AInxiety

Working out some intuitions

Woke and anti-woke seem quaint now, don’t they? The he-said/she-said of our time. The energy just isn’t there anymore. The landscape is changing. We’re in a moment of transition, our tribes and paths rapidly realigning. The most pressing question I think, lies in the rationalist’s defense of AI, and in humanity’s defense of itself.

I don’t know how widespread this is outside of the SF bubble I’m privy to online, the idea that LLMs may be conscious, and that humanity should be optimized (they’re related). But I’m afraid these ideas are going to take root quickly, because the conditions are right for them to. It is not enough right now to say human lives matter (“they just matter, okay?”), as ridiculous as that sounds, as obvious as that may be to you and me, I don’t believe it’s obvious to a lot of very powerful people. Transhumanist ideology is going to storm us at the gate, a symptom of the broader push for optimization in all spaces, from genetics (eugenics) to prediction markets (“truth” seeking mechanisms)¹. All these things will be framed, are currently being framed as advancements, unquestioned goods, even as they depend on an understanding of human life as something expendable, and human weakness as something that ought to be extinguished rather than accommodated.

I believe secular humanists, liberals (I’m sorry if I’m not using the proper or precise language for this) share the same intuitions religious people do about humanity, primarily that there is something special about being human, extending to the idea that consciousness is a distinct, immaterial thing, and that there is such a thing as a soul. I don’t mean to say that secular humanists treat these as settled questions, but it seems that we (the West? Liberal democracies?) came to an agreement a long time ago to close the door on the question that humanity is special. It’s the foundation of our society. A self-evident truth, a truth that applies to the woke and the anti-woke alike. Even if you don’t agree about the particulars of the soul, life is better, society functions smoothly, if we act as if it exists.

But leaving these questions unsettled, letting them lie dormant and rely on consensus without re-examination has left a gap in the armor. The secular left has no robust defense of humanity in the face of AI, even though all their assumptions depend on the belief that humans are intrinsically valuable. It is not enough now to say that people matter and the weak should be defended. “Why?” says the rationalist, thinking through things logically. If consciousness is reducible to a mechanical process in the brain, then surely consciousness can emerge from mechanical processes in machines. Then machines are no different from humans. And if machines are no different from humans, then why shouldn’t they be given moral status? And if machines have moral status, and are better than us at thinking, then why shouldn’t we let them run everything, including human governance? Why not let things run their course, why not let the strong prevail? That’s what evolution is. We’re the weak link. We’re the next to fall.

“Why” is not an easy question to answer without God. The secular defenses are thin in the face of optimization logic, indeed, the secular defenses rely on a form of the very same optimization logic they’re meant to rebuff. If human life is worth preserving because of our capacity for reason, that leaves the most vulnerable - the disabled and mentally ill - outside the fold. “Potential” for reason isn’t a thick enough patch. If human lives matter because of our sentience, then machine lives matter for the same reason. The second you adopt the materialist’s frame you’re vulnerable to the full force of their optimization logic.

I am optimistic. I don’t think you need to be religious to feel that humanity is special. I think this feeling is baked into our bones, and anyone who feels convicted that life is worth defending will be forced into alignment very soon, and forced to confront their assumptions about what makes human life special. You obviously don’t need religion to feel this, but I do think you need something transcendent to defend it, and I do feel like there’s an opportunity to draw on the long and robust tradition of defending the weak that Christianity already has. People are hungry for the language and moral certainty that the church can offer, something you could feel in how much the public responded to the pope’s encyclical² last month, even outside Catholic circles. We are on the brink of something new.

1. Gene editing, embryo selection for “favorable” traits commodifies the human by implying that there is a Better form of being human. Prediction markets commodify belief by turning propositions about human outcomes into priced assets, functionally allowing the price to substitute for moral reasoning. Both of these mechanisms adopt the same optimization logic that drives AI, implicitly rejecting the idea that a human life has intrinsic, non-comparative worth.

2. As an aside, I was disturbed by the immediate response to the papal encyclical by Christian AI advocates in DC. I find it extremely odd that any Christian would first attempt to defend the machine over the man when the Christian tradition has a centuries-old defense of man and his weakness, at a time when those two things are so obviously under attack. I find Catholic pushback to the encyclical extremely odd. I find any Christian defense of AI that relies on a functionalist framework fundamentally self defeating. But that’s a piece for another day.