Search
Close this search box.

Author: Gabor Ambrus

God is NOT like Algorithms: Negating AI’s Absolute Power

In my previous blog, I discussed the totalitarianism and determinism already created by today’s AI, concluding my argument with a distinction between a positive and a negative theology of AI. I also made, without any elaboration, an appeal for the latter. The terminology of this distinction may lead to some confusion. The name “artificial intelligence” is usually applied to computer-based, state-of-the-art algorithms that display behavior or skills of which it has formerly been thought only human beings are capable. Notwithstanding, an AI algorithm, and especially the whole array of AI algorithms that are active online, may exhibit behavior or create an environment whose qualities go beyond the level or capacity of the human mind and, even more than that, appear to be “God-like” or are treated so.

Here enters theological reflection with two of its forms: positive and negative theology, of which the second is less common and more sophisticated than the first. Positive theology describes and discusses God by means of names and positive statements like – to give a few simple examples – “God is spirit”, “God is Lord”, “God is love”, and so on. But, according to negative theology, it is equally true that, by reason of God’s radical otherness and difference from anything in the created world, God can only be spoken of through negative statements: “God is not” or “is unlike” a “spirit” or a “lord” or “love”. Accordingly, these two distinct ways of approaching God can translate into the two following statements: “God is AI” or “God is not AI.”

Taken from unsplash.com

Defining a Positive Theology of AI

Scandalous as it may seem, a positive theology of AI is hardly avoidable, and its subject should be less the miraculous accomplishments of future AI and all the hopes attached to it than the everyday online spectacles of the present. True, the worship of today’s AI scarcely pours out into a profession of its divinity in the manner of the Apostle Thomas when confronted with the risen Christ (“My Lord and my God!” John 20:28), but spending with it the most beatific hours of the day including the first and last waking moments (before going to pee in the morning and after doing so in the evening) certainly qualifies as a life of prayer.

In a sense, the worship of AI does more than prayer to the Christian God could ever do in this life as AI provides light and nurture in seamless services tailored to every user’s interests, quirks, and wishes. Indeed, it casts a spell of bedazzlement on you in powerful alliance with the glamour, sleekness, and even sexiness of design. So it comes to pass that you end up in a city whose sky is created by AI, or, rather, whose sky is AI itself – a sky where your highest aspirations turn to. Could this city and sky possibly be those prophesied by John the Seer in the Apocalypse? “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it…” (Revelations 21:23).

Image by anncapictures from Pixabay

Valiant Resistance or Fruitless Nostalgia?  

But, let’s suppose, there arises an urge in you to resist the city and sky of AI, recognizing that they are not God’s city and God’s sky, that AI is not God, and God is unlike AI – in other words, you negate AI as God. Of course, this is more than an act of logic and goes beyond the scope of a theoretical decision. The moment you realize you have treated AI as God, and you have been wrong, you change your attitude and orientation, and start searching for God elsewhere, outside the realm of AI.

You repent.

This metanoia of sorts leads you to trade your smartphone for nature, opting to live under the real sky. There, you experience real love and friendship outside social media platforms. You may even discard Google Maps and seek to get lost in real cities and find your bearings with the help of old paper maps.

Such actions, however, are not the best negative theology of AI. Do they not exhibit a nostalgia for the past, growing wistful about the sky, the love, the city, and the God of old? Is God nostalgic? Would God set up God’s tent outside the city of AI into which the whole of creation is moving? Have you, searching for God outside the realm of AI, not engaged in an unserious, even dull form of negation?

There must be another way.

In fact, the divine realm empowered by AI carries in itself its own theological negation, moments when its bedazzlement loosens its grip and its divine face undergoes an eclipse – moments that are empty, dull, boring, meaningless, or even full of frustration or anxiety. Such moments are specific to this realm and not just the usual downside of human life. It was, if you are willing to realize, the proliferation of such moments that have made you repudiate the divinity of AI and go searching outside its realm, and not just a sudden thought that occurred to you.

