You can learn everything you need to know about our collective state of mind from the fact that the most talked-about book of the year is titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
The “it” in question is advanced artificial intelligence. Although the book’s authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, present a serious and nuanced argument worth contemplating in full, their bottom line is simple enough. The machines, they argue, have reached the point at which, like anything flirting with cognition, they wish to maximize their performance. Sooner or later, this will mean eliminating those obtuse meat puppets that take way too long to complete basic computations and consume way too much electricity—namely, all of us paltry humans.
Judging by the book’s ecstatic blurbs—everyone from Nobel Laureate Ben Bernanke to Mark Ruffalo, best known for portraying the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, lined up to sing its praises—we paltry humans seem to buy the argument. Read about AI these days, and the views on offer would likely range from dark to bleak to apocalyptic. The Cassandras predict the total annihilation of the species, while the optimists settle for a cheerier vision in which the machines take over every job and render Homo sapiens obsolete.
I’m sorry to spoil the pity party with a dose of old-fashioned optimism, but I feel compelled to note that everyone is not dying just yet. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that AI will usher in an era not only of great economic flourishing and innovation, but also of faith and spiritual growth.
For more on the former, you can listen to Alex Karp or observe the inspiring success of his company, Palantir, which uses AI to make America greater and keep Americans safe. The latter, however, is trickier: What reason have we to believe that an abundance of AI will send us straight to church or the synagogue?
To answer the question, it may be useful to turn to a term nearly three-quarters of a century old.
In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young was looking for a word to describe a new phenomenon he was observing. It was so strange, he felt he needed to coin an original word to get it right. He mashed Latin and Greek together to give us one of the most ascendant terms of the last half-century: meritocracy.
On the surface, he argued, the idea sounds unassailable. Who in their right mind would object to a system that promoted and rewarded the smartest and most skillful? But take a closer look, and you’ll notice a deep and fatal flaw. Meritocracy, Young argued, sanctified success as a stand-alone virtue, which made a society dominated by meritocracy not only empty but also pernicious.
Many members of the merit-certified elite, Young mused,
came from homes in which there was no tradition of culture. Their parents, without a good education themselves, were not able to augment the influence exercised by the teacher. These clever people were in a sense only half-educated, in school but not home. When they graduated they had not the same self-assurance as those who had the support and stimulus of their families from the beginning. They were often driven by this lack of self-confidence to compulsive conformity, thus weakening the power of innovation which it is one of the chief functions of the elite to wield. They were often intolerant, even more competitive in their striving for ascent than was necessary, and yet too cautious to succeed.
Over time, reliance on meritocracy further exacerbates this negative dynamic. The sons and daughters of the highly educated and richly rewarded these days are likely to grow up and assess their self-worth in terms of accomplishment. Made it into Harvard? Snagged that six-figure job? Moved into that corner office? You’re a success. Anything less? Disaster.
Now, imagine these meritocrats in the age of the machines. Think of the young woman who understands herself primarily as a graduate of an Ivy League medical school, say, encountering software that could glance at an MRI scan, compare it to every other similar case on record, and produce an accurate diagnosis in the time it takes her to put on her doctor’s coat. Or consider the young man who takes great pride in his career at a white shoe law firm, only to discover one morning that AI can inhale millions of pages per minute, ingest every existing precedent on the books, and deliver a sophisticated analysis before the budding lawyer can finish his morning espresso.
It’s very likely that these meritocrats will soon find themselves, if not altogether out of a job, then at least in possession of one that is far less radiant and remunerating.
What happens then? To hear Moshe Koppel tell it, only good things. Writing recently in Tablet Magazine, the Israeli computer scientist posed the question on everyone’s mind: “If automation hollows out jobs, what will people do all day that feels meaningful?”
Simple, he responded: They will do what humans have done since time immemorial, which is look to faith for answers and a sense of purpose.
Religion, Koppel reminded us, works because it offers “scheduled repetitions of doing what you said you’d do even when you don’t feel like it.” It’s a commitment, not a preference, and it offers “a class of goods [that] sits outside the market by design,” like reading Scripture, praying to God, and spending Saturday or Sunday with your friends and neighbors. Your job, in other words, may be disrupted by some clever computer that can do it twice as well in half the time, but your relationship with your maker and with your community is something you alone can navigate, and only by showing up and being fully present. “The boundary,” Koppel concluded, “protects the thing from the optimization pressure that dissolves it.”
To keep things biblical for a moment, think of AI not as the flood but as the dove, informing us that the deluge is over and that it’s now time to rebuild. For decades, we’ve been in a competitive frenzy of work, work, work that has scrubbed our existence of every trace of truth and beauty. We have measured out our lives with coffee spoons, obsessed with having just a little bit more: more money, more power, more respect. We asked only what we could do, rarely what we should. We generated immense wealth and progress, and then wondered why they brought with them so much misery.
The coming of very smart machines may be just the chance we need to start over.
True, like all technological upheavals, this one will bring profound changes we can’t even begin to predict, not all of them rosy. But also like all technological upheavals, this one offers us an opportunity to return to first principles and ask ourselves what being human is all about.
“AI,” Koppel writes, “can fetch sources and summarize moves, but it cannot give you the reflex that keeps moral talk from devolving into sentiment.” The machines, in other words, may take some of our jobs, but they could never satisfy our desire for justice, for compassion, for truth, for transcendence—basic human instincts that have thrust us forward for millennia. We may lose some of the prestige that once came with being meritocratic high achievers, but we’ll gain something more valuable in return: the gift of being fully present and realizing, as so many of our ancestors have, that we matter because we were created in God’s image, not because we are on the receiving end of a gilded diploma or a padded paycheck.
Ask any AI agent to sum up the Law of Conservation of Energy, and it will tell you that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. The same is true of emotional and spiritual energy as well. The singular human genius that for too long has lashed itself to spreadsheets is about to be set free to contemplate not just the price of things but, finally, their value. With a little luck, we may be looking at a new great awakening, with artificial intelligence not replacing but liberating our much more precious, irreplaceable, and all-too-human intelligence.
