The Real Great Replacement

AI’s loudest detractors are an unlikely bunch. They’re the tech bros of Silicon Valley, the engineers at Anthropic, the Effective Altruists of Berkeley. They are also the people, perplexingly, who are developing AI at breakneck speed. Their dramatic claim is that AI will inevitably lead to, or at least significantly increase the probability of, our extinction. Why, then, do they continue to build these systems? I suspect that behind it all there is an implicit concern more subtle than their obvious and easy-to-grasp extinction narrative.

Broadly speaking, most of these developers are utilitarians—many openly claim to be Effective Altruists (utilitarianism’s modern incarnation). At the very least, almost all of them operate within a materialist framework. If there is no God to justify the equal dignity of all, then what imbues humans with their intrinsic worth? The closest thing the tech elites have is their intellect. Their central assumption is that humans occupy a privileged place in the universe on account of their ability to reason. So when AI (even in its nascent stage) makes human rationality look quaint and anachronistic, of course the response from this community is going to be existential. The Effective Altruist may write breathless essays about a Terminator-style extinction scenario, but internally he is anguishing over his own replacement. That is what “extinction” really means.

This should not be mistaken for replacement in the narrow economic sense. To the rationalist, the supersession of one’s rationality is a total replacement of the self. This might explain why they can be both detractors and boosters—if they are the builders of their own replacements, perhaps they can maintain a sense of ownership, thus preserving their privileged place in the universe, if not as the supremely rational being, at least as the one who brought the supremely rational being into existence. This may also explain, in part, the fervency with which some of this cohort pursues the trans-humanist project of merging with the AIs—a desperate bid to reassert their centrality in the universe.

But talk of extinction makes for good headlines, and perhaps this is why the prophets of Silicon Valley have seemed to monopolize the discourse. The Christian response, meanwhile, has been much less influential. In part this is because it has been markedly less united than that of the utilitarians. The reason for this may lie in what each community fears.The Christian has a soul, and he does not fear that AI will somehow supplant it—his intellect may be made to look quaint, but he will still have his soul, something the rationalist cannot say. There is also some obvious protection against Doomerism in the Christian’s eschatology. What the Christian fears is more subtle and more insidious. He fears diminishment. And “diminishment” is harder to put in a headline — 7 Billion Souls Diminished! is much less exciting than 7 Billion People Killed!

Unlike replacement, diminishment happens in a thousand different ways. And so there are a thousand different essays tackling a thousand different kinds of diminishment from a thousand different Christian perspectives. That makes the Christian response seem diffuse when compared to the unified front of the rationalists warning of “extinction.” This makes the enemy frustratingly broad—one cannot point to something as visible as a killer robot. The diminishment of the soul resists our attention precisely because a singular, monolithic enemy operating via some singular, monolithic method can’t be identified. This is why books like Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine are called “frustratingly broad.” They are broad, but they are necessarily so.

But the Christian fear of diminishment, while less amenable to the writers of headlines, is better placed than the technologist’s fear of replacement. In a million small ways, AI cuts us off from our humanity. It encourages us to move the locus of authority and agency from the human person to the machine, making us more machine-like in the process. At what point are we so diminished that it is fair to ask if we are indeed still human? At what point are we so diminished that we have no free will to exercise? At what point does salvation become infinitely harder than the camel making his way through the eye of a needle? Psalm 115 offers wisdom here:

Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever he pleases.

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.

They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.

They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.

They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat.

Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them.

As myriad are the ways of the soul’s diminishment, so too are the ways of its protection. Just like the devil, our guardian angel will be in the details. Yet the first step is to recover a basic understanding of what is at risk of diminishment. It may sound silly, but the question what is a person? has never been so important. For we live in an age when persons are being disassembled and reconstituted in strange and disquieting ways. Only by learning to see ourselves as souls can we learn how to protect our souls from technology’s depredations.

Just as there are many Christian diagnoses of the problem, so there are many Christian prescriptions. The logic of the Incarnation is a logic of particularity, a sharp contrast to the abstract and homogenizing logic of our age. For Christians, the person is understood as embodied, which could not be more unlike the disembodied “intelligence” known as AI. Christian asceticism—even in the simple, daily forms practiced by the laity—is an attempt to work out that logic by embracing natural limits with intention and skill. That asceticism is the true opposite of “effective altruism.” Effective resistance to diminishment comes from a commitment to embodiment that celebrates variety and opposes, in a thousand specific ways, the boundless pride that can only celebrate a sterile and monotonous Progress.

Image Credit: David Wilkie, “John Knox Dispensing the Sacrament at Calder House” (c. 1840)