Professor Michael Hanby has stated that a technologically minded society becomes incapable of asking profound questions because it can no longer think deeply about them. He writes,
A culture whose very view of reality is technological, with all the assaults on human dignity that inevitably follow, will have every incentive not to think about the profound questions of human existence that for so long animated Western culture. Education will largely consist in learning not to ask them, and so will be scarcely distinguishable from ignorance. But more worrisome still, the inhabitants of such a culture will be unable to think deeply about such questions, because there will be no depths to think about; for they will have already reduced reality to an assemblage of superficial ‘facts’ and thinking to the arrangement and manipulation of those facts. For such a society there would simply be no such thing as a profound question, only problems awaiting technical or managerial solutions.1
Perhaps there is no better example of this than Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” where the renowned mathematician introduced his famous “test” for determining whether computers are intelligent.2 In the very first line of his paper, Turing states that he will consider the question “Can machines think?” (an undoubtedly profound question with theological, metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical implications) only to immediately discard it. According to Turing, asking this question would require defining the terms “machine” and “think,” and defining these according to their common use leads one to the conclusion that answering the question “is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll.”3 Instead of doing this, he proposes replacing it with another question that is expressed, according to Turing, in unambiguous words. But the new “question” is not a question at all: “The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game’” (emphasis added).
The ethical becomes irrelevant when intelligence ceases to be about contemplation and becomes mere computation.
The real reason the original question was discarded surfaces later on: “The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” In dismissing this profound question, however, Turing’s discussion of the possibility of machine intelligence loses all its depth. The resulting shallowness becomes evident in his reply to various objections to his view, in particular, in his response to what he calls the “theological objection”—namely, “Thinking is a function of man’s immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.” This objection is quickly discarded with a wave of the hand, first by reminding us that different religions hold different views, then by a bland appeal to God’s omnipotence, and finally, because it has been found wanting in the past: “I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past”—which is, of course, followed by an appeal to Galileo.
Turing’s response is plagued not only by bad theology but by even worse metaphysics. The real objection to machine intelligence is not theological but metaphysical. If thinking is the act of an immaterial intellect (and there are important reasons to think this, though we cannot rehearse them here)—an idea held not only by Christians, but also by Muslim, Jewish, and many pagan thinkers (such as Plato and Aristotle)—then machines, which are purely material, cannot think. This is the one objection that Turing never even considers. Despite his constant strategy of refusing to answer the metaphysical question of “What is thinking?” Turing nevertheless responds to it, though implicitly and under the table, as it were. His metaphysics are thoroughly materialistic: thinking is equated with brain states; computers are discrete state machines and thus mechanical brains; therefore, computers can think. Intelligence, for Turing, is reducible to computation.
In the classical understanding of intelligence, the latter’s purpose is to know the truth. Intelligence is not primarily about executing certain operations, however complex they may be, but to contemplate the truth. This contemplative reason can then reach out into the practical domain, permeating not only the abstract and complex tasks of higher thought but even the most mundane of activities. All human acts are infused with intelligence.4 Turing’s reduction of intelligence to computation makes intelligence banal, and if intelligence is banal, so is man.
A culture whose very view of reality is technological will be plagued with assaults on human dignity.
