Ted Chiang is probably best known for his 1998 novella, “Story of Your Life,” later adapted into my favorite science fiction film, Arrival. Two years later, the journal Nature published a Chiang short story disguised as an editorial note entitled, “The Evolution of Human Science,” which also carries the alternate (and biblical) title of “Catching Crumbs from the Table.” The story, which has no characters, begins with the observation that no one has submitted a work of original research to the publication in 25 years. This is because “metahumans,” i.e., people who have been genetically enhanced while still in the womb, are making scientific advances that even the most brilliant of non-enhanced scientists can just barely comprehend. The metahumans communicate via something called “digital neural transfer,” which must be translated, rather clumsily, into language regular humans can understand. Those non-enhanced scientists who have not quit in frustration find themselves moving away “from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.” The story ends by expressing a rather forlorn hope that regular humans might find a way to “upgrade” their now obsolete brains to keep pace.
Chiang’s story deftly captures the anxiety of being left behind or consigned to irrelevance, even if no physical hardship results (the metahumans seem indifferent rather than hostile to normal humans). Twenty-three years later, metahumans have not yet arrived on the scene, but the advent of “artificial intelligence” is occupying ever larger chunks of our cultural attention. We are constantly assured or warned that we are on the precipice of an “AI revolution.” Corporations with “AI exposure” have led a largely unanticipated rally in the stock market. Pundits on financial networks and elsewhere breathlessly opine that AI is the biggest human advance since our race harnessed electricity, while the public jokes, perhaps a bit nervously, about the rise of Skynet (or the Terminator series).
At least in its current form, AI isn’t going to spontaneously nuke us — but it might take our jobs. In March, investment giant Goldman Sachs predicted that adoption of technologies like GPT-4 could result in a huge productivity boom, but at a significant human cost: the investment giant estimates that 300 million full-time jobs are “exposed” to automation. “Exposure” does not directly translate to lay-offs, but it seems very likely that these new technologies will both create and destroy jobs in large quantities, as has been the case with every major technological breakthrough in human history. The jobs potentially affected are mostly first-world, “information worker” roles, which makes sense. Given our current technology stack, bond trading is easier to automate than plumbing.
I try to live by George F. Will’s dictum that “predicted disasters have a way of not occurring.” But it’s still reasonable to think that over the next decades, ever-increasing automation will leave a lot of “information workers” like myself staring down obsolescence, a bit like Chiang’s non-enhanced scientists. Besides the obvious economic anxiety, the prospect of being replaced by computers also raises something more existential: “If I’m not productive, then what exactly am I worth?”
The familiar mantra that “your work is not your identity,” which comes in both religious and secular flavors, could potentially be helpful here, but only if we can go on to answer the question of what human identity actually is. A specifically Christian answer probably begins with Genesis 1, which famously declares that “God made humans in his own image, in the image of God he created them” (v. 27). But things get a bit tricky here. In an Ancient Near East context, “image of God” was a title taken by kings claiming to act as the representative of the gods. To say that humanity is made in the image of God is to say that human beings in general (not just the elites) act on God’s behalf. This is borne out in the immediate context of Genesis 1:27, which connects the “image of God” with God’s mandate for the new human race to “have dominion” over the earth by cultivating and improving it.
So, human identity has something to do with being made in God’s image, which in turn has something to do with work. Which means that the biblical text here doesn’t do a whole lot to relieve our anxieties. God created us to tend the Garden, so to speak, but what if the robots can do a better (and more cost-efficient) job of it?
What could help us here is the doctrine of the Trinity. While Genesis 1 does not refer unambiguously to the Trinity (as even John Calvin recognized), Christians know that the God in whose image we are made is the triune God. God necessarily exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit “before all worlds.” Self-giving love is foundational to reality and would exist even if the created universe did not. Creation is contingent, love is necessary.
Since the God we image is the triune God, “image” better refers to our relational capacity to love and be loved. This capacity is foundational to human identity, more so than even our capacity for productivity. I realize that I am making a philosophically fraught claim, namely, that love requires a kind of subjective experience that cannot be produced by any algorithm. Thinkers like Daniel Dennett would disagree with me, claiming that we are biological computers and that our consciousness is simply a by-product of our brain’s functioning. If so, then we are certainly replaceable by more advanced models.
But I don’t think so. Much greater thinkers than I have already pointed out, numerous times, that if we are our brains, and if a brain is nothing more than a biological computer designed for the sole purpose of keeping us alive, then any kind of philosophizing — including the kind done by Dennett — is completely useless. More importantly, it’s impossible to live this way. We need identity. Historically it’s been easy to find identity in work. If that is no longer a possibility, we will find it elsewhere.
As well we should: if the true locus of human identity is giving ourselves to others, and, even more importantly, in being the objects of divine love, then any occupational disruption will only reveal what has always been true. To be clear, if our contributions to society become redundant, because our skill sets are automated, this will be tragic and painful. Matters of real importance are at stake in the so-called AI revolution. Work might have to be decoupled from its economic value in a way that is hard to imagine right now. But what is not at stake is our identity, inextricably tied as it is to the uncreated Love that exists from all eternity.
As I write this in a coffee shop, at the table next to me a little boy (three years old, probably) just kissed his big sister on the cheek. That can’t be automated. If it’s just a by-product of evolutionary forces, then we have lucked out incredibly, and we should do everything we can for as long as we can to preserve this by-product. But if it’s a tiny expression of fundamental reality (that God is love), then we, who have been created in the image of God, are not and cannot ever be made redundant.
