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.

Article

Comment

Death & life

29 October 2024

4 min read

There’s fear or fascination as cultures confront death

If Western society discussed death more openly, would Halloween’s appeal hold such sway?

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

Watching Christians jump and sing “death is defeated” was a strange experience.

As a new believer in Christianity from a Hindu background, I was struck by how Christians approached death. While I had seen reincarnation as a path to heaven, I couldn’t understand why the church either hesitated to talk about death or celebrated it so intensely. Why were Christians sometimes dancing and other times, silent about death?

During my early years in Christ if ever the topic of death arose from the fun times I was having with Christian friends it was almost always met with a dead silence - excuse the pun. On one occasion, the husband of a close friend in our small church community had passed away due to cancer. I was one of the first to make a call to his widowed wife. When my friends heard that I had done this the response was unusual, “well done Rahil!” “That’s so good Rahil.” Strange. I was sensitive over the phone, but it wasn’t that hard. Then I asked the others if they were going to make a call and the response was equally peculiar, “erm, I can’t” or “I just can’t do that... ” Puzzling.

Recently, I came across the GodPod podcast, which shed some light for me on this hesitation. In an interview with Dr Lydia Dugdale about her book The Lost Art of Dying, a surprising statistic caught my attention: “In the 18th century, one-third of church sermons were about death and eternity.” I had to play that line back multiple times. In contrast, today’s sermons often focus on personal purpose, calling, or spiritual gifts. All important, but are we missing a vital balance—one eye on eternity, the other on our present lives?

Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East?

This avoidance of death became even more apparent during the Covid pandemic. When the Delta strain hit India in 2021 it caused a massive widespread devastation and death. The funeral pyres were filling the sacred river banks up and down the country. At one point there was no more wood left to burn the bodies. It had run out! Urban crematoriums were overrun and so people left their deceased loved ones to simply float down the nearest river in the hope that the next life would be easier.

I followed the detailed footage of the funeral pyres and bodies choking various holy rivers. It was meticulously covered by the western media. Even PM Boris Johnson at the time cancelled his trip to India because the Covid death crisis was “out of control.” It’s Interesting how the western media flippantly assumed that death could be controlled. And then an eminent academic in India wrote a remarkable article for Project Syndicate. Brahma Chellaney’s opening paragraph was,

“When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.”

The author’s accurate observation demanded my attention. Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East? Although Chellaney uses the concept of ‘grieving’ for his argument, there really isn’t such a spiritual concept across Indic faiths as Christianity knows of it. Of course, there is sadness and loss but grieving in the deep spiritual sense, not really. Is that why the Western media found it easier to cover death in the East? Because the secular (although Christian) West knows of the concept of grief so well at home? Or is it because the West do actually want to confront death without hiding and when they see other cultures do it so openly (and a tad bit casually) they are drawn to it? As morbid as it sounds (and I’ll do the British thing and apologise here) there might actually be a healthy interest with the way certain cultures embrace death that the west is seeking to find an expression for.

Brahmar Mukherji chaired the Department of Biostatistics at Michigan University. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2021 she stated that India as a society sees death differently which is why the death toll along with so many other complex and practical issues was so high in that nation during Covid. They embrace it more easily. I am not promoting reckless behaviour around rules. One can’t play with a rattlesnake and then call it faith. My hope is that the reader finds hope when confronting death with a Christian lens. Why have themes of Euthanasia and Assisted Dying become such a big thing in the West and not in the East?

Which brings me to Halloween. It’s a leap, I know, but think about it: if Western societies and churches discussed death and eternity more openly, would Halloween’s macabre appeal hold such sway? Dressing up as a ghoul or a skeleton seems to be a playful, yet safe way to confront our fear of death—something we’re eager to do from behind a mask. That lighthearted, but jarring moment in the Barbie film comes to mind: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Maybe that’s the real question we should be asking ourselves. Not just on Halloween, but frequently. How do we truly confront death—with fear, with fascination, or with the hope of something beyond?