Artificial Intelligence: For Good Or Evil

AI something that five or 10 years, or years down the road if something were already think this is a weekly radio show and can't cast from family designed to better inform listeners about the issues of the day and encourage you to be voices of persuasion from family values in your community.

Thank you for joining us today for family policy matters. Tracy did at Greg's director of communications sitting in this week for John Rustin. Many of us may still consider artificial intelligence or AIS daydreaming or part of a sci-fi novel or movie, but those who spend their days studying AIS. Many in our local universities are doing. Understand that it's coming much quicker than most people realize.

Will as a response to that, the ethics and religious liberty commission or ER LC of the Southern Baptist convention recently issued a statement on artificial intelligence, which was signed by a long list of evangelical leaders Jason Thacker with the ER. LC was one of those signers and he's with us today to talk about why that statement was necessary. Jason serves as creative director and associate research fellow at ER LC, where he oversees all creative projects while writing and speaking on human dignity, technology, and artificial intelligence has a new book on AI and human dignity coming out in 2020, Jason Thacker, welcome to family policy matters. If you think you can muster heavenly. So what you begin by defining artificial intelligence.

What is it and how prevalent is it in our lives today. But the really important question because when we talk about artificial intelligence in our culture, there's often, sub- misunderstanding about what it really is essentially AI is nonbiological intelligent what we mean by that the machine that can exhibit certain intelligent feature so being able to process or think or learn in certain aspects, and a lot of those are loaded words initially at the machine that can process the formation of data and produces a result of two forms of artificial intelligent, but one that are novel the popular culture is actually artificial general intelligence which is a humanlike intelligent that we don't currently have and we don't know if it is another form of AI, which is popularly used and we can interact with it every day that narrow AI or just artificial intelligence machine that can perform a certain task. So example of that would be on my iPhone. I have theory can take a theory and tell her to do something specific, and what she is able to do that but you know sometimes it's really rigid, not able to do everything I asked to do just a very narrow task about this recent statement issued by ER LC why did you all feel the need to issue the statement are you seeing a lack of understanding about AI. Perhaps some fear related to it among Christians. Yeah, I think a lot of those are part of the reason that we develop the statement back last April. Google actually dropped a project called Project Mason with the Department of Defense and what is will AI was that it was able to process through video data captured by drones that our military uses have been using for the last 10 or 12 years pretty pretty predominantly and what was happening is that the employees were kind of voicing their turns and outrage that Google would even work on a project like this that could be used to strengthen targeting systems and surveillance systems overseas.

So after that debacle happened what you saw was a number of tech companies, putting out apical statements of Google put one up on the Google AI blog abuser, guiding how we think about use AI because AI isn't something that five or 10 years or 50 years down the road if something were already using our military uses AI often now were starting to see the medicine we're starting to do some work in automation and so AI of our office you it's something that's were already working through in our culture is asking a lot of questions.

What is it mean to be ethical. How do we use this in a good way versus a lot of the abuses that we see of AI states like China who are using facial recognition technology that's driven by AI to really oppress certain people, groups or dissidents within the country.

So what we wanted to do was put forth evangelical statement or guidelines, or ethical framework on how we feel that the church should approach these type of issues because they are. They are very intense, and we believe as Christians that we have the hope of the world that we have the truth that God is given us on how to use these tools well and so that's what were doing about putting together statements address the misunderstandings address some of the height but also to proactively engage the subject of the church rather than responding to it after its impacts are widely felt is a really interesting statement in the preamble it seems like you are tackling. How do we as Christians how we can think about AI and how we can think about technology in general and another place you say that the use of AI is not morally neutral so help us out here how how are we as Christians to view AI and technology in your opinion and I think the best way for Christians to view this as any other tool that we've ever created or used many technology is new.

Often we think of technologies or phones in our computers and the type of system that we have for the last 10, 20, 30 years, but we've always use technology with humanity.

And so that's what we wanted to do misstatement is to go back to the very beginning of how God created us, he created us in his image he give us work to do and that he gave us these creative abilities to create certain pieces of technology like a shovel or hoe or even going to Johannes Gutenberg in the printing press. These are tools that God had given us what we believe through Matthew 22 were Jesus is being pressed on what is the greatest commandment. He says the year to love the Lord your God with all your heart mind soul and strength and mature love your neighbor as yourself. And so we were thinking through a grid is how do we use technology as a tool not as a God, not as a substitute but as a tool to love God and to love our neighbor and so in the preamble and throughout the statement were trying to frame this because often in culture. AI can easily become because it's so powerful.

