Gregory E. Kaebnick, The Hastings Center ; What Does AI Jesus Teach Us?
"But there are some roles in which human presence is important.
This is a valuable insight that AI Jesus really does teach us. There would be ways of interacting with AI Jesus that did not suggest an inappropriate replacement of humans. For example, AI Jesus might be a tool for searching through the theological material on which it is trained and generating theologically informed answers to visitors’ questions. Visitors might thereby use AI Jesus to help them think more clearly or creatively about those questions.
But if the bioethics’ editors’ statement is on the right track, AI Jesus is troubling if it is in effect taking over the moral thinking—if it is genuinely seen as spiritual leader or moral guide. For one thing, we humans must be in charge of our moral governance. In much the way that, in a democracy, public policy must ultimately be collectively authorized by the citizens in order to be legitimate, so, too, must moral rules be collectively endorsed by the beings to whom they apply. For that idea of endorsement to have any meaning, we must all be thinking about them and settling on them together. We must collectively be the authors of morality, as it were.
Beyond that, it’s our society. Just as the core mission of a bioethics journal is to foster a community of people exchanging scholarly views about bioethical issues, the ultimate goal of a society is about creating the conditions of human flourishing. Human flourishing has something to do with the efficient production of things for people to enjoy, but most people would say that there’s more to it than that—hence my friend who would rather die than let a chatbot take over the biography he’s struggling to write. As philosophers tracing back to Aristotle have often held, human flourishing requires, not just contentment, but activity and engagement. It requires that humans be in the loop."
