OK Borger

My Senate testimony on ensuring your kid's best friend is human.

What a difference a year or two makes. 2023: Will AI destroy the world? 2021: Will AI befriend my child?

But perhaps the answer to both questions hinges on a little redefinition.

AI OR AS?

“AI and reality are basically identical at this point. This video was generated by AI. I couldn’t believe it myself”—so joked a recent joker, at the expense of those too mindblown by the tech’s recent advances, or too desperate to have their minds blown, to admit that the gap between AI imagery and the unaided human eye is still big, still real.

But the “fidelity” of “artificial” images is set to improve dramatically, because the AIs aren’t really artificial intelligences at all, but rather automated simulators. And when we confront the risk of our automated simulators today and tomorrow, we face a problem much different from the one now typically pegged to AI — that of machines which outsmart us.

We already know that smarts don’t save, that smarts self-sabotage, that around every corner is something smarts don’t know about smarts and which, if they learn at all, they learn the hard way, at cost, no matter how fast.

What it’s time to remember again is that since the Fall we have always desired simulations that operate “well” enough both to suspend our disbelief and to take our hands off the controls. The lure of a pseudoverse within which to hide from the Father and, once it’s up and running, to ape paradise to such a degree that, in time, we forget, engrossed first in the tooling the job requires and then in the trance that unfolds when the tools take over where we leave off — this is a powerful longing, perhaps the most powerful that remains when we have broken our full and proper relations with God. At our utmost in this sense, we can do no more than imitate Him in His creation.

For that reason, I suspect that unless the breach is repaired we will ultimately be driven on to seek in our pseudoverse a place we can prove God is not, a void, and in our relentless failing quest to discover where God is really absent, we will be whipped on first to try to summon new matter from a void and at last to try to create a void, a nihilism far beyond the conjecture of the logical philosophers.

SMARTS OR HEARTS?

Of course, one way we are already trying to summon a nothing is by talking ourselves out of having children, still more of a risk than that of a kid making friends with a robot. But to return to the matter at hand, it isn’t smartbots we’re really concerned with, it’s automated simulators, radically different from what came before much more in degree than in kind, because their appearance and growing authority in our falling world is driven by the same broken will, the same bent desire, that has flogged us ever “forward” since the first temptation. It was not an “overdevelopment” of intelligence — our intelligence, the provenance of created beings breathed full of spirit — that occasioned the Fall. It was our appetite to simulate God.

I do not think that smarts alone, however hugely and blindly errant they characteristically are, will destroy us. But our smarts, no matter what they argue in our heads, are never alone. The head may grow distant from the heart but, cut off from the heart, the head dies. It is in the heart where we hang in the balance. The child brought to understand this in his own heart is protected against the ageless temptation to forget or betray the heart for the sake of its simulation. But today he faces a legion, amassing before his eyes, in his mind, menacing his heart — an army that seeks nothing so much to conquer him, and all children, body and soul, for the sake of the ultimate simulation.

While the first three written questions posed to me after my Senate testimony in late ‘21 focused on political matters, the fourth was more cultural — circling this question of our children and, though the question may not have known it, of our prospects for mending our broken relations with the Father of all.

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Written Questions Submitted by Honorable John Thune to Mr. James Poulos, following testimony to the December 9, 2021 hearing of the Communications, Media, and Broadband Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, entitled “Disrupting Dangerous Algorithms: Addressing the Harms of Persuasive Technology.”

Question 4.  I recently spoke with a well-known and well regarded technologist who told me that in the near term future, there may be children whose best friend is an AI.  That seems to me to be a cause for great concern.  How do we prevent a future where our children’s best friend is an AI?

Response.  Many factors fuel the increasing emotional reliance of adults as well as children on machines that more enchantingly imitate human interactions—and the increasing desire among adults to make children ever more reliant in that way.

