Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Adam Kirsch is a renowned literary critic and poet. He’s published multiple collections of poems as well as over a dozen other books ranging in topics from literary biography to cultural analysis. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a PhD in English from Columbia University. He’s written numerous reviews and essays for the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, as well as The Atlantic. He’s an award-winning poet and author. He’s been conferred the National Jewish Book Award as well as a Guggenheim fellowship. But his most recent book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, is the topic of our conversation today.
Adam Kirsch, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Adam Kirsch:
Thanks very much. I’m glad to be here.
Albert Mohler:
I’ve really looked forward to the conversation about this book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us. I’ve been familiar with your work for a long time. I didn’t see this one coming.
Adam Kirsch:
Well, that’s nice to hear. Thank you. Yes, I usually write about literature or sometimes about Jewish subjects. I don’t ordinarily write about science and technology. And this book isn’t really about the science and technology side of it so much as it is about, from a humanistic point of view, what does it mean when people start to think that the future will have no human beings in it or maybe far fewer human beings than we have now, or that we will be superseded by some other kind of mind that’ll be superior to ours?
It’s a pretty revolutionary concept, and I think when you first hear about it, as when I first heard about it seems crazy or science fictiony, but I think that it’s an idea that is spreading, that people are taking more seriously, and it’s turning up in all kinds of places in public life. So I thought it would be interesting to look at who are the people who are making these kinds of arguments? What is it about this idea that appeals to them? And what are some of the possibilities and dangers of it?
Albert Mohler:
I was very familiar with your work on Lionel Trilling, and found your volumes on Trilling very interesting. I actually have taken one of Trilling’s titles, something of an homage, “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” as a lecture theme. And I’m familiar with your essays, and again, mostly on literature, and yet this one seems to have been at least partly sparked by literature. I look at the book itself and from PD James on, there’s a lot of literature in here.
Adam Kirsch:
It’s true. I look at a number of people who are trying to imagine what it would be like to not have humans at the center of our world picture, basically. And that includes philosophers and activists and scientists and tech investors, people like that, but it also includes novelists and poets and people who think about humanity and human stories. And it’s something that a lot of different kinds of novelists are circling around or converging on. I think it’s something that people realize is in the air, and it raises a lot of interesting questions from Ian McEwen, the British writer, to Richard Powers who won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel called The Overstory, which was about a lot of these themes as well.
Albert Mohler:
Sometimes it takes someone from an outside field to detect a pattern that the people inside don’t see. And you’ve put two things together in this book, which so far as I know is the first time they’ve been combined. You’re looking at two different forms of what we might call anti-humanism, two different streams, and you track those through. Just lay that out for us.
Adam Kirsch:
Sure. So I talk about two schools of thought in the book, and as I say in the book, they’re people who don’t necessarily seem to have a lot in common and probably wouldn’t see each other as allies. They wouldn’t get along if they were in the same room. One are people who come to anti-humanism from an environmentalist point of view. People who think, because of environmental damage or climate change, we are putting our own future in danger. That we will face a future in which there’s species extinctions in which parts of the Earth become harder for human beings to live in, and ultimately might lead to our own extinction.
And unlike mainstream environmentalists who might see these problems and say, “Well, let’s think of ways to solve them,” the people I’m looking at are anti-humanists, and they say, “Well, humanity itself is the problem. Humanity is an inherently destructive force on the face of the Earth. And there’s no way to really remedy that short of getting rid of ourselves either entirely or at least changing the way we think about the world, so that our needs don’t always come first.”
And so some of the people I write about, for example, are philosophers who are thinking about what would it mean to think of rocks or oceans or the climate as beings in some kind of way analogous to the way we’re human beings. So that’s one side of the story that I’m telling in this book.
The other side, which is probably more familiar in the mainstream, are people who call themselves transhumanists. Those are people who are very positive about science and technology. In fact, so much so that they think that we will invent our own successors either by transforming our own physical bodies in ways that do away with a lot of the limits of the human condition, such as maybe mortality or illness or even embodiment itself.
Or else by inventing artificial minds like artificial intelligences on computers which are actual minds similar to ours, but don’t have bodies and would have a very different perspective on the world than we do. And for transhumanists, these are all things that although a lot of the writing that these people do is about problems and things that can go wrong, essentially, they see that as a very positive development because it will mean better lives in the future.
Albert Mohler:
So let’s take these two themes and separate them, because, again, I’ve said I think one of the achievements of your book is actually to put the two of them together as what you call the revolt against humanity. And the first one is a deep form of pessimism. You might say the other’s the opposite, it’s an extreme, fanciful notion of optimism, but what particular pessimism is this? In other words, it’s a very dark picture. In fact, in your book, you make clear it’s even darker than your introductory comments.
Adam Kirsch:
It’s true. I’m looking at people who are either environmentalist thinkers or activists or in some cases philosophers who are approaching this from a more abstract point of view. And what they’re all saying is, and this is something that I think we all can hear in the media that is a familiar idea at this point, that the future is going to be a very dark one, because of environmental changes. That we’re on a course to inflict irreversible damage to the Earth. And that will result in things like serious climate change, mass extinctions, making large parts of the world uninhabitable, leading to huge refugee crises or resource wars.