Since ancient times, man has been defined as a rational, thinking animal. To change what it means to think is to change what it means to be human. This banalization, however, did not begin with Turing. He is the heir of modern philosophy’s rejection of metaphysics and its concomitant reduction of human reason. Michael Hanby argues in his book No God, No Science? that behind modern science’s claims that it is metaphysically neutral lurks a metaphysics that has hollowed out all of reality, reducing it to an aggregate of inert stuff that is moved about indifferently by natural forces. The universe thus becomes banal and meaningless, an object not for contemplation but for manipulation through technological prowess. In other words, all those who disregard metaphysics are not actually setting metaphysics aside. They are embracing and taking for granted—usually unconsciously—a half-baked version of it. Elsewhere, Hanby describes modern philosophy’s role in this banalization:
If the truth is identical to my control over the phenomena of nature, and if by manipulating x, I can induce result y, and if in inducing y, I can move on to experiment z, then I simply do not need to bother asking what it means to know or to cause something, or even what x, y, and z are. Within this reduced understanding of reason and truth, the questions ‘what is and what things are’ are superfluous, and a great deal of modern philosophy has devoted itself to making the world safe for technology precisely by showing such questions to be nonsense.5
The Turing test is not concerned with answering the question of whether computers can think, for that question is, according to Turing himself, meaningless. It is not in fact concerned with truth at all, because its whole purpose is to deceive. The point of the test is to make the judge (or panel of judges) mistake the computer for a human: “The idea of the test is that the machine has to try and pretend to be a man, by answering questions put to it, and it will only pass if the pretence is reasonably convincing. A considerable proportion of a jury, who should not be expert about machines, must be taken in by the pretence.”6 The point is to deny them the truth, but that is to deny them their rational participation in the act of judgment. If we no longer have a concern for truth, if the question about what things are is superfluous (as Turing suggests), so will any questions concerning goodness. Asking whether we should or should not do something becomes meaningless.
There can be no profound ethical questions without profound metaphysical ones. If intelligence is reduced to computation, ethics is reduced to activism. Thus, discussions concerning the “ethics” of AI do not ask after what is good. They are restricted, instead, to matters of control over the technology, to concerns on diversity and inclusion, privacy and transparency. Not that these are not important, but ethical discussions without questions after what is good are inherently shallow and one can rightly wonder whether they remain ethical at all. This shallowness follows from what was said before, if intelligence is reducible to the execution of tasks, all that matters is whether those tasks are done correctly. The ethical becomes irrelevant when intelligence ceases to be about contemplation and becomes mere computation.
Hanby has also warned that a culture whose very view of reality is technological will be plagued with assaults on human dignity. We can now see why. To deny man truth and goodness (and with them, beauty) is to violate his very dignity. If we are, as Turing believed, mere biological computing machines (“wetware,” as it would now be called), why should we have any special dignity? Why not accept replacement by more efficient electronic computing machines? Turing himself points in this direction: “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.”7 This would not be an issue if it were only the mad ravings of a now defunct mathematician. But Turing’s ideas live on, his perverse metaphysics lurking underneath the agenda of the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, et al., where it is furthermore corrupted by economic motives. It is impossible to speak of ethics where the very notions of goodness and truth are denied, where man is reduced to a machine, and a defective one at that. Where man is reduced to a machine, it is no longer the human good that sets the standard. In discussing the consequences of developing “intelligent” machines, Turing responds to the opposition likely to be faced from intellectuals losing their jobs: “There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the machines were trying to say, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines.”8
To make intelligence banal is to make man banal, which means to make him less that what he is: the image and likeness of God, made for communion with him who is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Turing was so enthralled by the power of computers and so blinded by his materialistic metaphysics, that he became incapable of seeing that those who had built the computers were far more worthy of admiration than the work of their hands. Despite his genius, he lacked the wisdom to prevent him from falling into the idolatry of worshipping the work of his hands: “And you praised the gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone, that neither see nor hear nor have intelligence” (Dan. 5:23).
1 See Michael Hanby, “The Gospel of Creation and the technocratic paradigm: reflections on a central teaching of Laudati Si’,” Communio: International Catholic Review 42 (Winter 2015): 738.
2 See A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy vol. 59, no. 236 (October 1950): 443-460.
3 Ironically, Turing’s alternative formulation also implies a “statistical” solution. See ibid. section 6: “I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about l09, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning” [emphasis added].
4 Which is precisely why we can judge certain actions as “dumb” by their failing to be fully ordered by the intellect.
5 See Michael Hanby, “The Gospel of Creation and the technocratic paradigm: reflections on a central teaching of Laudati Si’,” Communio: International Catholic Review 42 (Winter 2015): 737.
6 Alan Turing, “Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?” in Stuart M. Schieber, ed., The Turing Test Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2004), 118.
7 Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery, A heretical theory” in Ibid., 109.
8 Ibid. (emphasis added).