AI and the Tower of Babel

The subject of artificial intelligence has become a national obsession in the last year or so. Various questions about what AI will mean for society, the jobs market, and our way of life have become a media craze and an opportunity for great handwringing. Stratospheric stock prices of the companies that serve as the “backbone” of AI have added to the craze. Whether one owns stock in Nvidia or is afraid of what AI will do to one’s job or is a student who wants to know how AI can help write a paper, almost everyone has some skin in the game when it comes to the latest national hype.

In a lot of ways, the AI moment is not entirely new. The digital revolution itself has been years in the making, and many of us have lost count of the examples of “disruption” it has created. From personal computing to the internet to the cloud to now AI, digital technology has made obsolete many jobs and many entire sectors (RIP, typewriters) and has simultaneously created millions upon millions of new jobs. But what is new with AI is the so-called “generative AI” and the machine learning behind it that allows content creation with less human input and more machine capability.

For believers, there is a lot more on the line here than just the stock price of Nvidia (which, for what it’s worth, is massively overvalued to this money manager, but I digress). The Christian worldview affirms a certain understanding of the human person that asserts human dignity, God-given reason, and a unique image-bearing status. The present hype around AI often describes machines disintermediating some of the “really human things”—allowing machines to replace humans not just in remedial functions and calculations but in actual pattern detections and important directional decisions. This capacity has evolved from what was previously called “predictive AI” to generative AI where machines can now generate images, content, and information. This capacity is fed from language-learning models that are all the rage these days and have led many to believe that a future is coming with far less human input and far more decision-making and activity from machines, computers, and robots.

It is a little hard to disagree that the capacity for predictive AI is not gigantic. Human beings are very resourceful and our capacity to program computers to analyze data more and more intelligently is quite significant. But this is not the hype, fear, or euphoria of greatest concern. Generative AI is legitimately feared by many to be capable of not merely optimizing tasks but replacing the entirely human contribution to “tasks” to begin with. And this is where I believe secular anthropology simply cannot properly frame what is in front of us.

The human contribution to economic activity has never been limited to the performance of tasks. Machines are not going to replace the relational, social, and personal dimensions of our endeavors for a very simple reason: God has made mankind, and mankind alone, as image-bearers of Him. Our elevated status as the “very good” creation made in His image and likeness—the imago Dei of our being—is an ontological reality that cannot be replaced by a machine, a robot, or a computer. We can debate if Chat GPT and other language learning models can even do the transactional and generative work they are said to be doing (color me skeptical on even these functions, thus far), but there is no scenario whereby the virtue and the humanity of market activity are going to be disintermediated by computers. To suggest otherwise is to make God a liar and believe that an entire reordering of God’s creation is underway. It is not.

From the Tower of Babel forward there is no shortage of high-profile incidents of mankind wanting to play God. Indeed, modern technology has always faced a certain Godlike aspiration from some of its more arrogant zealots, as even leading industrialists in the pre-digital era fancied themselves miniature deities on occasion. The AI moment is an odd twist on this Babel-like idolatrous tendency, where rather than elevate humans to the role of God, some believe machines can be elevated to the role of humans.

It all ends in the same place: With God on the throne, and humans as His subjects, “choosing this day whom they will serve.”