That’s a vision that I think a lot of people take very seriously. I don’t set out in the book to ascertain whether that’s right or wrong. I know that there are people obviously who disagree with that as well. What I’m trying to look at is for the people who think this way, what are the implications? If that worldview becomes more accepted and more popular, how will it change the way we think about ourselves and the way we live?
One way it will change is among younger people in surveys, there’s extraordinarily high levels of anxiety about the future, a feeling that the future is going to be worse than the past, which is historically the opposite of what Americans have reported in surveys. And in particular, a lot of ambivalent feelings about whether it’s morally right to have children, and in particular to have a lot of children.
Because if their idea becomes accepted that humanity is bad for the planet, or that it’s a zero-sum game between humans and everything else on Earth, then the idea of having more and more humans starts to look like a selfish and destructive choice. Which is the opposite of the traditional, certainly biblical, but also secular humanist way of thinking about humanity, which is that we are the point of the Earth, that we are the reason why the earth was created or at the very least we’re the protagonists of the story here on earth. And what we do is the most interesting, most important thing.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, what you call anthropocene pessimism is something I’ve been watching for a very long time. You take someone like the figure David Benatar, you cite in your book, I just want to say straightforwardly, I want to take him seriously and I want to take him honestly, but it’s hard to know how to take someone who says—and in fact, one of his titles Better Never to Have Been—it’s just hard to know if you really mean that. And you keep publishing books. So, how do you read them? And by the way, you’re a literary critic. How do you read this even as literature?
Adam Kirsch:
It’s true. It’s an interesting question and something I talk about a bit in the book is if you’re dealing with people who say things like, “The human species should cease to exist,” or, “We need to wipe ourselves out,” or sometimes even in much more concrete terms about why we shouldn’t have children. Those arguments run so counter to our basic assumptions that it’s hard to take them seriously. And I think the first reaction we have to a lot of them, certainly that I do, is to put them in another category of hyperbole or this is some thought game or experiment. It’s not really what people think.
David Benatar is an interesting case. He’s a South African thinker, philosopher who his main argument is not so much environmental as it is saying that human life itself is on balance bad. That even people who think their lives are good, are mistaken. And in fact, if they were to think about it more rationally, they would agree their lives are bad. And therefore the most moral thing to do would be to prevent future lives from coming into being, because life is suffering and life is bad.
The idea that life is suffering is not a new insight. There are a lot of philosophers and religious traditions that have the same insight. But I think the idea that we should move from that to wiping out the human race or trying to guide us on a glide path to extinction does seem hard to take seriously. And there are some people who write about this in a very provocative way where they’re clearly trying to get a rise out of the reader. I think David Benatar is quite earnest about it. I think he really does think that, or at least, he’s-
Albert Mohler:
I read it in the same way by the way.
Adam Kirsch:
Yeah. He’s argued himself into this position. There’s another writer I didn’t talk about in the book named Claire Colebrook, and she says that the instinctive rejection of these ideas is a defense mechanism. That we rule these things out of bounds because we don’t want to really think about what they mean, what the implications are. But she describes our current period as a time of anticipatory mourning. In other words, we’re looking forward to a time when things will disappear, whether it’s the entire human race or institutions or civilization that we now have. And we’re in mourning for that loss in advance.
And I think that that does really capture a big part of the spirit of what’s going on today. I think a lot of people who think about the future are very worried about it and see that the future is going to be very different from the past in lots of ways, and are in mourning for that declining or disappearing civilization.
Albert Mohler:
I think one of the achievements of the way you write this very extended essay is when you talk about anthropocene pessimism. There are actually some so pessimistic as to suggest that humanity could never last. For instance, even some suggest that the ecological crisis was prehistoric and that humans were always just materialistically determined to cease to be.
Adam Kirsch:
Right. There are people who look at the geological record, for example, or paleontological evidence and say that, for instance, when the first human beings arrived in the Americas, which is thought to have happened about 10,000 years ago, if you look at the record, within a few thousand years, 80% of the large mammals have been exterminated. And that’s using hunter-gatherer techniques, fire and bows and arrows. It’s not using industrial technology at all.
So if you think that that is what human beings do to the environment wherever we are, and then you look at the immense increase in power and capability that we’ve had in the last 200 years because of technology, it might lead to the conclusion that wherever we go, we are going to damage and take and destroy as much as we think we need to, until we get to a point where the damage might be irreversible. And I think a lot of people worry that there might be a, say, with the climate, a tipping point where without intending to, we will change the climate in some way that is truly disastrous and can’t be reversed.
One of the things I write about in the book is how this way of thinking, this anthropocene way of thinking really changes the way that we’ve thought about humanity and nature. So the term anthropocene, which is very common in the humanities and social sciences right now, originally, it’s a geological term and it suggests that we’re in a new phase of the history of the planet where the most important force shaping the planet is humanity. In other words, it’s not tectonic plates or the climate, but it’s us. And that idea really turns upside down a lot of our usual assumptions about our role in the world and our place in nature.
