‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’ – so stated a single-sentence open letter to the world, signed by global experts.
The message was circulated on 30 May, signed by hundreds of top AI experts and other key figures including Bill Gates, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and the chief executive of Google DeepMind. They signed the statement with the aim to ‘open up discussion’. There have also been calls for regulation of AI.
They are not alone. On 16 June, David Evan Harris, senior research fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, and senior adviser for AI ethics at the Psychology of Technology Institute, warned: ‘As a former researcher on Meta’s civic integrity and responsible AI teams, I am terrified by what could happen next.’
David Wilkinson, Principal at St John’s College, Durham University, said some of the fear around AI is that it becomes ‘out of control’. He added: ‘While this has been a fear with all new technology, the potential here is different and needs to be monitored carefully. Caution about developments needs to be expressed in agreements and work between scientists, business and political leaders around the globe, but as a theologian I want to always see technology as a gift from God – to be received with gratitude but also then to be used responsibly under Kingdom values of truth, grace and generosity.’
Jonas Kurlberg, a specialist in digital culture in the context of Christian faith and culture with Spurgeon’s College, London, points out that while various applications of AI have been around for some time, ‘it’s the rate of the development that is causing headlines today’.
Speaking after the ‘Global Network for Digital Theology’ (GoNeDigiTal Conference) 2023, He added: ‘The fear is that, in the not-too-distant future, the self-learning capability of AI will override human decision-making, leading to substantial harm. For instance, one could imagine a scenario in which an application is told to make money and does so by hacking the banking system.
‘The ultimate fear is that these systems become more powerful than humans and end up controlling humans, even leading to our destruction.’ This, he said, is why many in the industry are calling for regulation to safeguard against the worst scenario.
Kurlberg said: ‘At grassroots level, Christians need to resist the temptation to anthropomorphise this technology. The risk is not so much that the technology becomes like us, but by humanising the technology [we] become like it and start to measure others against its standards.’
AI is, he notes, based on statistical inferences and ‘therefore fundamentally different from human intelligence. If we forget this we lose something of our humanness’.
Theological papers discussed at the conference included Stephen Garner’s Robot Discipling? Some Implications of AI for Christian Education, Worship and Spiritual Life, and Melanie Dzugan’s ‘Created Co-Creators’ and Thick [sic] Public Theology. There was also time for prayer.
