Given the increasing popularity of Artificial Intelligence, I’ve found myself wavering back and forth over whether or not to embrace it.
On one hand, AI technologies offer endless opportunities to shorten our workload and expand our existing capabilities. When directed by our human intelligence, we could use its assistance in completing otherwise impossible tasks or the most mundane ones. (I personally appreciate AI can analyze my food pantry and give me a meal recommendation for my family). On the other, slippery-slope hand, however, if AI is applied outside the bounds of ethics and morality, it holds the potential to destroy all that is good, true, and beautiful about being human.
So what does a former English teacher such as myself do when she’s caught in the tension between AI’s “potential” and AI’s “threat” (and when she is also in the midst of reading Magggie O’Farrell’s incredible novel Hamnet)? Well, she adapts her inner struggles to a familiar Shakespearean monologue.
And here it is…
TO AI OR NOT TO AI
To AI, or not to AI, that is the question:
Whether tis better to dig and brew and struggle
through work tedious in mere human hands
or to allow AI’s golden balm to soothe
and smooth paths of simple men. AI—to sleep
and breathe! And in AI’s sleep, perchance end
the painful slide of grueling loads, laid on
by power lords who lust and lick their lips
in man’s fatigue. AI-where man lives his wish, Or like
a dimming night, will vanish—Yes, there’s the rub:
Because in AI’s promises, what could come,
when we have unburdened our mortal selves,
is what gives us pause—why else hesitate
from seeking relief from those nagging dings
of burdened inboxes and iPhone screens,
from lonely nights of research in dark rooms,
from our mind’s agonizing frustrations when
envisioned products, our dreamed creations,
don’t come through…unless it wasn’t fear—
Fear…
of dark futures, when man’s needed judgment
is no longer marked and tested by fire,
when the work we ran from becomes a forbidden desire,
when we move farther from goodness and light
or fall for deceit in shame, and dare say,
usher in end times, when men’s secrets will be made known,
while AI laughs from its sinister throne,
watching, at its hands, humanity undone…
But still…
Do such worries make us cowards, again?
With or without AI, can’t there still be sin?
I can’t know, so for now, I’ll quiet voices within
And step instead with Christ, and listen…
What are your thoughts on AI?
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