So for a long time, people have gone into nature to find escape from ourselves. To say, this is a reflection of God or it’s a sublime power, and reminds us how small we are and how powerless we are in comparison to something like a forest or the ocean, the Grand Canyon, in the 19th century, those are very common ideas. Now, I think the way we think about the environment is completely the opposite of that. We worry about it and we take pity on it. We say, “Look at this enormous patch of garbage that we’ve created in the ocean, or look at these clear cut forests that we’ve destroyed.”
In other words, we are now bigger than nature, and nature depends on us instead of us depending on it. So that change in the way that we think is in a way spiritually sort of claustrophobic, because it means that there’s nothing bigger than us in the world and whatever happens next is going to be a reflection of our character, of our moral priorities and actions. And the people who are pessimistic say, “There’s no reason to think based on our record that we’re going to make good choices in that future.”
Albert Mohler:
And some of them are pessimistic beyond that, suggesting that it’s too late anyway, that the anthropocene is going to be a short amount of time, kind of materialistically destined to be so.
Adam Kirsch:
True. And it’s very hard to make predictions. And this is also true on the more optimistic side, the transhumanist side. There are a lot of predictions that are in the 20 year time horizon, because as someone I quote in the book says, “It’s just the right amount of time because it can’t be proved false right away. And it sort of feels like it’s important, but not so much that you have to change anything right now.” So if you say. “Within 20 years the climate will change or the temperature will have gone up by a certain amount of degrees,” that is something that no one can immediately refute.
But for example, one thing I talk about in the book is this idea which is widespread, especially among younger people, that the year 2030 has some sort of immagical or innate significance. This comes from a UN climate report which talked about what the world would have to do to limit the increase in temperature to a certain level by the year 2030. The way that that was reported a lot of the time was, “We have until 2030 to save the planet.”
So I quoted several people in the book who say, “The world will end in 2030,” or, “After 2030, it’ll be too late for us and humanity will be doomed.” That kind of apocalyptic impulse has shown up in lots of forms in human history, often in religious forms. This is an environmental form of the same impulse, and it’s hard to refute. It’s hard to say, “No, that’s definitely not the case,” because we don’t know yet.
Albert Mohler:
One thing that struck me as a theologian is that there were so many millennial sects, say, in the 19th century, and a lot of them were aberrant forms of Christianity. But the millennialism was just a driving factor. The world’s going to end, or we’re going to be in a new world then, and everything’s going to change at the end of this age, which is coming swiftly to an end. Now you have this kind of techno pessimism or environmental pessimism, and it’s a new millenarianism. It’s a new sense of this kind of imminent eschatological catastrophe.
Adam Kirsch:
Right, exactly. Except that it’s one that we’ve brought in ourselves by exploiting the Earth rather than something that’s happening on a divine timetable, although even that has religious roots as well. I mean, why we’re Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed? Because the people were wicked. And so it’s something of the same moral impulse.
You can especially see that I think in a figure like Greta Thunberg, the young environmentalist activist, whose language is very denunciatory and sort of punitive. And she really is saying, “You adults,” because she is young, “have sort of messed things up so terribly that you’ve destroyed the world and now you’re going to pay the price. So that idea has been around for a long time, and now you can find it in environmentalist terms.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it’s very interesting. I think that’s one of the best expressions you use in this. You have a brilliant way of putting that, that Greta Thunberg has a kind of pass because she’s a teenager on the discourse that would never be acceptable from adults. But she has kind of grown up, so does that last?
Adam Kirsch:
I think it is changing. She’s now in her 20s, I think, so she’s no longer a teenager. But I do think there was something very powerful about this image of a young woman saying you that, “You have destroyed my future,” and calling humanity to account for what it’s done. And I think that the fact that that message was given so many prominent audiences, I mean, like the US Congress and the UN. Everyone wanted to hear this message, so it’s obviously something that people believe.
Albert Mohler:
It’s hard to say no to a teenager.
Adam Kirsch:
Right, especially, one who is making what seems like a purely moral argument.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it seems to be. But this has precedent. I don’t remember in your book if you mentioned Samantha Smith.
Adam Kirsch:
Yes. Yes, I do.
Albert Mohler:
Very, very similar, a young girl warning the world of nuclear catastrophe. And this goes right back into Greek mythology, basically. But nonetheless, it is really interesting that what you don’t hear from people now, at least from many people is, “Hey, there’s no problem.” I think just what everyone recognizes there’s a problem. The big question is, is this something that human beings can respond to, will respond to, or how should we respond to it?
And I think what’s really interesting about your book is that at least in this first category of the kind of anti-humanists you mentioned, the pessimist, they’re basically saying either it’s too late or humanity’s not worth saving anyway.
Adam Kirsch:
Right, exactly. I think there are some people who look at the record of things like climate pledges and agreements to limit, say, the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, and whenever a target or a goal is announced, immediately, we blow right past it. There’s no real way to enlist all of humanity or enforce these goals. So in practical terms, there’s good reason to doubt that those kinds of goals can be met. But there are also people who say, “Even if we could meet them, the price would be too high. Because it would mean that we would have to live in an even more technological world than we do now.”
So there are people I talked about in the book, like Paul Kingsnorth, who’s a British environmentalist, who sort of started out as a mainstream environmentalist and then became much more radical. And one of the things he writes about is why he’s no longer an environmentalist. He doesn’t call himself that. And he talks about being on the coast of England and seeing a wind farm off the coast, which wasn’t there when he was growing up, and thinking that the best possible future, the green future that people want is wind farms everywhere. Because that’s what would be required to give us really renewable, no carbon power, but that would mean cutting ourselves off from nature even more dramatically.
