What does the rise of artificial intelligence tell us about being human?

I write a quarterly column for Preach magazine, in which I explore a significant word or phrase in the Bible, or a theme or section of Scripture, and the ideas that it expresses. At the end of this piece I list the previous articles I have written for them. Here I explore what Scripture says about being human in the light of the rise of AI.

The growth of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ has very quickly raised a whole host of questions, as we have seen in this edition of the magazine. Although at first the major questions were thought to be about ethics (how it is used) and power (by whom and to what end), we are now realising that the biggest questions are about what it means to be human. 

To explore this question, we need to begin by dispelling some myths. AI is actually not very intelligent; I only have to look at the very odd sentences created by the AI behind the speech recognition on my phone to realise that! This is why chatbot ‘helpers’ on websites or phone systems are so frustrating. They don’t actually ‘understand’ anything; all they do is recognise and then mimic patterns of speech, which in fact are simply sequences of digital information, scraped from the internet and analysed for repeated and matching patterns. 

And this ‘virtual world’ of AI is completely dependent on the material world, but in ways we often miss. As I type this on my computer screen, I am dependent on the factory that made this screen, the people who worked there, the metals and minerals used to build it, the cables that connect it, and ultimately those who mined these resources from the earth.

And where is AI when we need it? AI is able to write poems and compose music, leaving me more time to wash the dishes—but what I want is for AI to wash the dishes so I can write poems and compose music!

These questions begin to open up the questions to reflect on regarding AI and what it means to be human. 

In the beginning…

The most important text that addresses what it means to be human comes in the first chapter of the Bible. 

God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 

So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Gen 1.26–28). 

In the narrative, the creation of humanity is the apex of God’s creative activity. We are distinguished from the other animals, alone being created ‘in the image of God’. This does not undermine our nature as creatures; within the narrative, the great divide is not between humanity and other animals, but between the created and the Creator.

Much theological ink has been spilled over the meaning of ‘being in the image of God’. Is it about rationality? (If so, what do we make of those who have mental disabilities?) Is it about being relational? (If so, what of those who struggle to form relationships?) Is it about sharing the ability to create? Perhaps, but note that we can never create ex nihilo, from nothing, as God has done. 

The Image of God

In ancient religion, the image of a god was installed at the centre of the temple. There is a sense in which the world is created here in an orderly way (formed in the first three days, then filled in the next three) and the image of God—in the form of humanity—installed at the ‘centre’. 

We are therefore commissioned to make God known in the world—to act as his delegated authority. The command to ‘subdue’ the world and ‘rule’ its creatures is not an invitation to exploit but a responsibility to manage and care for the world, sharing delegated responsibility with God. 

But in doing so, we need to be attentive to the ways in which we are not like God, even as we are his image. God is spirit (John 4.24), whereas we are bodily. God has no sex—God is fruitful in and of himself, and needs no other. By contrast, we can only be ‘fruitful and multiply’ in partnership with another who is different from us. From the very beginning, to be human is to be dependent, communal, and relational. 

So, in contrast to AI, we are not ‘brains on sticks’. As Charlie Chaplin showed in his parody ‘Modern Times’, we are not mere cogs in a machine, or units of production. We can only truly flourish in the real world of nature and in the human world of community.

Human Fault

But responsibility has a flip side; we can fail to respond to the call God gives us. To be human is to have moral agency, and with moral agency comes the possibility of disobedience and sin. There is a great divide running through our nature—the divide between what we know and what we do, between our desires and our actions, between possibility and reality. This divide is something that people are usually very well aware of—in the memorable phrase of Francis Spufford (in Unapologetic) ‘The Human Capacity to [Foul] Things Up’. 

This means that failure and forgiveness, restoration and redemption are inextricable elements of the human story. This explains the shape and concerns of the scriptural narrative; God is constantly reaching out to humanity, offering forgiveness and restoration, and setting out a pattern for holy living. To be human is both to be in need of and to offer forgiveness, to be able to say ‘I am sorry’ and ‘I forgive you’. Apologies from AI and computer systems only mean ‘I cannot access the information’. 

In the end, hope

And this all leads to perhaps the most distinctive element of being human—the ability to hope, to believe that things should not be the way they are, and can be—one day will be—better. As Samwise Gamgee expresses in the Lord of the Rings film, to believe ‘that there is some good in the world—that there is something worth fighting for!’

The possibility of new hope does just feature in our favourite films; it arises from the biblical narrative. From the beginning, God invites humanity not to a finished world, but to the task of enabling the earth to come to its full and fruitful potential. And from the first moment of human sin, God speaks a word of hope and healing. And the arc of the biblical story is constantly bent towards this—not that humanity can improve itself, but that one day God will visit his people and put all things right. AI can only rearrange what is already there, in pictures and in words; only humans can hope for real change.

This is what it means to be human, then. To be bodily, to be dependent and communal creatures, to accept responsibility, to fail and offer and seek forgiveness, to know and be known, and to be led by hope. All these set us apart from algorithms and data processing.

For more information and reflection on the question of artificial intelligence, see this Grove booklet, and this interview with the author.

My previous articles have been on the themes of: