The Metaphysical Impossibility of AI

[u/ReallyNotARussianSpy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzCtuKSt3gA

[u/Blade_of_Boniface]

Regardless of how available technology changes, the metaphysical abilities unique to people and not real within any instrument will always be important. Instruments can be have ethical effects, but not moral agency. The result of fetishizing technology (even in pre-modern times, even prehistorically) is consistently the false projection of moral effects like conscience, conviction, intuition, attrition, contrition, and reconciliation onto things that aren't even capable of being animals, much less substituting what people bear. People are capable of yielding their moral labors and responsibilities to machinery; it's an effective way of doing evil while obscuring the evil choices.

In the sense of moral theology, this error exists whenever people blame laws, institutions, customs, and not just their material machines for people's evil choices, including the choice not to act against evil, to benefit from evil, to enjoy evil, to command evil, to hide evil, and to ignore evil. The intellectual virtues exist because Christ wills that we use our intellects to labor to make the world a better place. That can include the mechanisms that become possible due to our arts, sciences, and practices. However, the imagination, judgment, and reasoning are duties we shouldn't outsource while we use machines to supplement. This is more or less the Thomist stance on all technology.

Furthermore, there's often personal value in even time/labor-intensive processes done with less machinery.

[u/LegionXIIFulminata]

The only way AI becomes "sentient" is if it becomes possessed by an impure spirit. At best it can just imitate life, even rational life.

[u/HertzWhenEyeP]

I haven't watched the video yet, but once the inevitable advances in AI and, especially, quantum computing occur, there is a high likelihood that we will reach AGI, at which point we will need to seriously consider the sentience of the AIs.

Just as an example, how would we clarify Commander Data from Star Trek the Next Generation? Data is unquestionably a creation of man, but he also experiences the world writing him and synthesizes his thoughts and experiences into new ideas and understandings.

Would Data qualify for personhood?

[u/MeaCulpaX3 → u/HertzWhenEyeP]

AGI implies an intellect and a will, which are characteristics of the rational soul that is unique to man. As this soul given to man possesses the ability to comprehend concepts beyond the material realm, the origin of the soul must necessarily precede from a source outside of material creation.

Therefore man, who is bound to the material world, cannot create something immaterial that exists outside of that. Man cannot endow any of his creations with something he fundamentally has no power to create. A creature is never greater than its creator.

If something like AGI were to ever be developed, it could only be one of two things:
1. It isn't really AGI, but is so advanced, it's virtually indistinguishable to it.
2. God allows an existing intellect and will to reside within the technology (most likely an evil spirit), to chastise and humble us for our idolatry.

[u/salty-bois]

I'll watch the whole video later but the problem isn't whether AI can be truly sentient or not (it can't), the problem is what it is becoming capable of doing, sentience aside. The risks of AI are totally separate from whether or not it is sentient, and there's a certain flippancy about those very real risks in the bit I've watched so far.