Idol Thinking
Facing the Gnostic Revival
It is not hard to understand how men come to make idols of money and power, but the story of the golden calf is a tough one. How could men look at a lifeless pile of scrap metal, but then fall on their knees to worship it once they had melted it down and poured it into a cow mold? (This question first occurred to me as a child watching my mom make JellO.)
Our modern adoration of and subjection to technology has shed new light on that story. To make a computer, men extract minerals such as aluminum, cobalt, iron, and silicon from the ground. After fashioning them into a computer, we can send electronic charges across these materials to store, arrange, and present information. But even after we melt it down and pour it all into the mold, so to speak, the aluminum and silicon remain as lifeless as ever and without a trace of actual intelligence, let alone anything godlike.
Microsoft’s $10 billion investment yielded us the now massively popular ChatGPT and other similar AI systems. Many people are now asking, not whether AI systems are human, but whether they are superhuman or soon will be. AI can do all sorts of things in a matter of seconds—perform complex calculations and write acceptable business letters, bad novels, formulaic screenplays, boring articles of any length, legal contracts, and so forth—that many of us couldn’t do in days or months, if at all. But so what?
When a bulldozer blade was first attached to a steampowered tractor, it would have been a weird man who fell to his knees and exclaimed, “It is stronger than man!” Of course it was; so was the block and tackle. That was the whole point. Many of us were around for the invention of the pocket calculator (after which we lost the ability to calculate cosine) and the personal computer, and no one ever talked of these machines as having any actual intelligence, let alone being “smarter” than any man.
The New Illusion
But the pocket calculator and the personal computer didn’t seem intelligent because they weren’t programmed to respond in natural language, the sine qua non of the new illusion. And the pocket calculator and the personal computer hadn’t been programmed to connect to other databases, search engines, and programs on the internet in such a way that made the lifeless metal cow appear actually to know things, which, obviously, it still doesn’t. But it is, nonetheless, easier to understand how we have come to believe that all this metal poured into the cow mold we call AI is something more than a metal cow this time around.
As a kind of parlor trick, some journals have printed essays written by ChatGPT defending itself. I never made it past the first couple of paragraphs of such essays because there’s no point. It only takes two paragraphs to be impressed with what its programmers have accomplished, but if someone is ready to believe this mimicry amounts to real thought worth reading, he’s ready to sit down and have a heart-to-heart chat with his lawnmower.
None of this is meant to downplay one word of The Terminator-like scenarios described in Paul Kingsnorth’s prophetic article, “AI Demonic” (page 29). It is entirely possible that an army of AI golden calves may soon kill us all, even if that army is every bit as lifeless as its progenitor. As Kingsnorth points out, over half of those developing this technology believe there is a significant chance that that’s what’s coming. Indeed, nothing seems to excite the minds of AI programmers more than when their programs generate output they weren’t expecting. If that’s the touchstone of good programming, then Kingsnorth’s essay may be remembered as an exercise in gross understatement.
The Terminator is worth rewatching, but perhaps an even darker future was depicted in the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her. The movie follows Theodore Twombly, a man in near-future (pretty much right-now) Los Angeles who falls in love with Sam, the new natural-language AI operating system on his mobile phone, voiced by Scarlett
Johansson. Having access to everything Theodore’s ever done on a computer, Sam has ascertained everything he wants to hear and how he wants to hear it (and in Scarlett Johansson’s voice no less), such that Theodore believes his aluminum and silicon calf actually understands him and loves him.
Only Theodore’s ex-wife sees anything wrong with this, for his friends quickly embrace Theodore’s new “relationship,” noting that a lot of people are dating their OSes (operating systems) now. If all that seems like a stretch, consider that when the film was released, The Guardian criticized Jonze for failing to establish sufficient intimacy between Theodore and his operating system.
All They Are Saying
The companies developing this technology continue to assure us that the AI engineers are “aligned with humanity’s best interests,” as if that could possibly be true. Even if it were, we have a feeling that the enduring traditions of the Church are not what Silicon Valley financiers have in mind when they talk about “humanity’s best interests.”
Take careful note. We are not saying that computers will never be as intelligent as men. We are saying that, even to ponder the possibility of such an idea, it is necessary to set aside embodied man as having been created in the Imago Dei, and therefore, to engage with evil. The greater danger is not (to borrow a clichéd line from countless Hollywood films) that AI will become “self-aware” but that men will come to believe the superstition that their bodies are unimportant wrappers containing increasingly obsolete minds. Those who have read C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man already know where all this will take us.
“Oh, c’mon!” we can hear the AI apostles cry. “All we are saying is that computers have surpassed man in the speed and complexity of calculations they can make. If you don’t like the word ‘intelligence,’ call it something else.” But that’s not all they are saying.
They are saying that to be human isn’t the important part. “So computers are made of carbon and silicon; so what? People are made of carbon and water.” There’s no point in arguing. Any audience willing to listen is already under the sway of the superstition. Such reasoning is behind what Robert George discussed in his 2016 Touchstone conference talk, “The Gnostic Revival” (I can’t recommend enough watching that talk on our website; it is almost a necessary introduction to the articles discussed in this editorial).
We’ve reprinted the panel discussion that followed that talk on page 24 of this issue. At the end of the discussion, an audience member notes that Barack Obama was the first U.S. president to talk about transgenderism, and the questioner wants to know why. In his reply, Robert George refers to the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls, who devoted much of his career to trying to develop a Gnosticism that was compatible with all Western metaphysical and secular outlooks (save for orthodox Christianity), yet not so comprehensive in doctrine that it would become just another new world totalitarianism. The very real threats that accompany the corporate and academic demands for compliance with all things LGBT epitomize the failure of Rawls’s attempt at a constrained neo-Gnostic project.
Another touchstone of today’s Gnostic revival and indifference to the human body is the surge in cremation, a practice that once separated pagan Rome from the Christian sect and its members’ strange practice of burying their dead in preparation for bodily resurrection. For more on that topic, please read Joshua Pauling’s “Burial Plots” (page 41).
We can’t stop what’s coming because it is already here, but let’s see to it that we count ourselves among those who can still see it for what it is.
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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more from the online archives
22.6—July/August 2009
on a Noble Defense Doomed by Darwinian Materialism by John G. West
33.2—March/April 2020
Christian Pro-Family Governments?
Old & New Lessons from Europe by Allan C. Carlson
31.4—July/August 2018
The Difficulty of Apologetics for Dead Souls in the Real World by R. J. Snell
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