7 years ago, Google’s AlphaGo defeated South Korean professional Lee Sedol in a game of Go, sending shockwaves throughout the world as people came to realize what previously thought impossible was achieved by a computer program.
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The world had witnessed a revolution unlike any other, a revolution driven by the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Machines once seen as mere tools for human convenience now evolved into something much greater, something arguably on pace to becoming the cornerstone of modern civilization.
On 30 November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched, a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allowed consumers to conduct intuitive, human-like conversations with it. However, this was hardly why ChatGPT received a fraction of the overwhelming consumer response and internet frenzy. The AI programme had the uncanny ability to follow user instructions with frightening speed precision and seeming intuition.
The Impact of AI on Industries
The debate around AI replacing jobs is one that is convoluted but personal at the same time. The concerns of those who fear the replacement of jobs are not unreasonable – in fact, the manufacturing decline provides good reason to be concerned about technology and job losses. In 1958, the U.S. broad woven textile industry employed over 300,000 production workers, and the primary steel industry employed over 500,000. By 2011, broad woven textiles employed only 16,000, and steel employed only 100,000 production workers. While some of these losses can be attributed to trade, overall since the 1950s, most of the decline appears to come from technology and varying demand.
But is it also important to note that artificial intelligence can dramatically improve the efficiency of our workplaces and can augment the work humans can do. New technologies do not just replace labor with machines, but, in a competitive market, automation will reduce prices. In addition, technology may improve product quality, customisation or speed of delivery. All of these things can increase demand. If demand increases sufficiently, employment will grow even though the labor required per unit of output declines.
In fact, common consensus among experts is that a number of professions will be completely automated in the next five to ten years. Examining the listed professions, jobs with a disproportionate emphasis on labor and repetition tend to be on top of the list.
The World Economic Forum's "The Future of Jobs Report 2020," shows that AI is projected to replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025. While concerning, the report goes on to say that it will also create 97 million new jobs in that same timeframe. While this may be some comfort for people, this does not change the shift in the more academic and skill-intensive emphasis viable in the projected job markets.
Ethics
While AI is a game-changing promise for a better tomorrow, it has also been tempered with concerns that these complex, opaque systems may do more societal harm than economic good.
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“Part of the appeal of algorithmic decision-making is that it seems to offer an objective way of overcoming human subjectivity, bias, and prejudice,” said political philosopher Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. “But we are discovering that many of the algorithms that decide who should get parole, for example, or who should be presented with employment opportunities or housing … replicate and embed the biases that already exist in our society.”
Of late, there has been rocking controversy with the manner in which AI disseminates its information, with worries of newer, faster and more frictionless ways to discriminate and divide. Many Twitter users, when asking ChatGPT to equally describe current President Biden and Former President Trump, found that the descriptions of President Biden were disproportionately more positive than Former President Trump. While the issue was inevitably politicized widely, it was clear to both sides of the political spectrum that these results were not the objectivity expected from an AI.
However, it is also important to note that the particular issue of AI biases is not new. In 2015, Jacky Alciné tweeted about Google Photos tagging 80 photos of a Black man to an album titled "gorillas”, forcing Google to issue a public apology.
Early on, it was popular belief that the future of AI would involve the automation of simple repetitive tasks requiring low-level decision-making. But owing to more powerful computers and the compilation of huge data sets, AI has rapidly grown in sophistication. One branch, machine learning, notable for its ability to sort and process massive amounts of data and to learn over time, has transformed countless fields. However, it is important to understand that Machine Learning requires the constant feeding of vast amounts of real-world material, and with that comes practical limitations in the balance of such material. So long as AI requires machine learning, it would mean a fundamental limitation in an ideal perspective.
While AI offers us its vastly macro and perhaps objective views (objective relative to humans), humans of course may benefit when calibrated carefully and deployed thoughtfully, as can be seen in resume-screening software allowing for wider pools of applicants being considered, eliminating or at the very least, reducing bias. However, one must also be conscious that AI is a replication of human thought, and with that, very human biases, and that it would mean conferring these biases in a sort of scientific credibility.
Returning to the topic of machine learning, one of AI’s greatest impacts is its unique ability to collect and utilize data. However, this would mean vast amounts of data fed into it for it to go anywhere close to becoming remotely useful for consumers.
Some may also be concerned with the enormous potential of AI, and its capacity in constructing the next intellectual tower of Babel, which, if built, will cause serious AI dominance and a tyrannical revolution against the value of humans in society.
You see, intellectual work has always been qualitatively assessed in fundamentally three aspects: analysis, creativity, and emotional value. One would be considered a wildly accomplished qualifier of white-collar industry if all of these attributes were adequately shown. This is where AI comes in: it has shown to be extremely proficient at analysis, potentially creative, but unable to demonstrate nor add emotional value.
Let us visit a synagogue in New York, where Rabbi Joshua Franklin delivered a sermon written by the AI software ChatGPT in January this year. When given the prompt “write a sermon, in the voice of a rabbi, about 1,000 words, connecting the Torah portion this week with the idea of intimacy and vulnerability, quoting Brené Brown”, the programme produced an analysis of various biblical lines that effortlessly connected to general case study content, so eloquently put that many in the audience thought was written by famous rabbis.
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Clearly, the capacity for analytical thought was displayed. In fact, with the advent of people using AI programs like ChatGPT to conduct direct research, AI has proven to easily surpass the human brain in filtering out information and connecting the dots.
AI has also shown to be creative – not in the conventional sense, but in the more systematic sense of either creating new works based on the attributes of old ones, or offering new ideas based on combinations of attributes and ideas that humans have considered in the creative process.
Unfortunately for the super-intellectual AI design, it has not shown an ability to add emotional value to human society. As the same rabbi has discovered through reading the AI’s sermon, it not only committed certain social faux pas in preaching, such as ending a sermon with a prayer, but more relevantly, it failed to connect the necessary moral teachings to the audience’s religious journeys. It failed to understand and engage the Christian audience, and tailor the sermon to that subjective experience, undermining its effectiveness.
In a sense, that is a reassuring thought for the relevance of humanity in all things communication – the idea of subjective human feeling.
However, the unassuring part comes in when we consider the influence that AI has on thought. As our leaders of intellectual discovery increasingly adopt a systematic, analytical approach to science and academia, with the primary dependence of AI mechanisms for research and tutelage, we need to recognize that AI can heavily influence our thought processes. And if these thought processes are so primarily analytical, then will we, as humans, begin forgoing the subjective, for the objective, in the spirit of practicality?
On the conflict between subjectivity and objectivity, it can also be raised the rivalry between science and religion as the two main schools of thought today, with science taking the modern, expanding forefront. These two concepts represent opposing, yet both arguably reasonable, approaches to problem solving, and the intellectual limbo we see in today’s world causes noticeable conflict.
Therefore, the decision of many churches to implement robotic preachers and priests is one that raises eyebrows. It is definitely ironic that the very tools that work in a manner that competes against religious ways of thought, are now used to promote religious ways of thought.
But beyond the irony lies a danger. Given that there are, indisputably, inherent biases entrenched in the design of AI, at the responsibility of these software programmers, the AI software may in turn be able to reflect whatever biases the programmers seek to implement. Without making any prejudicial assumptions, it must be admitted that this gives Big Tech a firm grasp of influence into religious pedagogy – just the school of thought it seeks to replace.
Even without deliberately embedding a biased programme, AI may still pose a threat to religious pedagogy. When SanTO, an AI priest piloted in a Catholic church in Poland, a reporter asked, “SanTO, is there a heaven?”, to which it replied, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone rich to enter the kingdom of God”. The artificial priest gave a measured, relevant yet indirect response, as if heavily hedging the question to avoid a direct acknowledgement. Of a fundamental tenet of being in the Catholic Faith. With the answer coming from a machine programmed to preach about that very religion.
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Perhaps the analytical approach should not be applied to subjective questions of humanity like religion. Perhaps it is incapable of coming to opinionated conclusions that billions of religious people can. Perhaps it just isn’t human, cannot replicate human thought, nor understand it. As Catholic Priest Slawomir Abramowski emphasized in a BBC interview, “[AI should] not… replace the priest, [because] it has no soul, [and] it is not a person.”
AI was built to improve our productivity. To make our work more efficient and to automate the repetitive. But in modern times, it has crossed the unnoticed threshold between work and life. As an analytical system intrinsically unable to experience subjective human emotion, perhaps we need to find a balance between AI’s assistance in productivity, and its penetration into our daily lifestyle.
And while many, including the writers of this article, write and research about AI as a form of productivity, what happens, and what does it say about the influence of AI when readers read about it for recreation?
References
Bettiza, S., Alanna, E., Furst, J., Alston, K., & Williams, C. (2021, October 21). God and robots: Will ai transform religion? BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-58983047
Jewish Center of the Hamptons. (2022, December). I plagiarized this sermon!! Can you guess who wrote it? Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/785589624?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=60812087
Netburn, D. (2023, March 3). Can religion save us from Artificial Intelligence? Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-03-03/can-religion-save-us-from-artificial-inte
Webber, A. (2021, October 29). Sermon-giving 'robotic priest' arrives in Poland to support faithful during pandemic. The First News. Retrieved from https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/sermon-giving-robotic-priest-arrives-in-poland-to-support-faithful-during-pandemic-25688
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