To kick off the New Year, Nick Spencer explores the parallels between ever advancing Artificial Intelligence and the Christian creation story. 14/01/2025

Happy New Year. Right, back to AI. 

Not, for now, the government’s plans to turn the UK into an AI superpower, but a more reflective take. The year began, on Radio 4, with a Matthew Syed series looking at 25 Years of the 21st century, the last programme of which explored “The Age of Artificial Intelligence”. Syed spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, so–called ‘Godfather of AI‘ about his (well–publicised) fears for the future, as well as historian and author Margaret MacMillan, and Baroness Joanna Shields, who has held senior roles at both Google and Facebook. 

It was an interesting and informed conversation, free of hyperbole. And then, towards the end when they were focusing on the biggest threats, Joanna Shields said this: 

“Technology was always this benign force that put into the right hands could be transformative and this is the first time when AI may be able to be malevolent in and of itself. You know, we’ve not had that before where superintelligence emerges, and a model can make a decision to do something other than what its programmed to do, and I think that is definitely a concern.” 

I wonder if that sounds familiar. If not, let me prompt you. Beginning of the Bible? Genesis? Creation, fall and all that? Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve heard a better summary of those epochal stories for a long time.  

Someone or something does the creating. To be clear, that someone or something isn’t like the thing it’s created. It exists on a different plane of reality, exists in a different way. But it still exists. Its fingerprints are all over the creation, even if he/she/it is nowhere to be found in it. (Scene from the future: a cocksure, newly–conscious, undergraduate AI turns to an older model and says, “Ha, well, show me your Geoffrey Hinton if you’re so sure he exists, because I can’t see him here.”) 

The created thing is supposed to be a “benign force”. Or, to put it more succinctly, “It was (very) good.” It was supposed to be “transformative”. Or, to put it in a less succinct way, to “fill the earth… subdue it… rule over it… work it… take care of it”. And the created thing was, or should have been, operating in the right hands.  “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden… and commanded the man…” 

But alas the created thing gets hubristic. It becomes confident about its “superintelligence”. It “make[s] a decision to do something other than what its programmed to do”. It may even become malevolent. For some reason, deep inside the Black Box of Eden, the created thing “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, [and] took some and ate it”. 

And the rest is biblical history, as they say. I don’t welcome the arrival of superintelligent, independent–minded, maybe–malign AI. To be honest with you, I don’t think it’s a likely prosect. But I might allow myself a smug smile if we do go down the post–AIDenic path laid out by Baroness Shields. If we do, I wonder if we’ll respond as graciously as our own creator. Who’s going to volunteer to go into the matrix this time?

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