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

Politics

26 February 2024

3 min read

When tradition deserves a break

Upsetting a convention caused uproar, so is it right to break with tradition?

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

A robed and seated man, in a speaker's chair talks and gesticulates.

The House of Common's Speaker.

Parliament TV.

“Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since a speaker of the Commons stood down from its high chair with dignity and to applause.” Thus wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian this Sunday. Last week the House of Commons erupted. An unedifying lava-spew of recrimination and anger flowed through the corridors of power as the Speaker of the House, The Right Honourable Sir Lindsay Hoyle, broke parliamentary convention to the seeming benefit of the Labour Party. Memories of his predecessors’ playing fast-and-loose with Parliamentary procedure pushed buttons. The SNP’s Gaelic fury founded a flurry of calls for the Speaker to step-down, and it was not until he gave a near-tearful apology that some calm seemed to be restored. Opponents cried foul - ‘how dare he upend the conventions of the House!?’ - while supporters jumped to his aid - ‘he was just trying to protect MPs from further harassment over the Israel-Gaza debate!’ - and everyone was unhappy…

The technicalities of this convention (that multiple amendments are not called upon for voting during an Opposition Day Debate) are less interesting to me than the fact that the convention exists. ‘Convention’ is another word for ‘tradition’. Traditions are important. Our famously ‘unwritten’ Constitution relies heavily on tradition, especially for the smooth running of Parliament. Rather than having the process of legislating and governing micro-managed with procedural minutiae, the Commons operate on the basis of nurturing and conforming to its traditions. In essence, the House of Commons operates on the basis of respect - by respecting the traditions of the House, Parliamentarians grow to respect each other as fellow followers of tradition. Exterior action builds-up interior disposition. Practice influences sentiment.

At least, that’s my romantic take on it. Traditions give some coherence to a society - from the society of elected MPs right through the society of a nation - and allow it to flourish. Traditions bind people together. Traditions unite. You may come from a different part of the country than your neighbour, have different family values, have a different religion or skin-colour or education-level, etc…but you can be united in the traditions you follow. Whether it’s having a roast on a Sunday, going to a Carol Service in December, singing Three Lions in a World Cup year, the traditions you share despite all other differences give you a common cause with those around you.

This is not to say that traditions can’t have a dark side. Some traditions can alienate guests. Some traditions can stifle creativity and innovation. Some traditions can be maintained purely to bamboozle the uninitiated for the benefit of those in the know. In extremis, some traditions can lead to groupthink, to the othering of those who don’t share them, to jingoism and hatred; St Paul wrote that it was the zeal for the traditions of his fathers than led him to persecute the first Christians. Traditions should never be taken for granted or left unexamined. Traditions are roses - beautiful and sweet-smelling, but always in need of pruning. But let the gardener prune carefully - you want some roses left for the garden.

When the scribes and Pharisees try to trick and trap Jesus with impossible thought experiments, they often quote their traditions. Jesus always wins the debate. He wins in the face of their traditionalism. He wins by being a radical. RADICAL! His radicalism is not marked by the abandonment of the concept of tradition, but by deep respect for it. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the most famous speech about the importance of tradition - “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times…But I say to you…” - keeping the traditions of God in the face of the self-serving traditions of men. The scribes and the Pharisees are the White Witch to Jesus’ Aslan: ‘“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.”’

Not every critic last week will have genuinely cared about the traditions of the House of Commons. Many will have mouthed the words but would have happily stood by if the breaking of convention benefited them. Nevertheless, we must take tradition, and it’s breaking, seriously. Traditions nurtures the relationships of MPs. Traditions nurture the relationships of neighbours and fellow citizens. Traditions nurture relationship with God, as the traditional rhythms of religious practice and Church seasons help order prayer and worship. Perhaps we’ll look back on the upturning of this particular Commons tradition and recognise it as the right rejection of an outdated convention…but let's be cautious. Traditions are important. Break them with care.