Albert Mohler:
And killing birds.
Adam Kirsch:
Yes, and killing birds. There’s always a price to pay. But the idea that if what people want is a more natural way of life, a return to a pre-technological, pre-industrial way of life, then environmentalism really can’t offer that at all at this point. All it can offer is trying to mitigate the cost of the way of life we have now.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And there are those in the industry who already think the wind farms are becoming too expensive, both, not just in terms of the construction and maintenance costs, but in the ecological costs. It also reminds me of the late Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts who was pushing for all these farms of green energy, and then fought a wind farm that would’ve be visible from Martha’s Vineyard, where he had-
Adam Kirsch:
Right. No one wants it outside their window.
Albert Mohler:
No one wants it there. As a literary critic, there’s a theme I wonder if you’ve thought about in this connection, because it struck me reading your book, and that is that one distinction is that we’ve kind of shifted from a tragedian sense to an apocalyptic sense. And so I think about 19th century and 20th century literature, so much of it is so powerful because of its recognition of tragedy, but tragedy’s not nihilism.
Adam Kirsch:
Right. It’s true.
Albert Mohler:
So did you think about those themes as you were writing here?
Adam Kirsch:
Yes. And I think that there are a couple of important differences in what’s going on now versus earlier versions of the same phenomenon. I mean, one thing that’s not new is the idea that the human race has the power to destroy itself. That’s been the case since the 1940s with the invention of nuclear weapons. And a lot of agonizing and thought has gone into that subject, and it has changed civilization in profound ways. But what it doesn’t change is our sense of good and evil, because I think everyone accepts that nuclear war would be the ultimate evil and should be avoided by any means possible. And so-
Albert Mohler:
Just to interrupt you for a moment, that means that the mass death of humanity, and perhaps even the darkest understanding of human extinction, that would be a bad thing.
Adam Kirsch:
Right. Exactly. Exactly. That way of thinking says, “The worst thing that could possibly happen would be a nuclear apocalypse, and we have to do everything we can to avoid it.” And in that way, it’s very much in harmony with traditional thinking, ethical and religious thinking about war, which is that war is bad and should be avoided as much as possible, and killing is bad. But what’s what I think is different now is that the things that are seen as dangerous are not things like killing or starting wars, but things like having more power plants or indoor electricity or letting people have more cars.
I mean, those are the things that for most of the last 200 years, our societies have been oriented towards exactly those things. Those are the things that we want. That’s supposed to be called progress and giving people better lives. So if the idea is no longer that the bad things are bad, but actually the good things are also bad, because they are going to ultimately take a toll on the planet and might even wipe us out indirectly, that changes the way we have to think, not just about war, but about ourselves. About if the things that we want the most are bad for us or bad for the environment, then we have to really change the way we think about ourselves morally.
And that’s what a lot of these more extreme thinkers are doing. They’re saying, “If this is what human beings are like, and we’re in this sort of conflict with the rest of the planet or on a collision course, how can we change the way we think so that we are not always on the side of humanity, but allow other things to have a say as well?”
Albert Mohler:
I guess the literary shift I was thinking of was a shift from, say, Dostoevsky, which was a very strong sense of the tragic, but also a very strong sense of human dignity and of basic human dignity. And of the fact that life is worth living, even in the midst of this tragedy. But we’ve gone from tragedy to kind of an apocalyptic system, just to say, “Life is not worth living.” And so I just have to wonder aloud with you on this pessimism, what kind of literature is this going to produce?
Adam Kirsch:
It’s a good question. I think that one person I talk about in the book, as I mentioned before, is Ian McEwen, who’s one of the most famous British novelists right now. And one of his recent books, which is called Machines Like Me, and it’s a novel which imagines a sort of alternate history in which artificial minds, androids, if you want, were invented in England in the 1980s. And it imagines one of the first of these robots being sold to a man who buys it, and then the man and the robot have a love triangle in which they’re both in love with the same woman.
And over the course of the book, the human protagonist comes to realize that he doesn’t actually have any moral right to say to the woman, “You have to love me because I’m human.” Or that this Android’s feelings aren’t real, because subjectively to the Android, they are just as real. And the title, Machines Like Me, suggest that the human being is also a machine. It’s a biological machine rather than a mechanical machine. But that that is not really a significant difference in the end.
And one of the things that is discussed in the book is the future of literature, and the robot says, “In the future there won’t be novels because humans need novels because we don’t understand each other. Whereas artificial minds will understand each other so well that they won’t need literature, because they won’t have to communicate in that indirect way.” So I think you could definitely imagine a future in which, I mean, we’re already moving towards a future in which traditional forms of human creativity, like literature and art and music are no longer what they used to be, but are sort of industrial products created artificially.
And now with things like ChatGPT, as a writer, I see that, and I think, we’ll get to a point where the ChatGPT could do my job or could write anything that you might want written. And one would like to think that there’s still a distinction between what a human being can do and what a computer can do. But if you look at all the things that people have thought in the past computers would never be able to do, in the end, they end up doing them, like being the best chess player in the world, for example.
