Saturday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Recently, developers of AI have been issuing dire warnings about the threat it poses to human life. One developer, who recently appeared on “Meet the Press,” resigned from his position at Anthropic (a major AI company), saying that AI advances were moving too fast with insufficient safeguards. If development of AI doesn’t soon start to focus on how to protect human beings, he went on to say, AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” Importantly, this is not the lone view of a disgruntled former Anthropic employee. I wish. Even Elon Musk, who stands to make a lot of money with AI, is now issuing similar dire warnings.
Wow! Ten years? Really? That’s terrifying!
And it raises a number of questions. Obviously, what we are going to do about it, is a big one. And I hope that gets answered soon! But even if it does, another question must be asked: How did we get here? Or, more accurately, how is it we ended up here again?
What is it about human beings that we seem determined to kill ourselves off once and for all? Why did we feel compelled to split the atom and create the most dangerous weapon the world had ever seen? Why didn’t we ask back in the early 1940s whether that was really a good idea for humanity? And why do we now feel compelled to create a form of “intelligence” that will one day (too soon) get so smart that it will be able to destroy not only its creator but all the rest of us, to boot? Wasn’t the nuclear arsenal enough? We have to find more ways to kill ourselves en masse?
Why do humans do this? It almost seems like a tragic compulsion.
In his famous definition of “human”, Kenneth Burke wrote that one of our distinguishing features is that we are “rotten with perfection.” By that he meant that human beings have a need to produce and achieve perfection. And that perfection can take many forms. It might be the perfect figure of a man in the statue of David. It might be the completely decoded double helix. It might be a gorgeous cello concerto that brings tears to your eyes. It might be a no-hitter in the World Series.
And then there are those other attempts at “perfection.” The one Burke reminds us of is the Holocaust and the effort by the Third Reich to create the perfect human race. We all know how that went. Splitting the atom comes to mind too, as it was once imagined to be an achievement of “pure science.” Next thing we know, we’re talking about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as if it makes sense. And let’s not forget the Crusades. They were the Church’s effort to achieve perfection by rooting out all beliefs and practices deemed improper against its Medieval vision of perfection.
As these examples illustrate, and Burke points out, such efforts to achieve perfection also tend to produce the worst kind of violence. And that’s because people think that to achieve perfection they have to eliminate all that is imperfect (when measured against the chosen form of perfection). And it seems to stand to reason: if the “perfect race” is white and perfection is a must, then all the non-whites gotta go. But the fact that one can follow the reasoning that leads from the desire for perfection to violence against another doesn’t make it any less rotten.
Rotten with perfection. Indeed. It’s an unsettling and salient point. Were Burke alive today, I believe he would feel compelled to shake his finger at us and say, “There you go again.”
Right. So, what does that mean for us Jesus followers today? What Word does Jesus have for us in all this?
I think Jesus is speaking right to us and our situation today in the text from Luke. Put all too simply, what I think he is telling us to “prepare our ground.” And, to do so we have to ask: What is the character of my ground? That is, the ground over which Jesus scatters his Word. Is my ground rich? Is it receptive? Will his word flourish within it?
I will confess that I don’t think my ground is ready. And I know for certain that I’m not prepared to face the AI dystopia that is being described. So, I’ve got work to do.
I don’t know what all that will entail, but I do find the words of the Psalmist sticking in my brain: “I will walk in the presence of God, in the light of the living.”
I am praying on that these days. I am praying and thinking about walking with God all of the time, attending to God’s presence, and making myself available for what God wants for me, of me, from me. I am praying and thinking about walking in the light of the living. The living and light. The living are light, with all of their perfections and imperfections. Always light.
I will walk with God in the light of the living . . . I will be part of that light. Amen.