OpenAI (chatGPT’s parent company) exists to develop ‘Skynet’-level Artificial Intelligence.[1] Or more specifically, a safe version of AI as intelligent as Skynet. In their founding charter, they write:
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI.
And if the recent ousting then return of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is any indication, they’re making progress. The ABC reported on Sunday:
Ahead of Altman’s ousting, several staff researchers wrote to the board of directors warning of a powerful discovery that they said could threaten humanity, according to Reuters. The discovery is believed to be something called project Q*, or Q star. Some at OpenAI believe Q* could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to the report.
And just as intriguingly, the day before he was ousted, Altman made these comments at the APEC summit: “Just in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten to be in the room, when we … push[ed] the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward”. What has OpenAI’s ‘Q star’ achieved? What did Altman see in that room? Has OpenAI just made a breakthrough in developing Skynet-level Artificial Intelligence? These are intriguing questions that we’ll hopefully find out soon enough.
There are other urgent questions that the push for AGI raises, such as: what will happen if/when AGI is developed? What are the benefits? What are the dangers? But let’s take a step back, and ask an even more basic question: where is the push for Skynet-level AI coming from?
The Surface Level Answer: Money
There is a massive financial incentive to develop AGI. AI is the hottest tech product in town. We are in a digital gold rush, with billions of dollars being invested into companies like OpenAI. Google, Microsoft and Meta are also spending billions developing their own AI, or investing in other AI companies. This provides enormous motivation for companies like OpenAI to charge ahead—and fire board members that stand in the way of rapid progress.
A Deeper Answer: Seeing the World as a Machine We Can Control
The Western worldview has shifted dramatically over the past few centuries. The Christianised worldview saw nature as having intrinsic worth and meaning given to it by its Creator. This has now been increasingly displaced by a ‘disenchanted’ worldview, where the universe has no intrinsic value, and we are free to manipulate it as we see fit.
Christian author and commentator Craig Gay describes it this way:
[Modern Westerners have] a peculiar view of the world. That view sees nature, including human nature, as a vast and elaborate mechanism that differs from automatic machine technology in degree but not in kind … That outlook continues to place a high value upon taking rational and efficacious control of all things by way of methods, procedures, techniques and technologies.[2]
Or as Richard Dawkins puts it:
The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is.[3]
Our scientists and engineers have done an impressive job examining, understanding, and manipulating this matter and energy for various purposes: electricity, plumbing, cars, planes, buildings. The problem comes, however, when we reduce all of reality, including human beings, to nothing more than matter and energy.
Seeing Embodied Human Existence As a Problem to Be Overcome
Within the disenchanted Western worldview, embodied human existence is often construed not as something to be nurtured and enhanced but as a series of limitations to be overcome.[4] If nature has no intrinsic purpose, humanity has no intrinsic purpose; we are free to deal with humanity as we think best. And since humanity has limited energy and intelligence, we should strive to overcome those limits through technology.
As AI becomes more intelligent than us then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t do the things we do, as soon as it can do them better than us. This will increasingly include our jobs, whether we be doctors, accountants, or lawyers. In this view, there’s no intrinsic worth to humanity that should affect our design and deployment of AI technology. The more AI technology can control the world, the better, perhaps even if it negatively impacts human well-being overall.
Thus, the digital gold rush keeps gaining momentum, and digital gold fever spreads.
The Goodness of Creation: A Christian View of Reality
According to the Bible, creation has meaning, purpose and value because of its relationship to the Creator. Indeed we human beings have a unique relationship to our Creator, being made in his image (Gen 1–2). Moreover, God has also shown how much he values his creation and our embodied human nature by sending his Son as an embodied man (Jn 1:14) and resurrecting his Son as an embodied man, in which state he’ll remain for eternity (Phil 3:20–21). We too, if we are in Christ, will also be resurrected physically, having a glorified body just like the Lord Jesus (Phil 3:20–21), and will worship him in the new creation.
We Christians need to think carefully about the goodness and limitations of our bodies. We need to consider how our divinely-valued embodied nature should impose discipline and restraint on what technologies are developed and how they are used. Whatever the noble uses of AI, including possible AGI, we should not aspire to an increasingly disembodied digital future.
[1] Skynet is the name of the malign artificial intelligence in the Terminator science-fiction film series.
[2] Craig Gay, Modern Technology and the Human Future: A Christian Appraisal (IVP: IL, 2018), 128–129.
[3] Richard Dawkins, A River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Basic Books, 2008).
[4] Gay, 95.