So it’s hard to say where the line will be, where computers will won’t be able to go, and humans will still be the best at something. And in that kind of a world, it’s also a very pessimistic vision saying, “We don’t even need humans. What are we for? If machines can do everything better than us, why do we need to be here at all?”
Albert Mohler:
So as I said, when I look at the pessimist, you call them an anthropocene pessimist, I know they mean to be taken seriously. I know some of them mean exactly what they’re saying. I still am not sure to the extent to which all of them mean all the extreme things they’re saying. But when it comes to the other group you’re talking about, I’m pretty well convinced they mean what they say, the transhumanist. And we’ve kind of gone from a form of pessimism to a form of just unbridled techno optimism. So walk us through that shift into a completely different non-human world.
Adam Kirsch:
Sure. So the point of connection here, I think, is that these are two groups that both think that a future without human beings would not be a tragedy. It would be fine and maybe even better. So the anti-humanist that we’ve been talking about think it would be better because human beings are destructive and that nature in the world would be better without us.
The transhumanists say, “The future would be better because we will invent our successors. We’ll invent minds and machines that are much more capable than we are. And we should look forward to that, even if it means that these things are eventually going to supersede us and maybe even extinguish us. Because it will carry on what’s most important about us, which is our minds, our intellect, and our ability to understand and explore the world.” And so-
Albert Mohler:
And by our, you mean, in some cases, actually ours?
Adam Kirsch:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
So in other words, we are talking about perpetuating particular individual minds.
Adam Kirsch:
Right. Well, there are all kinds of practical scenarios that you have to think about when you think about some of these technologies. Really, there are two main streams of transhumanist thought. One is that we will have technologies that will preserve our own bodies and capabilities or extend them in ways that are so different from what we are used to, that it’ll be essentially a new kind of human being. So if it’s possible through genetic engineering or through using nanotechnology to extend the human lifespan to a 1,000 years, for example, which is something that some of these techno utopians think will happen, that would be such a different form of existence than the human existence we know that it would be hard for us to imagine what that’s like.
Or if we are able to perceive wavelengths of light or hear frequencies of sound or think a million times faster than we do with our current brains, all of those things would… in a sense, humanity would no longer exist. It would become super humanity. And it’s not clear that anything that we currently think or do or have done would be of any use to those kinds of superhumans. That’s one way of thinking about it.
Another way of thinking about it is that in the future, minds won’t need to have bodies at all because they will live on computers. And that could be either scanning a human mind and uploading it onto a computer or designing a completely new kind of mind that lives on a computer from the beginning., And interacts with the world in different ways than we do. I think that for a lot of transhumanists, what they think is that we have come up against the limits of what we are capable of as Homo sapiens. In other words, we will never be able to travel into distant space because our bodies are not made for that.
Or there are certain problems, scientific problems that we will never be able to solve because our brains simply don’t perceive the universe in that way. But if we could create a different kind of mind or a disembodied mind, then it might be possible to travel at the speed of light or to understand everything there is to know about physics and the universe. And so people who are very positive about science and scientific progress, to them, that looks like a good next step.
I talk in the book about this writer named Toby Ord who has a book called The Precipice, and he uses this metaphor of if humanity has been climbing a mountain and we’re now on a precipice or a ledge, we can’t keep going. We seem stuck here, and there’s this danger of falling off. There are only two alternatives. One is to climb back down, and that’s the anthropocene pessimist view, which is that we should regress from where we are. Or we could change ourselves into some other kind of being that can keep going up, and that’s what the transhumanists want.
It’s been a strange thing that this book was published in January, which was right at the time when some of these artificial intelligence chatbots started getting attention in the news, particularly the one called ChatGPT, which has just been released in an even newer form. And a lot of these issues that in the book are sort of theoretical, are turning out to be very practical problems with these things.
If you’re talking to a computer program and it tells you that it has certain ideas or needs and desires, how do you know whether that is true or whether this is just a glitch or an artifact of the way it uses language? I mean, the way that we know other human beings have minds like ours is because they look like us and they have the same biology as us, so we sort of trust what’s going on in their heads is similar to what’s going on in our heads. But if it’s a computer and the only way what is going on in its head is what it tells you in words, you’re in a very tricky philosophical situation. And we are now in that situation.
Albert Mohler:
One of the things that struck me as I was reading that, and I was in actually an academic discussion of transhumanism earlier this week, one of the issues that strikes me is that what we’re looking at, the analogy between machine intelligence and human intelligence. And you even mentioned emotion, but for human beings, emotions are not merely mental states. They are also physiological states. They can be measured. They can be measured in terms of brainwave activity with an EKG. They can be measured in terms of perspiration. They can be measured in terms of heart rate, et cetera.
And as a Christian theologian, I have to say this because I believe a composite humanity, how in the world are they transferring all of that? I’m still puzzled by it. It seems to me they’re taking intelligence and abstracting it from the rest of human experience.
