A.I. is no longer the stuff of science fiction. From Siri and Alexa to Chat GPT, our world is now inundated with artificial intelligence. One senses that it’s time to think more deeply about A.I. — its implications and its assumptions.
In this episode, you'll hear an excerpt from a Forum event at Iowa State University from March 2023. Josh Swamidass (WashU), a medical doctor and computer scientist, discusses the role of artificial intelligence today with Clark Wolf (Iowa State), a bioethicist and philosopher. Their conversation is moderatored by Alex Tuckness (Iowa State), a political science professor.
That’s what technology does. It starts out as something useful, but it usually ends up so altering the human experience that it becomes something that we can’t really conceive of living without.
I grew up on a farm and we had a tractor that had enough power to knock down a tree. A tree looks very different when you're sitting on a tractor that can knock it down than it does when you're sitting next to it or growing it or planting it. And I think many technologies change not just what we can do with the world, but how we can manipulate the world. They change the way we look at the world that we're manipulating.
How do we not just have a more advanced society but how do we have a good society?
As human beings, we have a tendency to think there's a technological solution to our deepest problems when really those problems can't be solved with a technological solution. So we keep chasing after technology, with A. I. now being the most powerful one. But we may find ourselves continually disappointed with its ability to actually deliver on the promise of helping us flourish.
I think one of the things that Scripture really calls into question is the goodness of progress. Not to say that progress couldn't be good, but the progress as we get it actually might be far more fallen than we might expect.
