It’s everywhere.
Even my family has begun to depend on it: “Mom, have you seen the doctor to get your wrist checked out?” I ask. “No, I asked Chat instead,” she says. You see it appear in texts; the long, meandering, just-so perfectly casual yet precisely to the point prose that has never passed the lips of anyone I know.
The “it” is obviously AI.
What “it” is and how it “is” doing it has wedged its way between how we have conventionally regarded ourselves and the world. This intermediary between the uncertainty of the future and an optimized present is why so many now turn to AI to fill the void.
Joshua Treviño, a colleague of mine at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, took on the dauntless task of attempting to provide answers to the question, “What does it mean to be man in the age of AI?” Treviño turns to the Bible, warning that the machine’s ability to produce “anthropomorphic mimicry” threatens an “apocalypse” of “man’s existential need for relation.”
“What comes next is not actually the replacement of man or God — impossibilities by their nature — but the reorientation of relationality and the end of its fruits,” Treviño forewarns.
AI, for now, remains chiefly a thing-in-the-world. The change ahead, though, is happening between the real and the artificial. Yes, it is a question of the “oldest” kind, of our fundamental relationship between man, the world, and God. Still, as we begin to ask questions about personal and public consciousness — or the possible mushroom clouds of human existence — I must say, there is no resolving those “oldest questions.”
There is the Biblical tradition that Treviño and many others correctly argue is foundational for man and, notably, of America’s civic tradition. There are also the minds of men who have shaped our philosophical investigation into man’s being-in-the-world. As Leo Strauss artfully wrote, “Western man became what he is, and is what he is through the coming together of biblical faith and Greek thought.”
The fault line between reason and revelation is where man resides. For many the “oldest questions” of AI risks upturning both faith and philosophy. The “secular and materialist analysis” can be used as well to “discern the risk at hand.” While a wink at Aristotillian philia can assist man from succumbing to the worst outcomes of AI — that which “erodes or distorts” our relationship “to state and society alike” — however, it is at the heart of the “oldest questions” of philosophy that remain shrouded in shadows.
In our world of AI, there is a growing demand for dogmatism—a demand for answers about “what to do?” that can be fulfilled by the Truth that is revealed in the Biblical tradition, yes. Then there are those who rely on a worldly religion of a different kind: a dogmatic belief in modern science.
These hyper-rationalists-types, using “facts” and “figures” for their calculative thinking, openly proclaim: “We’re creating God.” And you see the melding of the two. Anthropic and OpenAI just recently met with more than a dozen Christian leaders and, in the words of partners in the “Faith-AI Covenant,” are going to attempt to provide “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety.” This fervor over the future of AI has also produced a rush of companies seeking to hire in-house philosophers.
To understand the “oldest questions” of AI is simultaneously fundamental to our future and strangely characteristic of our present. In our age of radical skepticism, we see the debate finally arriving at a point that demands answers. A return to anything like solid ground requires moving through the present, a philosophical age that has beget a human being less skeptical of handing over their thinking to something like AI that functions as proxy for thinking-itself.
For Plato, thinking was attuned through wonder; his Socrates was dedicated to a pursuit of wisdom. For Descartes, thinking was the ego, the I, and everything that can be known must comply with the conditions of human consciousness. For Nietzsche, thinking required a reevaluation of all values: “The great man is necessarily a skeptic… Freedom from any kind of conviction is part of the strength of his will.”
But what is missing? The human being exists embodied. The human being exists in the world of things; things that are not some generic table of needs or values. The human being thinks as the world reveals itself; as it relates to the human being discovering the world. It is in this pathos of creative discovery in the world that the human being is thinking his way through with language. AI uses language, too. But it forms its thinking inside an artificial world; its totality is not the language of a human being being in the world, but a horizonless world of artificial reality.
The being-in-the-(artificial)-world is one of illusion, where the totality of its form has no conceptual understanding for the human being-in-the-world. AI remains limited to correlations and pattern recognition — its totality of understanding is what takes place in the negative space of the past where information already exists. AI does not move, for genuine thinking to take place, a genuine rupture, an event, needs to bring forth a new world of possibility in the future.
Thinking, if it is to remain purely human, demands knowledge of the truth — and not some distilled epistemology or methodology for obtaining knowledge, but a genuine thinking about the meaning of being-in-the-world. But it is becoming more clear, as Martin Heidegger puts it, the “most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking,”
For the human being and AI to coexist, there must be a thinking that allows for the possibility of future progress, of deeper penetration in the future, of future revolutions of thought. Or we all risk turning over thinking to merely problems to be solved where man thinks himself to be a “creator of an uninterrupted progress rushing towards artificial paradises.”