Adam Kirsch:
Well, I think it’s definitely true that any attempt to create a mind on a computer, that mind will be very different from the kind of mind that we have. And whatever it experiences or thinks or wants, all of those things will be very different from what we’re used to. And in fact, that’s one of the big problems in AI research right now. It’s called the alignment problem. It’s the problem of how to align goals of an artificial mind with our goals. Because if an AI is so different from us that it doesn’t understand the basic things that we understand, it might want to do things that we would regard as very destructive and dangerous, but to it wouldn’t seem that way at all. It would seem totally fine.
I think, ultimately, and this is a reason why the book is a lot about spiritual or religious questions, ultimately, if you’re a scientific materialist and you believe that the mind is created by the brain that there’s nothing supernatural involved, then the idea that there could be a mind that’s a computer rather than a human brain is just an engineering problem. There’s no philosophical reason. There’s no sort of basic reason why that can’t be the case. Because our experience of the world, our consciousness is generated by things that happen in the neurons in our brain. So if you could have neurons that are made out of silicon instead of human tissues, that would also be a mind and a brain. There’s no reason why that couldn’t be.
So then the question is what does that mean for consciousness? There are some people I talk about in the book who say, “If that’s the case, then in fact we have to attribute consciousness even to very primitive things.” Like a thermostat, for example, is one example that this thinker named David Chalmers talks about. That a thermostat has three possible states which are get warmer, stay the same, or get colder. If something is that primitive, could that have some kind of conscious awareness, which would be infinitely more primitive than ours, but the same thing?
By the same token, could there be one that’s infinitely more powerful than ours that would be engineered very differently from ours and would be able to think and understand in a way that is as far superior to us as we are to a thermostat? I think that with the advances in computer science, we’re getting to a point where those aren’t just science fiction questions, but they’re starting to become very real public policy questions.
Albert Mohler:
An interesting little footnote here, when I read Chalmers and others, I often think of someone like Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit, who was considered quite the dangerous mystic by the Roman Catholic Church, and I think was kind of a intellectual fruit kick in certain ways. And I don’t mean that just dismissively, but he was just picking up things here, there, and all over. But he seemed to believe that there could be consciousness in rocks and mountains and such things.
And so I really think there’s a long tradition here. I think an intellectual history, you’d have to say that kind of what the people would call the alienation of humanity from nature in the 19th century with the rise of the industrial revolution, it led to all kinds of these questions of people asking, do machines have intelligence? I mean, people were asking that about steam presses.
Adam Kirsch:
Right. And then the book that’s thought of as the first sciences fiction novel, which is Frankenstein, in the 1818s, more than 200 years ago, is really exactly that. It’s saying, “Couldn’t you make a mind, a human mind just by sewing together dead body parts and electrifying them?” And so the science obviously wasn’t there, but it’s the same principle. If Frankenstein’s monster is created, wouldn’t it have needs and desires, wouldn’t it want love, wouldn’t it be enough like us that it would be cruel to deny those things. Now, we face those same questions in terms of computer programs.
Albert Mohler:
It’s very interesting by the way that the relationship between humanity and machines has always been complicated. And the more complicated the machine, the more complicated the relationship. And we tend to anthropomorphize and we tend to personalize. So what’s really interesting is that a lot of people have noted that during the high watermark of the automobile age, men in particular tended to name their vehicles. They named their cars. They gave personality to. It wasn’t a Chevrolet, it was Carla. And so you just look at this and you recognize some of this is new, some of this is not, but all of it’s kind of newly plausible in the age of artificial intelligence.
Adam Kirsch:
Definitely. And I think that one reason why transhumanism is a sort of serious movement, it started emerging in the 1990s and has become more and more plausible and self-confident, is that our technology is catching up to some of these ideas that once seem completely fanciful. And what transhumanists say, the place they start from is, “Look at the history of technology and how enormously it’s advanced in the last 200 years compared to all previous human history. And then imagine if we made the same amount of progress in the next 200 years. The world could look so different from what we are now, just as we are different from the way human life was 200 years ago.”
If you had told people even a 100 years ago that human beings would walk on the moon, almost everyone would’ve said that was crazy and completely insane, and it’s like something out of a myth or a legend, and then it happened. So I think to me, it seems very plausible that in our lifetimes, we will see computers that interact with us in the way that we interact with each other. And that will raise a lot of very serious questions and problems. And I don’t know how they’ll be solved or if they’ll be solved, but I think you can already see a lot of that coming.
Albert Mohler:
Certainly, it seems to me that there will be machines that will mimic those things such that we will at least feel we have a relationship with them, which already happens with children talking to laptop computers and thinking they’re talking to a person. As you think about this transhumanism though, I mean, frankly, you presented very straightforwardly and I think was a fascinating detail to sources, but it’s hard, honestly, to know how much of that to take really seriously. Because the other thing is that there’s really not much of a commercial application for pessimism, there’s a huge commercial application, even commercial incentive when it comes to transhumanism.
Adam Kirsch:
Absolutely. And I think that the most likely scenario is that we will stumble into this future in a piecemeal way, because certain things get invented, one thing here, another thing there. And just as with the internet and social media, we find that once they’ve been invented, they create problems that we weren’t anticipating before. So no one anticipated when someone created Facebook in a dorm room that it would lead to the kinds of polarization or misinformation that we have on social media now, or that it could be a major force in world politics.
