Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is assuming an increasingly ubiquitous and powerful role in our everyday lives. AI refers to the world of physical objects and information systems, such as computer programming, which are controlled by self-regulating processes that are no longer dependent on human agency. It is this element of machine autonomy that generates most anxiety, giving rise to fears that algorithmic reasoning will eventually eclipse human agency altogether.
Such visions of technological catastrophe are often labelled ‘apocalyptic’ insofar as they envisage the end of civilization as we know it. However, Michael Paulus resists this assumption, returning instead to a more historically authentic understanding of the term, drawn from Jewish and Christian traditions. Apocalypse, he argues, is not so much about predictions of coming disaster as a revelation of the deeper workings of the present. It represents a form of judgement, certainly, but more of a moral summons, or Kairos. The apocalyptic imagination serves to expose the ideologies and distractions of the present while containing the seeds of a more redemptive future: in this case, what might be hoped for, or from, a world in which AI is ever more predominant.
Paulus’s other chief premise is that such moral discernment can only ever take place from the realization that technology, far from being an alien or impersonal force, has always been part of human culture. Humanity has always co-evolved with its technological tools and artefacts, and Paulus is concerned with locating the recent intensification of interest in AI in a wider context of technological innovation, beginning with language, writing and elementary tool making, and culminating in the industrial and information revolutions of the modern era.
Paulus takes the urban phenomenon that is Las Vegas as his primary example of the complexity of human technological activity. Readers who equate AI with robots and forms of digitally generated information environments such as the internet may be surprised at Paulus’s choice here, but his argument is that the city has historically been one of the most significant achievements of human civilization and remains an important symbol for understanding the history and future of our technological society. Paulus relates contemporary narratives of the urban to analogous biblical sources, such as the Revelation of John, where a generation of urban Christians used apocalyptic literature to lay bare the contradictions of life under imperial Roman rule and to anticipate the inauguration of the New Jerusalem, an alternative social order, through everyday practices of holiness, discernment and service.
Our ability to exercise ‘reflective attention’ towards the consequences of AI emerges as pivotal, as does the key moral criterion of technologies as fundamentally designed to achieve collective and equitable goals rather than being ends in themselves. By laying bare the dynamics of the present and reminding us that all technologies can be traced back to their human sources, Paulus stresses the centrality of a kind of ‘practical wisdom’ informed by a biblical apocalyptic vision that enables us to influence the technological future.