There is a remarkable amount of chatter these days about the “character” of artificial intelligence. One person blames AI for everything going wrong in the world, while another talks about it as though it will become the savior of humanity.
Perhaps both are giving the machine far too much credit.
Artificial intelligence was created by human beings, not the other way around. What the technology can already do is astonishing. There is little doubt that AI is disintermediating functions that once required enormous amounts of human labor. An AI system can analyze in seconds what might have taken a person days. Robots guided by increasingly sophisticated software can work longer, faster, and in environments where human beings cannot.
That should concern anyone whose identity, income, or future depends entirely upon performing a function that a machine may eventually perform better.
But does that make the machine evil?
The Tool and the User
We have faced versions of this question before. A hammer can build a house or crush a skull. A printing press can publish a Bible or propaganda. Nuclear physics can generate electricity or destroy a city. The Internet can educate a child or exploit one.
The moral question, therefore, cannot simply be: What can the technology do?
The more important questions are: Who controls it? For what purpose? Under what rules? And who accepts responsibility for the consequences?
This distinction becomes enormously important with artificial intelligence because AI is beginning to operate at a scale, speed, and apparent autonomy that previous tools did not possess. That does not necessarily give the machine moral agency. It gives human moral agency greater leverage.
AI and the New Battlefield
Consider warfare. We are already moving toward increasingly autonomous weapons, AI-assisted targeting, unmanned systems, cyber operations, robotic platforms, and military decision-support systems.
My friend Richard Stiennon anticipated much of this changing battlefield in his 2015 book There Will Be Cyberwar. One of his memorable observations was:
“In cyber warfare, a good defense is a good defense.”
There is an important principle buried in that deceptively simple statement. Technology does not disappear because we dislike it. If potentially hostile governments, corporations, competitors, criminals, or institutions adopt powerful technologies, refusing to understand those technologies does not necessarily make us virtuous. It may simply make us vulnerable.
That applies far beyond warfare. It applies to business, education, medicine, communications, finance, publishing, scientific research, and increasingly to everyday life. The first reason to understand artificial intelligence, therefore, may not be ambition at all. It may be defense.
We need enough technological competence to recognize when technology is being used against us—when it is manipulating us, replacing us, deceiving us, or making decisions that affect our lives. If we are eventually rolled over by technological change, part of the reason may be that we refused to understand the tools reshaping the world around us.
Our Newest Scapegoat
There is another danger here that has very little to do with computers. Human beings have always been remarkably talented at avoiding responsibility. We blame our parents. We blame our employers. We blame politicians. We blame capitalism. We blame socialism. We blame religion. We blame society. We blame our circumstances.
And now we can blame the algorithm.
Artificial intelligence may become the greatest technological scapegoat humanity has ever invented. We can blame it when people lose their jobs. We can blame it for misinformation. We can blame it when students stop thinking. We can blame it when someone creates propaganda. We can blame it when people become intellectually lazy.
Some of those concerns are legitimate. But somewhere behind virtually every AI system are human decisions: people designing it, training it, financing it, regulating it, deploying it, prompting it, accepting its recommendations, or acting upon its output. The machine does not magically eliminate human responsibility. In many cases, it magnifies it.
Reasoning on Steroids
What fascinates me most about artificial intelligence is its ability to bring enormous quantities of human knowledge into a conversation almost instantly.
Think of it as reasoning assisted by access to an extraordinary amount of accumulated information. Ask a good question and you may receive connections between history, economics, theology, science, philosophy, and mathematics that would have required days or weeks of conventional research. But there is a dangerous temptation hidden inside that power.
We can confuse access to knowledge with wisdom. They are not the same thing.
AI can present an argument, but I still have to decide whether the argument makes sense. AI can summarize evidence, but I still have to evaluate the evidence. AI can recommend a course of action, but I still have to decide whether I should follow it. AI can help me think. It should never relieve me of the responsibility to think.
That distinction may become one of the most important intellectual disciplines of the AI age.
The Five-Year-Old and the Professor
Artificial intelligence also creates an extraordinary paradox.
