For the more visionary members of the scientistic elite, AI isn’t merely another tool for mankind to use but rather a means by which he will be transformed into a superior organism. An interview in the online magazine Noēma between Tobias Rees and Nathan Gardels provides many details of this ‘upgrade’ of humanity.
It begins with a redefinition of what it means to be alive and to have intelligence:
In her essay in Noema, the astrophysicist Sarah Walker said that “we need to get past our binary categorization of all things as either life or not.”
What interests me most is rethinking the concepts we have inherited from the modern period, from the perspective of the in-betweenness made visible to us by AI.
. . . Deep learning, in general, and generative AI in particular, have broken with this human-centric concept of intelligence and replaced it with something else: The idea that intelligence is pretty much two things: learning and reasoning.
. . . I am emphasizing this absence of the symbolic because it is a beautiful way to show that deep learning has led to a pretty powerful philosophical rupture: Implicit in the new concept of intelligence is a radically different ontological understanding of what it is to be human, indeed, of what reality is or of how it is structured and organized.
Understanding this rupture with the older concept of intelligence and ontology of the human/the world is key, I think, to understanding your actual question: Are we entering what you call a new AIxial age, where AI will amount to something similar to what writing amounted to roughly 3,000 to 2,000 years ago?
The Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church speak of man as the king and priest of creation, the one for whom it was all made and prepared by the All-Holy Trinity. By virtue of this, mankind has a special place in the created order. But the anti-Christian scientists, mimicking their predecessor Charles Darwin, are eager to demote man to a lower level, to make him simply one of the many myriads of lifeforms on the earth. In the context of AI, they are doing this by portraying AI as a new form of life with human-like intelligence.
The AI enthusiasts wear their evolutionist dogma on their sleeve:
Where does AI depart from, and where is it similar to the neural Darwinism described here by Gerald Edelman, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist? What Edelman refers to as “reentrant interaction” appears quite similar to “backpropagation.”
Because of this, they have no compunction nor hesitation about transforming mankind into a new kind of being via technology. They see the latter as a catalyst for accelerating the evolutionary process:
Let me summarize this simply by saying that the technology of writing had absolutely dramatic consequences for what it is to be human, for how we experience and understand ourselves as humans. Among the two, perhaps, most important of these consequences was the systematic emergence of self-reflection and abstract thought.
. . . We could take any theme and approach it from whole new perspectives. Imagine what this kind of co-cogitation between humans and AI would do to our current concept of interiority! Can you imagine what it would do to how we understand terms like mind, thought, having an idea or being creative?
. . . I am entirely aware that I am giving AI philosophical and poetic dignity. And I do so consciously because I think AI has the potential to be an extraordinary philosophical event. It is our task as philosophers, artists, poets, writers and humanists to render this potential visible and relevant.
All this certainly has the makings of a new pivotal age.
The stated goal is to create a new symbiotic creature by permanently combining men and women with AI:
. . .
The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/ai-and-a-new-humanity/.
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