Similarly, I don’t think anyone who is working on these text chatbots that basically just suck up huge quantities of text that they find on the internet and use it to figure out patterns in language. I don’t think they were thinking, “I’ll invent this, and it will completely destroy the idea of homework,” for example. Because every child will be able to go on the computer and get an answer to any question automatically by typing it in. But that’s already happening. So it is already-
Albert Mohler:
Trust me on that.
Adam Kirsch:
What’s that?
Albert Mohler:
No, I was saying it as an educator-
Adam Kirsch:
Oh, yeah.
Albert Mohler:
… it’s not hypothetical now, we’re in it. Had to form this week a faculty task force here in my own institution to try to deal with this. It’s not just science fiction in that respect right now.
Adam Kirsch:
No, definitely. And I think that one of the demonstrations of the latest sort of version of this technology had, there’s an amazing thing where one of the people demonstrating it, a tech CEO, drew a website interface, just with a pencil on a piece of paper, showed it to the computer, and the computer built a working website within minutes based on that image.
So when you think that computers are that capable, I mean, the first thing, I don’t talk about this in the book, the book is sort of focused elsewhere, but the first implication is economic. I mean, it’s going to destroy millions of jobs. Millions of things that require human beings to do them will no longer require human beings. And if that happens on a really mass scale very quickly, that will have enormous political and social implications.
Albert Mohler:
But one of the implications, by the way, is counterintuitive. So let me come back to my world. So let’s say that ChatGPT and other technologies make it such that you just don’t know what you’re dealing with when you’re given a digital product. So one answer is, as some professors are doing right now, then we’re back to blue books. We are back to you writing the answer or writing this essay in a room by yourself with a blue book and a pen, that’s it, or oral.
And by the way, there’s something very healthy about this. I don’t know how widespread it can be, but an oral conversation, oral exam, an oral report, professor to student, student to professor. So it is interesting to know that these are things that at least at this point, we’re saying, “Well, a machine can’t do that.”
Adam Kirsch:
Right. No, I think that that’s a great solution. I think having people with no technology in a room, having to write with a pen and pencil or just talk, I think that that would be a great solution. I think that they’re also dangers like people already tend to put too much trust in what they see in social media, regardless of your political orientation or what kinds of things it is that you’re seeing. People tend to believe things that they see, especially if it comes in a format that they associate with reputable, trustworthy information.
So if you see on Facebook someone says something that’s not true, you’re sort of inclined to take it at face value. And sometimes it’s very hard to convince people that things aren’t true. If when you go on your computer and you were looking for something, instead of typing into the Google search bar and getting a list of hundreds of results, you just had a voice telling you this is the answer, and say that that voice was right 98% of the time, but wrong 2% of the time, everyone would trust it and rely on it and believe in it.
And if that voice was wrong in the 2% of the time, or if someone was able to bias it to give certain answers and not others, it could have enormous power over the way things happen in a democracy. So I think that’s another real, very serious problem that I think is going to change things sooner rather than later.
Albert Mohler:
And maybe much sooner than later, or at least understanding the problem. Because even as we’re having this conversation in the aftermath of the fall of two major banks, one of them, Silicon Valley Bank, which by the way happened to have as a account holders, many of the people involved in transhumanism and the companies involved in transhumanism. But the interesting thing is that, and the Wall Street Journal’s done great work on this, there’s an open question at this point as to whether the run on the bank was a Twitter phenomenon. So that it would’ve been impossible even in 2008 when there were massive bank failures, people had to wait to hear it on CNN.
But right now, and much of it, the suggestion is, it was intentionally driven. We could look at an enemy on social media creating a run on a bank that could be fundamentally healthy. Silicon Valley wasn’t fundamentally healthy, but it could be fundamentally healthy. But no bank can have all its depositors demand the money at one time.
Adam Kirsch:
No, absolutely. It’s one of those classic unintended consequences of social media. The idea of frictionless communication that basically anyone can talk to everyone at any moment. That sounds great, until it’s someone who wants to spread a lie for their own advantage, and then a lie travels faster than the truth, and before you can stop it, the damage is done.
Albert Mohler:
So in the time that remains, I have to really make a major shift here, and now I just got to speak as a Christian theologian and say that when I look at the pessimism or the transhumanism, I think you were very helpful in just saying, “Look, they’re both based in a fundamentally materialistic understanding of reality. And human beings are just merely evolutionary accidents of one sort of sophistication or another.”
As a Christian theologian, I have to look at this and say, I have severe intellectual limits, theological limits as to how I can think in transhumanist terms or in pessimistic terms. And so, one of the big questions to me is how much of the biblical mind shaped by the imago Dei as evidenced by Jewish thought and then later by Christian thought, how much of that still constrains our society? Or basically is it gone in the society writ large?
Adam Kirsch:
It’s a really good question, and it’s something that I think about and thought about a lot in writing the book. I think that even people who are not religious or don’t profess to be religious, a lot of their moral vocabulary and intuitions are based on Judeo-Christianity, because that’s the sort of matrix of our culture. So a lot of things that we take for granted and don’t talk about in religious terms, like the idea of rights, for example, I think you could say ultimately has some sort of religious basis.
