Abstract
If machines could one day acquire superhuman intelligence, what role would still be left for humans to play in the world? The ‘midwife proposal,’ coming from futurists like Ray Kurzweil or James Lovelock, sees the invention of AI as a fulfillment of humanity’s cosmic destiny. The universe ‘strives’ to be saturated with intelligence, and our cyborg descendants are much better equipped to advance this goal. By creating AI, humans play their humble, but instrumental, part in the grand scheme. The midwife proposal looks remarkably similar to modern Christian anthropology and cosmology, which regard humankind as “evolution becoming conscious of itself” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), and matter as having a predisposition to evolve toward spirit (Karl Rahner, Dumitru Staniloae). This paper demonstrates that the similarity is only superficial. Compared to the midwife hypothesis, Christian theological accounts define the cosmic role of humanity quite differently, and they provide a more satisfactory teleology. In addition, the scientific and philosophical assumptions behind the midwife hypothesis – that the cosmos is fundamentally informational, that it intrinsically promotes higher intelligence, or that we are heading toward a technological singularity - are rather questionable, with potentially significant theological and ethical consequences.
Highlights
If machines could one day acquire superhuman intelligence, what role would still be left for humans to play in the world? The ‘midwife proposal,’ coming from futurists like Ray Kurzweil or James Lovelock, sees the invention of AI as a fulfillment of humanity’s cosmic destiny
Nick Bostrom masterfully demonstrates that such an artificial superintelligence (ASI) would be impossible to contain, unless we could insure from its inception that it is friendly towards us [6]
In AI, this is known as the famous ‘alignment problem,’ and is notoriously difficult: how to make sure that an ASI will have goals that are aligned with our own? The reality is that we have almost no way of anticipating how such an ASI might see us, or what its goals might be
Summary
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that AI will reach human-level by the year 2029, which will be demonstrated by the first program to pass the Turing Test [11, p. 200]. The main principle behind Kurzweil’s bold prediction is what he calls “The Law of Accelerating Returns.” He regards human history as a history of technological evolution, anticipating that technological progress will continue forward at an accelerated rate. These godly successors of ours will live lives that are incomprehensible to us and will have powers that we cannot even think of They will proceed to fulfill the universe’s “ultimate destiny,” that is, to be infused with intelligence: ”In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe” [11, p. 21]
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