot of important human activities. Little league coaches, scout leaders, Sunday school teachers, community theaters, and so on. What happens when people don’t have the jobs to support leisure time volunteerism? Or must work two or three jobs reduced to minimum wage by competition with machines? The real work in our society may become that to which we currently assign no monetary value. 

And this is where Christian witness needs to rediscover its central purpose: restoring humanity to those from who it has been stolen, taken captive, held for ransom, by Sin. The challenge of the new millennia is to raise us all up as something more than mere producers and consumers. The challenge is to restore us to stewardship even as our technology relieves us of the burden of production. The challenge is to restore us to the vocation of truly being fruitful and multiplying as our technology begins provide us all our needs. 

Genesis 1 and 2 has now so often been misinterpreted by Christians that we can hardly see what is before our eyes. The first humans weren’t called to produceanything. The Garden did that. They were called to be stewards. So what could it mean to “be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth” other than to spread this stewardship over all of creation. The need to produce is a symptom of sin, not the fundamental purpose of humanity. 

Put more strongly, the child feeding her pet rabbits every day, changing their litter, and insuring that they are warm and dry is far closer to the human vocation than her parents out working to make a living. Not that their task isn’t, for the moment, necessary and even virtuous. But it isn’t a necessity that should take precedence over their real human vocation of stewardship; love of creation and one another. 

Unfortunately the church seems to have tacitly accepted that humans are defined by their capacity to produce and consume; by their value in the labor marketplace and as responders to marketing rather than to God’s calling. 

We should beware the siren call to a ministry of production for religious consumers; whether it be of new members, changed lives, worship experiences, or social services. With increasing number of Christians participating in worship through electronic media it is almost trivially easy to replace preachers, worship leaders, musicians, and so on with their virtual counterparts. Computers that already write convincing poetry and song lyrics won’t have any trouble out-preaching the average pastor, and creating an avatar indistinguishable for a real human has already been done. 

And the call to faith? To repent and follow Christ? There will be an AI in the future more effective than Billy Graham and quite possibly based on a careful analysis of his sermon content, vocal stylings, and larger institutional framework. Indeed, in the future people in search of inspiration will be able to list their top five preachers and get a sermon delivered by an artificially created amalgam of all of them, keyed particularly to their challenges, needs, and emotional trigger points. No doubt Google and Facebook are working on the app even now, as hackers insert just a little bit of perversion in the mix.

Contemporary Christianity is already halfway to being just another product on the market for transcendent meaning, and Christians to becoming consumers in that market. Even the Eucharist is now doled out in many churches in machine packed servings of grape drink and “bread.”  It is hard to see why AI’s couldn’t take us the rest of the way toward eliminating any inefficient human touch.  (And, it might be noted, leading meditation classes, conducting Hindu rituals, offering dharma instruction, chanting the sabbath prayers, and leading the Friday call to prayer.) 

Again, the growing consolidation of Christians into larger and larger, and increasingly virtual communities, would seem to make this inevitable. So we should never forget that AI’s are the only real masters of the virtual world. 

Even our social services can easily be managed, and probably more efficiently, by algorithms that measure exact need, design interventions, coordinate community resources, and with the aid of self-driving vehicles and virtual classrooms deliver it all in precisely measured quantities to communities in need. Already we are obsessed with demographics and statistics whose meaning is far better discerned by AI than mere humans. Having displaced real people with statistics why not go the whole way and let them be cared for by algorithms? 

There is another path, but only if the Christian church vigorously offers an alternative vision of humanity to that which sees us as producers and consumers of goods, services, and entertainment. Only a vigorous assertion that the primary, indeed only distinctly human vocation is the love and care of one another and creation will save humanity. Without it we will become mere animals scrabbling for the crumbs that fall off a table set and served by AI’s for tiny fragment of humans who direct their efforts for their own pleasure. 

But this will require a careful reconsideration of the mission of the church. From the beginning until today we have assumed that our social and cultural frameworks would provide the myriad human interactions that give humans immanent purpose. Economic, political, and social interactions would provide the leaven that made for fruitfulness and multiplication. All we Christians needed to provide was the spiritual seasoning, the salt that gives life a little extra flavor.  

Now, as all those immanent human purposes fall into the hands of intelligent machines we must be the first to say that the true purpose of humans is to love. Love is the real leaven that makes human societies and cultures fruitful. So we must be the community in which the sole vocation is cultivation and expression of love. Only this will make us relevant.