147: Being Human in the Age of AI (with Thorsten Marbach)

What are the potential benefits and dangers of Artificial Intelligence? How can we approach AI through a Biblical worldview? Perhaps you’ve been asking these questions, too. Thorsten Marbach shares helpful insight in navigating the world of AI as humans created in the image of God.

• “The further into the future we look, the more divergent the possible scenarios and predictions are.”
• “What does it actually understand? There’s a very clear answer to that, and the answer is nothing.”
• “We need to catch a wake-up; we can’t just let this thing slide. This stuff is developing very fast, and we need to be on top of our game to make sure that it’s going to a good place.”
• “Previous technologies were very good at disseminating existing ideas, whether that was the printing press or the radio or the Internet, but now here we have something that’s creating - or at least seems to create - new ideas. That’s new.”
• “Engaging with AI has everything to do with what it means for us to be human.”
• “If one just were to look at those three things in which we can understand our humanness - identity, dominion, relationship - or if you want, it’s basically just saying being, doing, relating [...] those are exacting the three areas we need to think through and work through when it comes to what we do with AI at an individual level and at a societal level.”
• Dominion questions: Is this pulling me to a place where I’m doing better at dominion, or is it actually pulling me into a space of domination or a space of abdication? Is this AI thing going to increase or mitigate inequality? 
• “Don’t abdicate your creativity to AI.”
• “AI might simulate moral agency, but it doesn’t have true moral agency.”
• Relationship questions: Is it helping me relate in a better, deeper, wider way, or is it actually shutting down my relational capacities? Is this helping me love God and neighbor more or less?
• “It’s not an AI world; it’s still God’s world.”
• Identity questions: What does it mean to be a human being, and what is consciousness?
• “We have a very valuable identity, but it’s a derived identity; it’s not a self-made identity.”
• “One of our key roles as Christians would be to challenge and perhaps give an alternative to some of the more reductionistic understandings of what it means to be a human being.”
• “We can know who we are. We can know whose we are. We can know that nothing is going to derail God’s big story of creation, fall, redemption, eternity. No matter what AI does, no matter what happens, it’s still God’s story.”

What’s changing our lives:

• Keane: Using the arc browser
• Heather: Getting a new duster
• Thorsten: Learning from others in a weekly gathering that he coordinates called TGIF

Weekly Spotlight: International Christian School of Togo

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