We put way too much trust and authority before we start thinking of it as something more than just tool that's like really good point. I love the point about the printing press, the casino as Christians who love our Bibles. You know, we know what that did as far as being able to quickly print Bibles and get them to all edges of the world. So that's a really good example. Let's talk about the good and the bad because the statement that you guys issued certainly does that. It is in many places very hopeful so it contains phrases like a demonstration of the unique creative abilities of human beings and innovation for the glory of God. And then there's another that says human being should develop and harness technology in ways that lead to greater flourishing any alleviation of human suffering. So talk about that you mentioned it before but more specifically, what are some ways that you are hopeful about what technology can do as a tool for Christians, technology, and specifically artificial intelligence can be used by humanity and by society to make our work more efficient to make things quicker to be able to offload very simple task. Let us focus on more mentally intensive Tax Court physically intensive task and so just a real practical day-to-day example of how AI is already being used.

My father just last year had to have an amputation and it was due to medical complications. He walked away and he's able to win out.

Granted, the technology is still so futuristic and something unaffordable for us as a family, but you can already starting to see prosthetic limb that are controlled by thought and while that might sound robotic, Star Trek dish you already see this technology being used to really help people who lost abilities to use certain body parts where you're able to use the machine and driven by artificial intelligence regain kind of normal life for him.

Granted, he doesn't have that technology right now but it's available and it's already being used, to treat some of the most intense diseases and disabilities that we have a broken world about some of the applications for the church say doing evangelism or reaching out to people in poverty. Yet there's a growing group of Christians who are looking to harness the power of artificial intelligence to share the gospel to fulfill the great commission that Christ given us and what their how they're doing. That is actually using artificial intelligence and form of chat bot meaning something that you can log into some I can ask questions and its responding in real time helping God spiritual conversation. There's good and bad and that good is that the gospel is going forth network sharing the message of hope and also if that becomes a substitute for the church for authentic immunity as the body of Christ with one another in a physical location. We don't want to see that this can aid us in helping to share the gospel and getting the gospel in two places that difficult or next to impossible to be able to share this message but we don't want to leave it at that. But you also see other Christians who are faithfully using and developing these technologies are outside of maybe a specific ministry or the Angels of context for doctors and lawyers and economist professors who are starting to use this technology for the greater good for human flourishing. Seeing that every single human being made in the image of God and had ultimate dignity and worth.

And so they're harnessing this technology defined to do medical research to find any cures for diseases that have plagued us where AI can step in and just process more information and more data than a human being could in many ways to these AI systems are able to outperform on an very narrow task, but generally humanity is obviously still more thing than anything we have in terms of AI. Steve mentioned this many times, but after some of your very hopeful statements you go into a long list of possible abuses of AI and there are some pretty scary prospects when you consider that, but what are some of the potential abuses that we all as believers, as Christians need to be on the lookout for. I think one of the most pressing right now is the way that authoritarian states or wrote groups and when I say I'm specifically thinking China right now and some of the human rights abuses that they're committing as a nation against people of faith, their stories coming out that China is actually using facial recognition technology as a way to track it and the way of doing that is not just in the security economy which the government promotes weather also using it to oppress dissidents or people who don't agree with the Communist Party and specifically that happening with the Uighur Muslims certain people group a faith group within the mountains of China were actually being taken and in the custody using artificial intelligence with the facial recognition technology to be tracked every move they make their being detained and then there sent off to reeducation camps, to swear loyalty to the Chinese president and the Chinese government to renounce their faith to be trained and what it means to be a good Chinese person and so you see that AI can be used in ways that Crops or can't strengthen more authoritarian, centralized government were also saying the facial recognition that's driven by AI debated here in the United States where you have San Francisco just last week to issue the city band on the artificial intelligence being used in surveillance because they feel the tension between privacy and security in their leaning more on the privacy angle okay well just about out of time. Jason work in our listeners go if they want to read more, either about the E RLC statement on artificial intelligence or about this topic of AI in general that you can go to ER L.com/AI and that is where we list our statement. We also have a number of resources on website. You can also find under our technology topic, Jason Thacker, thank you so much for being with us on family policy matters today and for keeping up with our world is rapidly changing technologies and helping us to keep our focus on the fundamental important truths of life.

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