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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General Election 24

Leading

Politics

25 May 2024

3 min read

Let’s not make saviours out of Sunak or Starmer

Politicians do not live up to messianic billing.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

Looked down upon by crowds in galleries, a politician stands amid a throng of supporters

Kier Starmer at Scottish Labour's election launch.

Pam Duncan-Glancy via Twitter.

It was 2015 and I thought Ed Miliband was the saviour of the free world. Remember, this was before Covid and Brexit and Trump, and politics seemed so binary and easy. Left-Right. Government-Opposition. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown. Monoliths in my teenage eyes.

The excitement of the novel 2010 hung parliament and the injustice (as I saw it) of Nick Clegg (remember him?) ‘getting into bed’ with David Cameron instead of Gordon Brown had carried me all the way to the A-level Politics classroom. I was watching Ed attempt to tell Jeremy Paxman that, hell yeah, he was tough enough. A hung Parliament threatened again, until it didn’t. The Conservatives won enough to govern and the hope swelling in my breast was trodden down by spending upper sixth watching Donald Trump sweep to power.

I have learned enough since then not to cast Sir Kier Starmer in the same mould. Sunak’s snap election is not a choice between two saviours, but two politicians compromised by the grit of reality and the inheritance of a set of global circumstances.

Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, figures held up for their political savvy and economic foresightedness respectfully. To put it mildly, they did not live up to their messianic billing.

Often, we can make these political figureheads into messiahs, those who will come on a wave of hope to fix the nation’s problems, govern wisely, and bring unity. Perhaps, approaching July 4th, these feelings are intensified.

There is much in these pages excellently denoting the deliberate co-opting of Christ for nationalistic political purpose, and I am suggesting that we are often willing collaborators, bringing a religious devotion to our ideology and those which propound it: “If only it were insert politician who were running the country, then everything would be much better!”

This almost cultic reverence was present in some circles surrounding both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, figures held up for their political savvy and economic foresightedness respectfully. To put it mildly, they did not live up to their messianic billing. For others, this devotion was saved for Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, Corbyn.

A word of wisdom to my teenage self? Passion for politics is no bad thing, but devotion to human ideology is misplaced.

Rishi Sunak and Sir Kier Starmer do not quite have the same star power, with Starmer especially coming across as the more doughty-and-dependable type. But it was ever thus. Human nature is inherently cyclical, and we swing from one archetype to the next, always in the hope that the next one in will do a better job than the last.

The messiah is of course a Jewish concept, the awaited one who will deliver them from their enemies and lead them to a state of peace. Many have claimed to be the awaited one, but only one has convinced a multitude. We read of Jesus of Nazareth in our carol services every year that the government will be on his shoulders and the greatness of his government and peace will have no end. At the end of this year in which a new government is formed, perhaps these age-old claims have increased significance. They invite us to look beyond the immediate and the physical, to look beyond those names who dominate headlines, claiming to be the one who will deliver change and reverse decline.

Saint Paul has some wise words for those of us wondering how we can engage with a political world feeling more divisive and divided than ever. He tells us to pray for our government, whether you want Labour or Conservative and end up with the reverse. It is a tough job, and he tells us to give due honour to those who lead us, engaging with politics, giving it the respect it is due. But looking to politicians for deliverance? St Paul would call that folly. He only had one saviour.

For deliverance, we must look beyond the territorial and the electoral, to one who does not promise vote share or positive polling, but sacrifice and justice; to one who comes to us not with populism or popularity, but with lowliness, humility, and integrity. A word of wisdom to my teenage self? Passion for politics is no bad thing, but devotion to human ideology is misplaced. Do not put your trust in the cycle of human proclivities, but in the one whose government will have no end.