At the same time, these very old religious traditions have evolved in lots of ways as human society have evolved. So if you have what it meant to be Jewish or Christian in Judea in the first century ad is not the same as it was a 1,000 years later or a 1,000 years after that, in different parts of the world. There are certain basic continuities, but there are also a lot of differences. Whether those traditions will constrain people from doing things that they perceive as beneficial to themselves, for example, genetically modifying their children. I mean, one could say, “If we’re created in the image of God, that means we shouldn’t change our genome because the genome creates our bodies, creates our minds. There’s something sacred about that.”
On the other hand, if you were to say, you can genetically engineer your child so that it will never get cancer, I don’t think most people would be convinced by a theological argument that that’s a bad idea, because there’s always this tension. What does our tradition tell us that we can’t do? What do we want to do? Can we change the way we think about the tradition to meet this new demand, to change its advice?
I think that the most likely scenario to me is not a full rejection of Christian or Jewish or any kind of theological inheritance, it’s that these things will evolve in ways that accommodate or respond to changing technologies. And it’s very possible that there will be people who will say, “Absolutely not. I won’t participate in this because it’s against my religious convictions.”
Just as there are very few people who will say, “I won’t go to a hospital, take medicine, get a blood transfusion. Even if it would save my child’s life, I would refuse to let them have a blood transfusion.” But that is an extremely minority position, and most churches or religious authorities would say the opposite. I think it’s very possible that we will sort of evolve step by step in ways that will preserve our religious traditions, but in ways that we don’t expect right now.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’m one of those who’s going to fight for those religious traditions to stand extremely strong and in solidarity when it comes to human dignity. And when it comes to the understanding of what I will argue is biblically the imago Dei, the critical distinction of being made in God’s image, that is a categorical distinction from any other being and certainly from any other object.
I do think there’s a lot of work that’s going to have to be done on everything from germline therapies to any number of things. And the Christian tradition is not anti-interventionist, but it is anti-redefinitionalist, I guess you might say, when it comes to humanity. And I agree there are going to be a lot of challenges out there in the future.
I just have to say that the most fundamental level, even before you get to germline therapy or cryogenics or anything else, it’s whether or not life itself is a gift or a burden. And a part of me just wants to say that I feel brokenhearted looking at much of this, simply because it’s clear there’s so many people who think, “I think my life really has no meaning.”
Adam Kirsch:
Right. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
That’s a very sad thing.
Adam Kirsch:
It is a sort of evolution of a modern spiritual crisis, which is if we stop believing that the world and ourselves are made by God to be this way, and so we’re good, as the Bible says, that God saw that it was good, instead of that we just are, then why should it continue be this way? What’s keeping it from changing in some radical fashion?
And in fact, the big theological crisis came in the 19th century with the discovery of geology and then evolution, because those things showed that there have been this long succession of species on the planet that don’t longer exist. And if you extrapolate that into the future, it means that one day humanity will no longer exist. And I think this is a problem that everyone wrestles with in a certain way, everyone in the modern world, has had to think about. Some of the people I talk about in the book are thinking about it on a much faster schedule than we’re used to.
Albert Mohler:
Well, when it comes to evolution, you’re talking about very long controversy with Christianity.
Adam Kirsch:
Of course.
Albert Mohler:
And I also want to say that here again, looking at those who hold to evolutionary thought in its most extreme forms, they still have a very difficult time dealing with fundamentally human questions. Richard Dawkins still likes going to services of carols and hymns at Christmas and talks about the mystery and the majesty. In other words, I would say he’s a Christian theologian. There’s no way around the fact that there is a distinction between a human being and a cat, and even a bigger distinction between a human being and a rock.
Adam Kirsch:
No, absolutely. And I think one of the big things about evolution is that it doesn’t tell you anything about morality. Something isn’t right or wrong because of the way, if, say, that you believe human beings evolved, that doesn’t have any authority to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, that authority has to come from somewhere else.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. And as a Christian theologian, I found your book brilliantly done and fascinating. There were times at which I honestly thought, “I’m not sure how much of the author’s viewpoint I’m seeing here,” and I think you were probably intentional about that, but rather presenting it. But I do think it was brilliantly done.
Adam Kirsch:
Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And I did write this book thinking of myself sort of as a reporter saying, “This is what’s going on,” rather than joining the argument myself.
Albert Mohler:
So given all the work you’ve done in the past and this, what’s next?
Adam Kirsch:
I think that I’ll probably be writing something about American literature, modern American literature, that’ll probably be my next project.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that means that if you are planning to write a book, you’re certainly not one kind of pessimist.
Adam Kirsch:
Exactly.
Albert Mohler:
Adam Kirsch, thank you so much for joining me today for Thinking in Public.
Adam Kirsch:
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Albert Mohler:
I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam Kirsch. And it’s just a reminder to me of the absolute uniqueness and indispensability of the Christian worldview, and our understanding of reality and every dimension of reality, including what it means to be human. And this conversation just reminds me that it’s actually scriptural truth or nothing, and it’s imago Dei, it’s the image of God or a very, very dark, and I think unsustainable view of humanity. And I think this conversation really helped to make that clear, and I’m very indebted to Adam Kirsch for writing this book and for being a participant in this conversation, we share with you.
Many thanks to my guest, Adam Kirsch, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed Today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.