Using it well can require considerable thought and skill. Learning how to ask precise questions, challenge assumptions, verify sources, recognize hallucinations, compare competing explanations, and refine prompts is becoming a genuine intellectual discipline. Yet at the same time, the barrier to accessing knowledge has collapsed.
A five-year-old who can speak into a phone can ask questions about dinosaurs, stars, airplanes, languages, mathematics, or God. A seventy-year-old who has never written a line of computer code can suddenly use sophisticated analytical tools that once would have required an entire technical staff.
That is revolutionary.
For perhaps the first time in history, access to enormous amounts of accumulated human knowledge is becoming largely independent of our ability to navigate libraries, academic institutions, programming languages, or complicated databases. So when someone tells me, “I’m too old to understand artificial intelligence,” my response is simple:
You may actually be living at the best possible time in history to learn something new.
The machine does not have to replace your intelligence. It can extend it.
Is AI Immoral?
This brings us back to the original question.
Is artificial intelligence moral? Is it immoral? Or is it neutral? I would make an important distinction.
Artificial intelligence does not appear to possess moral agency in the same way human beings do. But AI systems are not necessarily neutral.
Human beings choose the information used to build them. Human beings establish their objectives. Human beings create their restrictions. Human beings decide which behaviors to reward. Corporations establish incentives. Governments establish regulations. Programmers make assumptions. Users provide instructions. Those decisions can contain biases, values, ideologies, commercial interests, political objectives, and moral judgments.
So technology may carry the fingerprints of its creators. But those fingerprints belong to people. When someone declares artificial intelligence immoral, therefore, I want to ask a deeper question:
According to what moral standard? Where did that standard come from?
If morality is simply whatever society agrees upon at a particular moment, then our ethical rules can change whenever society changes its mind. But if moral truth exists independently of human preference—if there really are things that are right and wrong regardless of what governments, corporations, programmers, algorithms, or majorities say—then artificial intelligence confronts us with a much older question:
Where does morality come from? The machine cannot answer that question for us.
It can tell us what Plato thought, what Aristotle thought, what Moses taught, what Jesus taught, what Marx believed, what Nietzsche argued, and what modern philosophers propose. But eventually we have to decide what we believe is true.
That is not a technological decision. It is a human decision. And for those of us who believe in God, it is ultimately a spiritual decision.
AI Does Not Remove Responsibility
Perhaps this is where the debate about artificial intelligence has gone astray. We keep asking what artificial intelligence is going to do to humanity. Maybe we should spend more time asking:
What is humanity going to do with artificial intelligence?
Will we use it to become intellectually stronger or intellectually dependent? Will we use it to educate people or manipulate them? Will we use it to create abundance or concentrate power? Will we use it to protect human life or automate death? Will we use it to discover truth or manufacture increasingly convincing lies?
Will we surrender our judgment to machines because thinking for ourselves has become inconvenient? Or will we use these extraordinary tools while retaining responsibility for the decisions we make?
Artificial intelligence may eventually become the most powerful tool humanity has ever created. But power has never eliminated morality.
Power makes morality more important.
And that means the central ethical question of the AI revolution may ultimately have very little to do with artificial intelligence. It may be about us.
And Then Comes the Singularity
There is an even stranger question waiting just around the corner. What happens when human beings stop asking artificial intelligence merely to improve our lives and begin asking technology to extend life itself?
Some extraordinarily intelligent and wealthy people are investing in longevity, cryonics, brain-computer interfaces, artificial organs, robotics, and theories about preserving or reproducing human consciousness. Behind these technologies lies an ancient human desire dressed in modern technological clothing:
We do not want to die.
What happens if humanity begins to believe that machines can rescue us from our physical mortality? Could consciousness someday be transferred?
If a perfect digital copy of your memories and personality existed inside a computer, would that consciousness actually be you?
Could a machine possess a soul?
Could artificial intelligence ever become genuinely conscious?
And if humanity eventually comes to believe that technology can provide some form of immortality, what happens to our understanding of God, death, resurrection, and eternal life?
Those are not merely technological questions.
They may become some of the greatest philosophical, moral, and spiritual questions humanity has ever confronted.
That is where I want to go in the next blog: artificial intelligence, the singularity, and mankind’s ancient search for immortality.