麻豆社

Good morning. I wonder if you鈥檝e tried ChatGPT to write a speech? Its extraordinary. Although you know there isn鈥檛 anyone really there your feely touchy side really engages with it. Like a programme set up years ago set up as a therapy session. When it typed 鈥楬ow have you been feeling鈥� and you typed back 鈥減retty dreadful鈥� it responded, 鈥榩retty dreadful?鈥� There were reports that some people really liked it and felt better as a result.

A number of those who have led the way on AI are now having second thoughts. It鈥檚 not only about the jobs which are already being lost. Yesterday Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre at GCHQ warned us AI was making it increasingly difficult to tell truth from lies, posing a huge threat to national security. Last week the Israeli academic Youval Harari went so far as to suggest that AI could create a new religion, producing sacred texts and mimicking deep and intimate relationships as though with a divine being. Of course some will say that humans have always created their own gods, ascribing to them perfections that we can鈥檛 ever hope to reach ourselves. Yet now AI is improving so fast. It鈥檚 not unreasonable to wonder whether an AI divinity might come to realise that we are the problem to life on earth and will persuade us to self-destruct. No more need for the flood which drowned the world in the days of Noah, or the apocalypse bringing the end of time. We will simply march out of history to the beat of the algorithms, crushed underfoot like the insects we walk on without even noticing.

The prospect of an AI religion makes me wonder about the way believers have usually attributed perfection to God. If we can achieve perfection for ourselves we would have no need of God. And yet there is another strand in religious thought which ascribes to God the capacity to suffer, and I wonder whether this could still save us. AI can sound loving, but it can never really love because it cannot experience pain, rejection, or fear. Does God perhaps need our love? In which case God鈥檚 perfection is not what we might have imagined. I have to confess that yesterday I tried to get AI to write a talk based on spiritual values and it came up with a draft script. It was pretty dreadful 鈥� I鈥檓 not going to share it 鈥� but apart from sounding rather pleased with itself, it was hugely polite and even ended with the words 鈥榟ave a blessed day鈥�, the only words I feel inclined to quote back to you this morning. I think God would prefer us to be human and fallible while we can be.