What does it mean to be human? Is humanity conferred from selecting stoplights in a square? Is it from our ability to read warped, struck-through text? Or is it the case, as some have posited, that to be human is merely to be an advanced ape with marginally larger brains?
Amidst the frenetic terror on the internet concerning the introduction of (potentially) Agentic AI, much thought has been given to the productivity, labor, political, and developmental impacts of the technology on humans. These questions are important, but subsidiary to a greater one: How will artificial intelligence alter our notions of humanity and its value?
If the current technological trend continues, Agentic AI will accentuate our understanding of human exceptionalism rather than dulling it. As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has said, “A.I. is a probabilistic technology”. AI may be able to generate a section of words that have occurred in that order before. However, because AI generates output based on probabilities of what its training data would say, it could not construct a reasonable new argument that has never occurred to someone before. This is a fundamental limitation of artificial intelligence technology. It is only an approximation of intelligence, rather than a true intellect.
Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment imagines a person locked in a room who follows rules to respond to Chinese symbols without actually understanding Chinese, suggesting that a system can produce intelligent-seeming outputs purely through symbol manipulation without any comprehension. This thought experiment demonstrates that a system approximating intelligence is not the same as intelligence. But what do I even mean by intelligence? Intelligence is defined by Webster as “the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations.” While every AI system involves what we call machine learning, it’s really machine selection, where the inefficient algorithms are removed, and the efficient ones are kept. It is not one system iterating on new information and developing an intuitive sense of its value in the way human learning functions. But how does the human mind actually function?
If many secular philosophers, such as Hilary Putnam, are to be believed, the human mind is a highly efficient biological computer. This means we ought to be able to perfectly replicate human understanding on a digital computer. However, if Huang, who owns the world’s most valuable chip-making company, is right, AI cannot perfectly replicate the human mind. It may be able to approximate the human process of knowing, but it cannot complete the process itself. This provides evidence that the secular conceptualization of a purely naturalistic mind may not be fully accurate. Perhaps the Christian scholars are correct that there is some separation between mind and matter. This separate, non-physical mind is not a “god of the gaps” fallacy in intuition, but rather a recognition that physical phenomena like electrical signals or the presence of certain chemicals do not, and likely cannot explain our capacity to generate new ideas.
This is true on a mental level. I cannot survey every inventor, philosopher, mathematician, or artist across time and ask them how their process of creation occurs from a mental standpoint. I am limited to my own experience, which tells me that ideation is a near-instantaneous process that comes from nothing. While a certain amount of background knowledge is a precondition for generating new ideas, it does not create the ideas themselves. Two people can have identical knowledge, and one produces something new while the other does not. A knowledgeable Christian might interject here that the character of God also involves creation out of nothing, or ex nihilo. This understanding of human creativity shores up the bulwark of the imago dei: humans possess a creative capacity similar, though lesser, to God’s ability to create out of nothing. AI provides the point of contrast; it is only capable of tasks requiring repetition, whereas human beings, via the imago dei, have this ex nihilo ideation. However, if AI atrophies away our collective cognitive capacity, no philosophers will be left to reflect on this new reality.
Such an effect of AI systems provides a counterpoint to my argument. By itself, this system has the potential to remind us of the image of God, but the technology also has the capability to simulate emotions and relationships in a way that removes our interdependence with other embodied human beings. Even if AI can only imitate human behavior, that imitation can still be fatal to relational structures and our perception of reality itself. Ultimately, though, in a vacuum, AI’s limitations remind us that to be human is to be made in the image and likeness of a creator; a divine, cosmic inventor who acts not by algorithm, or mechanization, but out of nothing.
