ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

THE sometime 20th century supposition that man had supposedly “killed God” stemmed from the secularisation of the West which left a void. That was filled by many nation states who implemented a rights-based humanism of common purpose and shared endeavour. Today that purpose has withered, too.

Our loss of faith in God has been coupled with a loss of faith in each other. The void has opened up again and we are using technology in an attempt to fill it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the world wide web was meant to herald an era of human flourishing, of rich cultural exchange, and global harmony. Knowledge was to spread in a way the printing press’s greatest advocates could only have dreamt of.

But rather than usher in an age of hyper-rationalism, the internet has exposed an age of debased religiosity. Having been dismissed as a relic from a bygone era, religion has returned in a thin, hollow version, shorn of wonder and purpose.

Look around today, for all is clear to see. Smartphone use is almost ubiquitous (95 per cent of the population own one, with as good as 100 per cent of 16-24 year olds). Artificial Intelligence, from chatbots, recommended search engines, or work applications, has become an everyday part of life for most people.

Our use of these technologies is increasingly quasi-devotional. We seem to enact the worst parody of religion: one in which we ask an “all-knowing” entity for answers; many outsource their thinking and writing; it is ever-present, shaping how we live our lives – yet most of us have only the faintest idea how it works.

The algorithmic operations of AI are increasingly opaque, and observable to a vanishingly small number of people at the top-end of a handful of companies. And even then, those people themselves cannot say in truth how their creations will augment and develop for the simple fact they don’t know.

Whether videos with Google Veo 3 or essays via ChatGPT, we can now sit alone and create almost anything we want at the touch of a button. Where God took seven days to build the world in His image, we can build a video replica in seven seconds. But the thrill is short-lived, as we are quickly submerged under a flood of content, pumped out with ease. There is no digital sublime, no sense of lasting awe, just a vague unease and apprehension as we hunch over our phones, irritated and unfocused. Increasingly, we have become aware of our own loneliness (which has reached “epidemic” proportions).

And perhaps the strangest of all, we accept AI’s view of us. Once, only God was able to X-ray the soul. Later, we believed the high priests of psychology could do the same, human to human. Now, we are seeking out that same sense of understanding in mute lines of code.

A mere 18 months or so since the tech became widely available, 64 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds in the UK have used an AI therapist, while in America, three quarters of 13 to 17-year-olds have used AI companion apps such as Character.ai or Replika.ai (which let users create digital friends or romantic partners they can chat with). Some 20 per cent of American teens spent as much or more time with their AI “friends” as they did their real ones.

Digging deeper into the numbers available, part of the attraction of socialising in this way is that you get a reflection, not an actual person: someone “always on your side”, never judgmental, never challenging. We treat LLMs (Large Language Models) with the status of an omniscient deity, just one that never corrects or disciplines. Nothing is risked in these social-less engagements – apart from your ability to grow as a person and be egotistically fulfilled. Habitualised, we risk becoming so fragile that any form of friction or resistance becomes unbearable.

Where social media at least relied upon the affirmation of your peers – hidden behind a screen though they were – AI is opening up the possibility to exist solely in a loop of self-affirmation.

Religion has many critics of course, but at the heart of the Abrahamic tradition is an argument about how to live now on this earth, together. In monotheism, God is not alone. He has his intermediaries: rabbis, priests, and imams who teach, proscribe and slowly, over time, build a system of values. There is a community of belief, of leaders and believers who discuss what is right and what is wrong, who share a creed, develop it, and translate sometimes difficult text into the texture of daily life and what it means for us. There is a code, but it is far from binary.

And, so, while it is possible to divine in the statements of our tech-bro-overlords through a certain proselytising fervour, there is no sense of the good life, no proper vision of society, and no concern for the future. Their creations are of course just tools – the promised superintelligence is yet to emerge and may never actually materialise – but they are transformative, and their potentially destructive power means they are necessarily moral agents. And the best we get are naïve claims about abundance for all or eradicating the need for work. A vague plan seems to exist that we will leave this planet once we’ve bled it white.

There is a social and spiritual hunger that a life online cannot satisfy. Placing our faith in the bright offerings of modernity is blinding us to each other – to what is human, and what is sacred.