Article
AI
Comment
4 min read

It's our mistakes that make us human

What we learn distinguishes us from tech.

Silvianne Aspray is a theologian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge.

A man staring at a laptop grimmaces and holds his hands to his head.
Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash.

The distinction between technology and human beings has become blurry: AI seems to be able to listen, answer our questions, even respond to our feelings. It becomes increasingly easy to confuse machines with humans. In this situation, it is increasingly important to ask: What makes us human, in distinction from machines? There are many answers to this question, but for now I would like to focus on just one aspect of what I think is distinctively human: As human beings, we live and learn in time.  

To be human means to be intrinsically temporal. We live in time and are oriented towards a future good. We are learning animals, and our learning is bound up with the taking of time. When we learn to know or to do something, we necessarily make mistakes, and we take practice. But keeping in view something we desire – a future good – we keep going.  

Let’s take the example of language. We acquire language in community over time. Toddlers make all sorts of hilarious mistakes when they first try to talk, and it takes them a long time even to get single words right, let alone to try and form sentences. But they keep trying, and they eventually learn. The same goes with love: Knowing how to love our family or our neighbours near and far is not something we are good at instantly. It is not the sort of learning where you absorb a piece of information and then you ‘get’ it. No, we learn it over time, we imitate others, we practice and even when we have learned, in the abstract, what it is to be loving, we keep getting it wrong. 

This, too, is part of what it means to be human: to make mistakes. Not the sort of mistakes machines make, when they classify some information wrongly, for instance, but the very human mistake of falling short of your own ideal. Of striving towards something you desire – happiness, in the broadest of terms – and yet falling short, in your actions, of that very goal. But there’s another very human thing right here: Human beings can also change. They – we – can have a change of heart, be transformed, and at some point in time, actually start to do the right thing – even against all the odds. Statistics of past behaviours, do not always correctly predict future outcomes. Part of being human means that we can be transformed.  

Transformation sometimes comes suddenly, when an overwhelming, awe-inspiring experience changes somebody’s life as by a bolt of lightning. Much more commonly, though, such transformation takes time. Through taking up small practices, we can form new habits, gradually acquire virtue, and do the right thing more often than not. This is so human: We are anything but perfect. As Christians would say: We have a tendency to entangle ourselves in the mess of sin and guilt. But we also bear the image of the Holy One who made us, and by the grace and favour of that One, we are not forever stuck in the mess. We are redeemed: are given the strength to keep trying, despite the mistakes we make, and given the grace to acquire virtue and become better people over time. All of this to say that being human means to live in time, and to learn in time. 

So, this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good. 

Now compare this to the most complex of machines. We say that AI is able to “learn”. But what does it mean to learn, for AI? Machine learning is usually categorized into supervised learning, unsupervised and self-supervised learning. Supervised learning means that a model is trained for a specific task based on correctly labelled data. For instance, if a model is to predict whether a mammogram image contains a cancerous tumour, it is given many example images which are correctly classed as ‘contains cancer’ or ‘does not contain cancer’. That way, it is “taught” to recognise cancer in unlabelled mammograms. Unsupervised learning is different. Here, the system looks for patterns in the dataset it is given. It clusters and groups data without relying on predefined labels. Self-supervised learning uses both methods: Here, the system uses parts of the data itself as a kind of label – such as, for instance, predicting the upper half of an image from its lower half, or the next word in a given text. This is the predominant paradigm for how contemporary large-scale AI models “learn”.  

In each case, AI’s learning is necessarily based on data sets. Learning happens with reference to pre-given data, and in that sense with reference to the past. It may look like such models can consider the future, and have future goals, but only insofar as they have picked up patterns in past data, which they use to predict future patterns – as if the future was nothing but a repetition of the past.  

So this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good. Machines, by contrast, are always oriented towards the past of the data that was fed to them. Human beings are intrinsically temporal beings, whereas machines are defined by temporality only in a very limited sense: it takes time to upload data, and for the data to be processed, for instance. Time, for machines, is nothing but an extension of the past, whereas for human beings, it is an invitation to and the possibility for being transformed for the sake of a future good. We, human beings, are intrinsically temporal, living in time towards a future good – which machines do not.  

In the face of new technologies we need a sharpened sense for the strange and awe-inspiring species that is the human race, and cultivate a new sense of wonder about humanity itself.  

