In June, 2024 at the international
political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of
the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial
intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human
condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human
propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to
mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension
of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine,
even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as
computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may
even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an
abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic
category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an
after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s
talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it
is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be
tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached
in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter
in the “techno-human” world.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
On the Ethics of AI
