Artificial intelligence has its perils, but consciousness not among them

We hear a lot about artificial intelligence, its dangers, and its possibilities. Science fiction lovers have long wondered about the possibility of conferring life on inanimate matter. Some claim that, in the future, it will be possible to upload one’s mind to a computer and so extend life indefinitely. Machines of extraordinary physical capabilities may one day rule the battlefields, replacing soldiers.

Alan Turing, a noted mathematician, once said that the first successful example of artificial intelligence would be a machine that looked and acted exactly like a person even though it was not. The machine just had to be good enough to fool people.

How realistic are these possibilities? Although there are dangers with all technological advances, we need to separate the possible from the impossible if we are to make a good assessment.

The greatest possible danger from artificial intelligence comes from those who might misuse it. We all hate spam email, phone scams, and computer viruses. The criminals who do such things are the real threat because they could use the power of artificial intelligence for schemes that are much worse. They could disrupt nuclear power plants, alter traffic signals, deprive emergency rooms of power, or cause other types of widespread mayhem. By using our advancing technology, malevolent actors could cause chaos within vast sectors of society.

But the possibility that a robot might acquire consciousness and then run amok on its own seems remote. There is very little reason to think that intelligence can be bestowed on anything that is not alive—although
it makes for good science fiction.

No machine has ever been given life, much less awareness. Machines may be provided sensors that serve as their eyes, and their mechanical brains may be programmed so that they can move with great agility through space, but they are not aware that they are seeing or responding to their environment. Even those machines endowed with the highest degrees of artificial intelligence will never be conscious.

We, as human beings, are conscious of our world. More than that, we are conscious that we are conscious of our world. To be aware, one must have thoughts. For example, one can picture an apple and then reflect on how good it would be to eat. This simple process transcends any material explanation. The machine could certainly display a picture of an apple on some interior screen and react to its presence, but that reaction would be the result of the programmer’s intention, not its own. The robot would not have had an actual thought about the apple.

We live in an age dominated by materialism, and it is an article of faith within the scientific community that life arises out of matter. There has never been any experiment that confirms this hypothesis. A typical biology textbook will begin in chapter one with the statement that life first arose from nonliving matter, but there will be no explanation for how this might be possible. RNA and DNA reproduce themselves, the text will say, but how RNA and DNA acquired this power is left unsaid. These descriptions seem to imagine that something can come from nothing.

Consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon. Machines are material. We can imagine machines that think, but it is just a fantasy. Turing’s robot may look and act like a human being, but when you peer inside what you find is that there is no awareness. God alone can produce a conscious being. We are just kidding ourselves if we think we can do the same.

EDWARD J. FURTON, PH.D., is the director of publications for the National Catholic Bioethics Center.