AI: The Original Sin 2.0?
The news in July sounded like a pitch for a prequel to the movie Terminator: Rogue artificial intelligence systems at two leading platforms escaped and hacked into outside companies.
The incidents were discovered. But what AI mischief remains hidden? And will things get worse? Could an AI avatar identify far-flung cyberanarchists with access to sensitive networks and bring them together to launch simultaneous crippling attacks on nuclear, transportation, and financial infrastructures?
Put another way: Is AI truly the best thing since sliced bread—or could it be the antichrist?
Depends on who you ask.
“With AI, we have the opportunity to create a future that is brighter for all,” says Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
But evangelist Greg Laurie cautions that “when we start looking to AI for wisdom, guidance, and even companionship—that is Antichrist behavior.”
Even the founder of Grok, Elon Musk, warns, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”
For his part, Pope Leo XIV admits that AI systems offer “tangible benefits across many fields” but cautions they “do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”
In his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, His Holiness warns that “no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil.”
As for what to do about it, the pope says, “No one is without responsibility. We all have our own areas for action” to “safeguard the human person in the era of artificial intelligence.”
AI should be like electricity; running unseen in the background of our lives.
It is with that spirit that I offer five ideas to protect against the harm that AI and other internet technologies can cause.
- Limit children’s access to smart devices and prohibit them from accessing social media. More parents and schools are favoring the former restriction, and so far, four nations—Australia, France, Indonesia, and Malaysia—are banning young people from using Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and similar platforms; many others are likely to follow suit.
- Prohibit anonymity on social media. This can markedly reduce vile and violent online behavior and promote civility in the digital public square. Plus, bots and scams will be scarcer. Sunlight is a great internet disinfectant too.
- Ban online pornography. Up to 75 percent of teens are exposed to internet porn, and there’s a disturbing trend of young people using AI to create sexualized images of people they know without permission. Less X-rated material means less sexual trafficking and exploitation of women and girls, and more benefits for the minds and souls of young people, especially boys.
- Restrict humanoid robots and AI avatar personalization. Sam Altman of OpenAI has talked about “the merge” of humans and machines. But as modern prophet Marshall McLuhan once said, “The more the data banks record about us, the less we exist.”
We must strive to make ourselves more like saints—not to make machines more like us. AI should be like electricity; running unseen in the background of our lives. Trying to elevate any technology toward sentience seems akin to Adam and Eve aiming to “be like God” (Gen 3:5). Look what happened to them (and thus to all of us)!
We do not need Original Sin 2.0 to exacerbate the OG one. AI can be a tool; it is not our friend. And to keep it that way, we may one day have to enervate AI like astronaut Dave Bowman did with the homicidal HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Observe an AI Sabbath. Take a whole day off from using AI and social media. Yeah, this is a tough one; I haven’t made it happen lately (though I did give up X during Lent—once).
But if by our conscious behavior we could do more to lead us not into algorithmic temptation, we can be delivered from much evil.
None of these ideas are original, and all would be very hard to achieve. I offer them with humility, as I am no computer scientist (and I admit to using AI, though—for better or worse—my writing is my own).
But in defense of my chutzpah, I did help a bit with Michael Lynton, then CEO of Sony Pictures, on his perceptive 2009 essay, “Guardrails for the Internet,” in which he warned that the intellectual property of humankind could be exploited on the internet:
Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don’t figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.
If by our conscious behavior we could do more to lead us not into algorithmic temptation, we can be delivered from much evil.
And for more than a decade, I was lucky to assist the visionary Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, in his virtuous battle to limit the threat of Big Tech to content creators. As far back as 2007, as editor of The Times of London, Thomson warned the House of Lords that in the digital world, young people:
are growing up surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear. . . . In the longer term, critical judgment will not be as it should be: the rumors will be believed, the fiction will be thought of as fact.
That future is now and is accelerated by AI. With the rise of social media and AI, our politics have become more polarized, our society more atomized. Trust in leaders and institutions and optimism about the future have all plummeted.
Groups like ControlAI and the Future of Life Institute aim to educate legislators and citizens about the extinction risk of superintelligence. But as our technomoral crisis deepens, are we too late to set things right?
Our world seems akin to the one William Butler Yeats wrote of in “The Second Coming” more than a century ago: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
And with our technological inventions and abuse of them, we’ve opened a Pandora’s Box (which was really a jar). As the Greek poet Hesiod wrote, Pandora:
took the lid off the big jar with her hands / And scattered all the miseries that spell sorrow for men / Only Hope was left there in the unbreakable container / Stuck under the lip of the jar, and wouldn’t fly out.
From whence will come our hope? To hold the center, to put the lid back on the jar, we can try the ideas outlined above, and there are more and better ones, to be sure.
But in the end, our “hope is in the Lord” (Ps 146:5).
And thus, as the spirit of Magnifica Humanitas suggests, we can turn to something no AI avatar will ever be able to do, no matter how savvy, smart, or sophisticated it becomes: We can pray.