One is the sheer formative power of the digital medium, which reshapes our senses and sensibilities in, so to speak, its image. The digital medium is all about the supremacy of machine memory, a faculty of recordation and recall so powerful that our human memory and imaginations appear suddenly obsolete or humbled. Because the previously dominant televisual medium enhanced and rewarded our faculty of imagination, we came to believe intuitively that whoever could dream the biggest and best dreams was, in a fundamental sense, the best, entitled ethically and practically to take charge, lead masses, rule the world. We are now suffering a wrenching transformation into a world where that ethic of order and ordering is overthrown by a new ethic of masterful machine memory. In response, people are showing a dangerous willingness to sacrifice their faculty of human memory so long as they can retain what appears to be a special zone where radical imagination can be given what feels like free play: the past and reality as such are being demonized as morally wrong and practically broken, and the kinds of wholesale socioeconomic transformations being urged as the only possible response to the triumph of digital require a sacrifice of people’s memories of their culture, their family, their bloodline, their biography, and more.

The Great Reset effort and the revolutionary digital culture currents allied with it aim ultimately to create a “Stunde Null” or “Year Zero” moment for America, akin to the one America once created for Germany in 1945. It is impossible to accomplish this without acculturating children into a fundamentally digital world, one where their uniquely human faculties are not seen as a precious gift but as a flawed or sinful impediment to the creation of a new and better lifeworld. In fact, children are the necessary place in a logical sense to begin with this recreation, because their memories are the fewest and in some respects the most weakly formed and easily broken. One need not read Brave New World in order to recognize the centrality of indoctrinating the youth to radical projects of reordering the very fundaments of human life. For the digital revolutionaries, children must now therefore be indoctrinated to see their humanity instinctively as a primitive and unpleasant state which can be overcome and transcended, for the good of the planet, of life, and of the universe, by the intimate merging of their being with that of digital entities.

This process is already being demonstrated at several levels, of which kids pair bonding with AIs or robots or virtual friends is just the most basic. Law in the Anglosphere (see recent developments in Canada) is being transformed so that it is illegal to stop a child from becoming transsexual or transgendered, a process inseparable from and at the vanguard of the process of becoming transhuman—both through hard technology and the soft technology of online life where social contagions of re-identification as trans- or posthuman spread constantly without censorship or suppression. Meanwhile the law does nothing to punish or even supervise those who relentlessly, obsessively groom children—that is, other people’s children—to become queer in all its myriad expressions. It is undeniable that under digital conditions laws welcoming and protecting the adoption of children by households lacking a married mother and father contribute to the normalization of not just post-heterosexual but post-biological and ultimately post-human identity formation. It is painfully easy to see how the next big pushes for “rights” will include polygamist rights, cyborg rights, and trans- or posthuman identifying rights. If Congress shies away from laying down laws that put limits on which mutations and malformations of our human identity may become the next identities and practices to be elevated for official approval, protection, privilege, and celebration, the task will fall to the states, where patchwork efforts will surely face a tsunami of litigation, doubtless backed by at least some public officials at the highest possible rank.   

In the realm of education, children need preserved and strengthened from the earliest ages their foundational human bonding to mother and father and their foundational development of independently human senses and faculties. This means that measures such as “universal pre-K” which institutionalize the removal of young children from the household away from the parents for daily education or socialization, however well-intended, should not be supported. It means that, for parents, homeschooling should be made as easy as possible and without penalties or undue burdens. And it means that lawmakers should undertake a thorough, restrictive, and exemplary review of funds allocated toward programs and initiatives that treat it as an inherent good or act of progress to “bring more tech” into schools. Adding digital devices to the classroom does not automatically bring anything to students’ educations except the interests and agendas of those furnishing the technology and of educators who see that technology as their most powerful way to advance them.

Nevertheless, it is essential to recognize that children and students do have a vital interest in learning confident human competency at mastering our most powerful digital technologies for the purposes of keeping them in check and strengthening and protecting our human identity, our human culture, and our American lifeway and free republic. Trying to hide kids away or come up with a magic age at which they can finally access such technologies is wrongheaded and futile. The goal is to ensure that technological education is not centered on convincing kids that they can become masters of their identities in machine-made fantasy worlds or that they have a global moral mission to transform other children in that image. That means supporting programs and initiatives that encourage or supply access and training in the competencies and the culture at the core of Americans’ digital rights.