Delivering the Anita and Antonio Gott Lecture at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City recently, Dr. Shannon Vallor explored the topic “The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking.” Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Her most recent book, which shares a title with her lecture, explores the ethics, advantages and challenges of a future with artificial intelligence.
She was introduced before the lecture by the Rev. Dr. Scott Black Johnston, senior pastor at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Vallor said her book “uses a mirror as a metaphor to help us understand how AI tools work, what they can do and cannot do, and what they can do but probably shouldn’t.”
During her talk, which can be seen here, Vallor addressed mirrors, space, time and stories.
On the topic of mirrors, “we need to grasp AI’s impacts on democracy, science, media, the arts and climate,” she said, including how we carry out our daily work and how we find companionship.
“It is changing how we make laws, music, love and war,” Vallor said. AI is a mirror “in a more powerful sense. It’s not one technology, but many machine-learning tools.”
When you look in a mirror, “you know there is no second face in that room,” she said. But AI companies “want you to fail the mirror test. They want you to think [that with AI technology] you’re seeing something that can help you, teach you, comfort you, help you speak and write — and one day replace you.”
AI tricks “can be dazzling, even blinding and disorienting,” she said. “They are used to confound us. They are fraudulent deep-fake images, designed to gin up our rage over something that never happened.”
Thinking about space, Vallor said that in order to reason, “we need to use thought as a way to stretch into the open space of the future.” AI tools can be designed “to hold open the space of reason, but for the most part they aren’t.” A large language model won’t tell us “I don’t really know” or “I’m not sure” or “why don’t you tell me?” she noted.
“They are mental space-filling machines,” Vallor said. “Want a better ending to your novel? The AI mirror has unflagging confidence.”
If we had large language models in the 1600s and asked them to deliver justice, “they would have never demanded the liberation of women and slaves. They could not have even questioned the divine right of kings,” she said. “We would have remained stuck in time.”
Thinking “requires the repeated practice of scaling daunting peaks. We’re letting those skills erode,” she said. “We could design AI to strengthen our cognitive muscles and those of the next generation, but that’s not what the market wants. It wants to extract maximum returns now.”
Vallor reminded her hearers that “we know space and time aren’t separate” and that “things and events arrive on an unpredictable schedule.”
Humans enjoy the ability to choose. “We can abandon a commitment or make one we swore we would never take on,” Vallor said. “We can stick with the dire politics we know, or we can say, ‘to hell with this. We’re changing the game.’”
During a question-and-answer session following her talk, Vallor was asked about how we can get to a hopeful future.
“I think we can get there through remembering the history of human courage and human responsibility,” she said. “When things feel like they’re spinning out of control, it’s easy to feel like we don’t have the resources to get through this.”
“All you have to do is read history enough to know how many times we’ve been in some version of here,” she said, and “how many times humanity has been boxed up … and chewed its way out through solidarity, ingenuity, faith and a commitment to the future.”
“There are ways to channel feelings into a power of creating a future for ourselves and one another,” Vallor said. “We’ve done it so many times, and we can do it again.”
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Lucy Bryant, Online Service Client Relations Specialist, Operations, The Presbyterian Foundation
Monica Buonincontri, Vice President, Marketing & Commumications, The Board of Pensions
Let us pray:
God of truth and wisdom, you created us with minds to wonder, question and imagine. As we live in a world shaped by new technologies, help us to use what we create with humility, courage and care. Remind us that no machine can replace the dignity, responsibility and hope you have placed within humanity. Amen.
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