Image by strikers from Pixabay

A Balanced Negative Theology of AI

As a matter of fact, it was not only you; such moments in the midst of all the bedazzlement, now and then, happen to all devotees. Does the ubiquitousness of such moments mean that all citizens of the city of AI participate in its theological self-negation, and, therefore, living in it necessarily includes the act of negating it? In a sense, yes but this is just a ubiquitous and unintended, almost automatic negation, and not the right one. As a rule, the citizens of the city live in the moment and for the moment; they naively live its bedazzlement to the full and suffer its moments of meaninglessness to the full. In doing so, however, they are unfree.

Instead, you are better off living in the city of AI accompanied by a moderate and reserved, yet constant negation. In this balanced and overall experience, you always keep the harrowing moments of emptiness and meaninglessness in mind with a view to them no longer quite coming to harrow you and, above all, with a view to AI’s bedazzlement no longer gaining the upper hand.

As a consequence of your moderate and sustained negation of AI as God (a negative theology of AI), you create a certain distance between you and AI which is nevertheless also a space of curiosity and playfulness. Precisely because you negate it in a theological sense, you can curiously turn towards AI, witness the details of its behavior and also enjoy its responsiveness to your actions. And it is precisely in this dynamic and undecided area of free play with AI, opened up by your negation, that God, defined as to what God is not (not AI) and undefined as to what God is, can be offered a space to enter.  

Gábor L. Ambrus holds a post-doctoral research position in the Theology and Contemporary Culture Research Group at The Charles University, Prague. He is also a part-time research fellow at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome. He is currently working on a book on theology, social media, and information technology. His research primarily aims at a dialogue between the Judaeo-Christian tradition and contemporary techno-scientific civilization.

What would a Theology of AI Look Like?

The influence of secular thinking in our global society is powerful enough to make a project like a “theology of Artificial Intelligence” appear to be a doomed enterprise or a contradiction in terms at best, and sheer nonsense at worst. Is there a theology of the microchip? The integrated circuit? The Boolean gates?  And even if one happened to think that God is closer to software than hardware – is there a theology of AI or machine learning?

Put so plainly and abruptly, these questions can easily lead to the conclusion that such a theology is impossible to make sense of. Just as a secular opinion (surreptitiously powerful even among adherents of religions) often hastens to declare that “religion and science simply cannot go together”, the same would be assumed about theology and modern technology – it is like yoking a turtle and a jaguar together.

Moreover, if one approached the incongruence between “theology” and “artificial intelligence” by transposing it to the field of anthropology, one would again face the same problem on another plane. What does a human being practicing religion – a homo religiosus – have to do with a human being – perhaps the very same human being – as a user of artificial intelligence? Is it not the case that historical progress has by our days left behind not only the relevance of religion but also the very humanism that used to enshrine the same human being in question as sacred? Is secular humanism in our day not giving way to things like the “transhuman” and the “posthuman”? 

YouTube Liturgies

But this secular-historical argument is not difficult to turn upside down. When it comes to human history, it is the nature of the things of the past that they are still with us and, what is more, religious forms of consciousness that many would deem atavistic today not only stay present but can also come across with new vigor in the contemporary digital environment. They might strike many as hybrid forms of consciousness, in which the day before yesterday stages an intense and perplexing comeback.

Photo by Pixabay.com

Take the example of Christian devotion in an online environment like YouTube. Assisted, surrounded, and finally motivated by the artificial intelligence of YouTube, a Christian believer will soon find herself in the intensifying bubble of her own religious fervor. Her worship of Jesus Christ in watching devotional videos is quickly and easily perceived by YouTube’s algorithms which will soon offer her historical documentaries, testimonies, Christian talk shows, subscriptions to Christian channels, and the like. In the wake of this spiraling movement, her religious consciousness will be very different and, in a sense, more intense than that of a premodern devotee of Christ – a consciousness steeped in a medium orchestrated by artificial intelligence.  