Article
Comment
Freedom of Belief
5 min read

These stubborn stories from Nigeria’s killing fields are still lodged in my head

Last year’s victims are joined by many more

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A burnt out motor cycle and car stand amid charred debris in a dusty compound.
Burned vehicles after Good Friday raid on April 7, 2023, in Ngban, Benue state, Nigeria.
Justice, Development, and Peace Commission.

Last summer, I spent some time in Northern Nigeria.  

I went there because terror is having its way and nobody seems to be talking about it. I said it last year, and it still seems to be the case now - the violence that is being carried inflicted is out of sight and, therefore, tragically out of mind. 

While there, I met many people that had their lives violently turned upside down - their families torn apart, their villages burnt to the ground, their homes and livelihoods pulled out from underneath them, their loved ones ‘butchered’ before their eyes. The people I met were targeted, it seems, largely because of their Christian identities.  

I wrote about them for Seen and Unseen this time last year, feeling the pull to memorialise their stories; to point toward them, to look their tragedy in the eye for a little longer. 

Every person that I met has had a lasting impact on me, how could they not? Before I met them, the only reference point I had for such violence was apocalyptic movies. A year on, my brain still resists accepting what my ears have heard and my eyes have seen. I dwell on it all, the whole experience, often.  

But there are two stories that have gotten stubbornly lodged in my mind, taking up slightly more real-estate in my thoughts. They’re the stories of two girls, one around my own age and one much younger. I’d like to re-point you to their stories now.  

The first woman, she was incredibly gentle and kind, and told her story with a composure that’s hard to fathom. She was working on her land along with her husband and mother-in-law, a totally run-of-the-mill day. They were so engrossed with the task at hand, they didn’t notice that their village was being attacked by armed ‘Fulani’ militants (the majority of the violence being carried out in Northern Nigeria is at the hands of Islamic extremist groups such as Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP - Islamic State in West African Province). She looked up to find herself face-to-face with two attackers and despite their command for her to surrender to them, she ran, as did her husband and mother-in-law. While she was running, she could hear bullets flying past her head and the screams of her mother-in-law. Making it to a neighbouring village, she gathered help and eventually went back to find her husband and mother-in-law. Both of whom were stabbed and killed that day.   

The Fulani militants now have control over her village, and she told us how she’s been praying that she would be able to forgive these men for what they’d done, as she is now forced to live alongside them. And so, she felt proud because she had recently been able to respond to one of the men as they greeted her.     

The other story, that of a heart-wrenchingly-young girl told us how, while she sleeping – she was awoken by her father who told her that they needed to run, they were under attack. She ran, hand in hand with her father, while her mother carried her younger brother. While they were fleeing, her dad was shot and killed. Her mother pried her hand out of her father’s and buried both her and her brother in sand, instructing them to stay hidden. The next day, they found that their house, their crops, their entire village had been burnt down.   

This rampant violence is not caught in a freeze-frame, it’s not last year’s story, it is still happening. Despite Nigeria having greater religious freedoms than other countries, it is still the seventh most dangerous country in the world for Christians to live, it is still the case that more Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than the rest of the world combined.    

2025 has seen wave after wave of attacks, some of which were prompted by outrage over the testimony of Bishop Wilfred Anagbe, who spoke of the horror and terror being inflicted on Christian communities in front of the US Congress. As a result of Bishop Wilfred’s words, his Nigerian diocese was subject to mass shootings, killing forty people. So, people’s voices, their pleas for help - or even simply recognition of the violence - brings a threat to their lives.  

Just weeks later, 24 members of a Methodist church were shot in the middle of the night, days later nine further people were killed while mourning those who had already been shot dead. 

In the month of June alone, 218 Christians were killed, and a further 6,000 were displaced after a spate of attacks carried out on mostly Christian villages. Open Doors note that ‘dozens of Christians are said to be trapped in forests and mountain hideouts, unable to escape as the militants continue to roam through the villages’.  

And in July, Pastor Emmanuel Na’allah, a Christian pastor and convert from Islam, was shot and killed during a worship service. A friend of his, Samaila Gidan Taro, was also shot, and a woman was abducted.   

Again, Open Doors explains that ‘These murders and abductions are sadly increasingly common in Nigeria… large-scale attacks are the most visible. Attacks such as this one occur daily, so frequently that they do not make the headlines. It is clear that Christians are suffering a relentless onslaught, with government agencies, international bodies and official observers struggling to even document each incident.’ 

As I wrote last year, while we are not seeing this violence, the people of Nigeria are not seeing an end to it.    

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