Who Decides What is Human?

"Artificial intelligence might never develop consciousness, sentience, morality or a soul. But even if it doesn’t, you can bet people will say it did anyway."

In my last post I suggested that the possibility of artificial intelligence is changing the way we think about what it means to be human.

In the first article below the authors argue that the tendency to anthropomorphize, long observed as a human characteristic, is now being applied to claimed AIs. Which in my view only underscores the possibility that AI will transform human self-understanding. Just imagine how our anthropomorphizing of animals, and even eco-systems has changed our understanding of what it means to be human in relation to nature. Many Christians now see vegetarianism as a moral obligation because they understand themselves as part of a continuum with animals rather than distinctly different and hierarchically superior to them. What happens when this is true of AI as well? 


The ethics of regarding AI as sentient are taken up in a second opinion piece - which points out the dangers of such claims and how they mask the accountability of those who create supposed AIs. What is our human responsibility for our creations (like children) as they become autonomous? What is our human responsibility to create such dangerous things as ourselves? 


And finally the central question: How do we recognize something/one that actually shares what is essential to our humanity? At the very least a consideration of what we mean by sentience as applied to us interrogates whether those whose cognitive abilities are dramatically different from what we regard as normal. Is an AI just a consciousness somewhere on the autism spectrum? As I pointed out in the previous blog, our culture has come to define humanity in terms of brain function. That gives an entry to regarding AI as human, or a basis for rejection of some humans for their lack of brain function. Maybe what AI really interrogates is the shortfalls of contemporary understandings of humanness. 


Which returns to the main theme of the last four posts - We are in the midst of a changing understanding of what it means to be human. How then do we understand what it means to say the Jesus is God become human? And how we make this central gospel claim? 

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