It follows from the pervasive presence of artificial intelligence in today’s society in general and in what we call “new media” in particular that, the same way as any other kind of content, any positive religious content may also invite an inquiry into the nature of AI. But a note of caution is in order here. The terms “religious” and “religion” in this context must include much more than the semantics of mainstream religious traditions like Christianity.

An online religious attitude includes much more than any cult of personality and may extend to the whole of online existence.

For instance, the above example of artificial intelligence orchestrating Christian experience, after all, is perfectly applicable to any online cult of personality. A teenager worshipping Billie Eilish will experience something very similar to Christian worship on YouTube whose algorithms do not make any methodical distinction between a pop singer and a Messiah. 

Online Worship and Techno-Totalitarianism

In a theology of AI what really matters online is not positive religious content but a certain religious attitude intensified and eventually motivated by Artificial Intelligence. An online religious attitude includes much more than any cult of personality and may extend to the whole of online existence. As researchers of contemporary cultural anthropology and sociology of religion have pointed out, many users of digital technology find a “higher life” and a “more authentic self” online, at the same time as experiencing a mystical fusion with the entirety of the global digital cloud.[1] The relocation of the sacred and the godlike in the realm of the digital is as obvious here as the influence of a technological version of New Age spirituality which is often called “New Edge” by researchers and devotees alike.

From Pixabay.com

This “techno-religion” is fully subservient to what can be termed techno-totalitarianism. The digital technology and environment of our times perfectly fit the definition of totalitarianism: it pervades and knits tightly together all aspects of society while enabling the full subjugation of the individual to a ubiquitous and anonymous power. The totalitarian and curiously religious presence of the secular, “neutral” and functional algorithms of artificial intelligence evokes both a religious past and a religious future.

Algorithmic Determinism

This is another example of the historical dialectic between religion and secularisation. The secular probability theory underpinning these secular algorithms (and predicting the online behavior of users) has roots in the Early Modern statistical theory of prediction modeled on the idea of God’s predestination.[2] Ironically, the idea of divine predestination is making a gruesome return in contemporary times as the increasing bulk of big data at the disposal of AI algorithms means more and more certainty about user behavior and, as a consequence, increasingly precise prediction for and automation of the human future. It is, therefore, safe to say that there can indeed be such a thing as a theology of AI and machine learning.

The division between those who are elected and those who are not, increasingly defines various sectors of contemporary information society such as the financial market. The simple truth of a formula like “the rich get richer, the poor poorer” has deep roots in the reality of inscrutably complex AI algorithms running in the financial sector that determine not only trade on Wall Street but also the success or failure of many millions of small cases like individual credit applications.

By Pixabay.com

Algorithms decide on who obtains credit and at what interest rate. The more data about individual applicants they have at their disposal, the more accurately they can predict their future financial behavior.[3] Like in many other fields defined by AI, it is not difficult to recognize here how prediction slips into modification and modification into techno-determinism which seals the fate of the world’s population. Indeed, this immense power over individuals, holding their past, present, and future with iron clips together, is nothing short of a force for a new religious realm and a wake-up call to Christian theology from its dogmatic slumber.

Conclusion

It is clear that if there is a positive theology of artificial intelligence as such it must go far beyond an analysis of explicit, positive “religious content” in today’s online environment.  If so, one question certainly remains which is impossible to answer within the confines of this blogpost: what would a negative theology of AI look like, a theology in which an engagement with AI would go hand in hand with a distance from and criticism of it?

[1]  cf. Stef Aupers & Dick Houtman (eds.), Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010).

[2] This idea is spelled out in Virgil W. Brower, “Genealogy of Algorithms: Datafication as Transvaluation”, Le foucaldien 6, no. 1 (2020): 11, 1-43.

[3] This is one of the main arguments in Cathy O’Neill, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).

Gábor L. Ambrus holds a post-doctoral research position in the Theology and Contemporary Culture Research Group at The Charles University, Prague. He is also a part-time research fellow at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome. He is currently working on a book on theology, social media, and information technology. His research primarily aims at a dialogue between the Judaeo-Christian tradition and contemporary techno-scientific civilization.