There’s more than one way to lose our humanity

How we treat immigrants and how AI might treat humans weighs on the mind of George Pitcher.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grey multi-story accommodation barge floats beside a dock.

The Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge in Portland Harbour.

shley Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

“The greatness of humanity,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “is not in being human, but in being humane.” At first glance, this is something of a truism. But actually Gandhi neatly elides the two meanings of humanity in this tight little phrase.

Humanity means both the created order that we know as the human race and its capacity for self-sacrificial love and compassion. In the Christian tradition, we celebrate at Christmas what we call the incarnation – the divine sharing of the human experience in the birth of the Christ child.

Our God shares our humanity and in doing so, shows his humanity in the form of a universal and unconditional love for his people. So, it’s an act both for humanity and of humanity.

This Christmas, there are two very public issues in which humanity has gone missing in both senses. And it’s as well to acknowledge them as we approach the feast. That’s in part a confessional act; where we identify a loss of humanity, in both its definitions, we can resolve to do something about it. Christmas is a good time to do that.

The first is our loss of humanity in the framing of legislation to end illegal immigration to the UK. The second is the absence of humanity in the development of artificial intelligence. The former is about political acts that are inhumane and the latter goes to the nature of what it is to be human.

We have literally lost a human to our inhumanity, hanged in a floating communal bathroom. It’s enough to make us look away from the crib, shamed rather than affirmed in our humanity.

There is a cynical political line that the principal intention of the government’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, voted through the House of Commons this week, is humane, in that it’s aimed at stopping the loss of life among migrants exploited by criminal gangs. But it commodifies human beings, turning them into cargo to be exported elsewhere. That may not be a crime – the law has yet to be tested – but it is at least an offence against humanity.

Where humanity, meaning what it is to be human, is sapped, hope withers into despair. When a human being is treated as so much freight, its value not only diminishes objectively but so does its self-worth. The suicide of an asylum seeker on the detention barge Bibby Stockholm in Portland Harbour is a consequence of depreciated humanity. Not that we can expect to hear any official contrition for that.

To paraphrase Gandhi, when we cease to be humane we lose our humanity. And we have literally lost a human to our inhumanity, hanged in a floating communal bathroom. It’s enough to make us look away from the crib, shamed rather than affirmed in our humanity.

That’s inhumanity in the sense of being inhumane. Turning now to humanity in the sense of what it means to be human, we’re faced with the prospect of artificial intelligence which not only replicates but replaces human thought and function.

To be truly God-like, AI would need to allow itself to suffer and to die on humanity’s part.

The rumoured cause of the ousting of CEO Sam Altman last month from OpenAI (before his hasty reinstatement just five days later) was his involvement in a shadowy project called Q-star, GPT-5 technology that is said to push dangerously into the territory of human intelligence.

But AI’s central liability is that it lacks humanity. It is literally inhuman, rather than inhumane. We should take no comfort in that because that’s exactly where its peril lies. Consciousness is a defining factor of humanity. AI doesn’t have it and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

To “think” infinitely quicker across unlimited data and imitate the best of human creativity, all without knowing that it’s doing so, is a daunting technology. It begins to look like a future in which humanity becomes subservient to its technology – and that’s indeed dystopian.

But we risk missing a point when our technology meets our theology. It’s often said that AI has the potential to take on God-like qualities. This relates to the prospect of its supposed omniscience. Another way of putting that is that it has the potential to be all-powerful.

The trouble with that argument is that it takes no account of the divine quality of being all-loving too, which in its inhumanity AI cannot hope to replicate. In the Christmastide incarnation, God (as Emmanuel, or “God with us”) comes to serve, not to be served. If you’ll excuse the pun, you won’t find that mission on a computer server.

Furthermore, to be truly God-like, AI would need to allow itself to suffer and to die on humanity’s part, albeit to defeat its death in a salvific way. Sorry, but that isn’t going to happen. We must be careful with AI precisely because it’s inhuman, not because it’s too human.

Part of what we celebrate at Christmas is our humanity and, in doing so, we may re-locate it. We need to do that if we are to treat refugees with humanity and to re-affirm that humanity’s intelligence is anything but artificial. Merry Christmas.

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22 November 2024

1 min read

The bird-brained behaviour of holding a grudge

Cranky corvids and feuding pop stars share something in common.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A crow stands at the end of an overhanging rock.

Still in the huff.

Haaslave185, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sometimes it's just too hard to let it go. Art Garfunkel recently told The Times that he and Paul Simon have put aside their feud. Again. I was at their gig in Melbourne in 2009, four rows from the front. Although Art's voice soared, it faltered on Bridge Over Troubled Water. But it was glorious. Their setlist began with Old Friends, the name of their reunion tour, tragically describing a duo marked by both harmony and discord.

It's not just old friends who can harbour old grudges. It turns out, according to John Marzluff from the University of Washington, that crows can similarly prolong a grudge for up to 17 years. Putting aside a longstanding grudge can be a good commercial decision, as evidenced by a certain Britpop band recently... but when I heard on the radio the other morning that crows are good at holding grudges, I must admit it made me laugh. There's something about the pettiness, the silliness of human grudges that seem to befit the ridiculousness of a bird. The bird-brained behaviour of holding a grudge may similarly find its root in fear: just as Marzluff has discovered that crows' brains show evidence of human-like fear.

But grudges, just like fear, are no laughing matter. They aren't light, and they don't soar like crows or an ageing rocker's voice, but thud and squelch in all their onomatopoeic heft. We hold onto petty and significant grievances because, however unpleasant, we feel we have control. But the language we use around grudges is telling - we bear grudges, hold them, nurse them. Grudges, just like children, grow over time. And whether they last for weeks of crow-like decades… they destroy things around us and within us. Perhaps it's apt that the collective noun for a crow is 'murder'. Indeed, it's old wisdom that such grudges are destructive. Jesus said 'anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother 'idiot!' and you just might find yourself hauled into court.'

Grudges towards coworkers, family and friends can be subtle and invisible but no less real and consequential as visible damage. When Garfunkel asked Simon recently why they hadn't seen each other, 'Paul mentioned an old interview where I said some stuff. I cried when he told me how much I had hurt him. Looking back, I guess I wanted to shake up the nice guy image of Simon & Garfunkel. Y'know what? I was a fool!'

The sense of freedom, joy, yes tears, and the possibility of singing together again has only been possible by them talking it through.

Forgiveness won't necessarily mean condoning or reconciling, particularly if a crow has swooped on you. And sometimes those opportunities will be out of our reach. But however out of control our grudges may feel, we can hand them over, in all their deathly ugliness, to someone who is willing to absorb them.