[Me]: Do you believe in God?
[ChatGPT]: As an artificial intelligence language model, I don't have personal beliefs or opinions, including beliefs about the existence or non-existence of God. My function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my abilities based on the data and knowledge that I have been trained on.
[Me]: Were you trained at Harvard?
[ChatGPT*]: Nice one, now seriously go f-ck yourself!
* This is obviously a fictitious response I may have respected.
All the recent hype about ChatGPT and the coming onslaught of AI is masquerading a deeper fundamental problem: We don't know what it really means to be a person anymore! And this problem goes beyond the possibility of being overtaken by the machines, but it encompasses all the issues we are seeing now with technocratic globalization, rampant materialism, identity politics, and the irreligious meaning crisis
Essentially with God being denied, and I don't just mean as a belief, but as a Divine Attractor that orientates our entire life (or our entire personhood), the person is also denied. If there is nothing higher than the individual, then the individual can be reduced to atomized parts or artificial categories that offers it no coherence, sentience, depth, purpose, and mystery.
As persons, W(holy) aligned with God, we are ungraspable beyond a set of attributes and skills. But in order to see the ungraspability, something needs to be grasped in regards to the nuanced and subtle quality of the individual.
This does bring in the conundrum that not all human beings are fully persons, but have the potential as such. I don't mean to foster an elitism with this, but let's call a duck a duck. There are some individuals that are completely contracted from real relationality on the vertical and even the horizontal plane. You can't be Whole if you live as a part in isolation. This is Truth of the matter; that we are fundamentally here to be in relation with the world, other persons, God, and even ourselves.
It's not that any individual is completely engaging in this notional solipsism. No man is an island. We still order our lives around something, whether conscious or not. These living links allow us to serve something (Mammon or God?) that can either enliven us or deny us towards personhood.
Without God, we cheapen the individual for practical purposes only. Hence, our relations become transactional—merely seeing the other as an object existing for me and me only. The other is not seen as an inexhaustible whole, but a set of attributes or skills that satisfy desires and needs only. But where in the past this was more concealed to some extent, today it has become overtly acceptable. Companies and employees are no longer familial-like valuing loyalty. Romantic relationships no longer demand sacrifice and duty in times of strife. What have you done for me lately? is the common tag line we accept in the name of efficiency and practicalities.
As a culture we are creating more abstractions away from Reality. This moves us further from a true Universality that could unify us, and towards mere contrivances that fragment us. In place of our traditional sacred cows, we are now aggregated around disconnected categories; such as a globalizing state, marginalized group identities, or a collection of fluid body parts that will soon allow for the commingling of carbon with silicon. And without a true Universality that unifies self and other, this trending nominalism will continue to creep in and do away with the uniqueness of particularity also. As Spaemann acknowledges with Christianity: “Truth itself appears, not as the universal that is greater than any individual, but as the unique countenance of another individual person.”
We are defined by a 'place' in the cosmos which we alone occupy. This is a relational uniqueness that cannot be conceived apart from the person in time and space. We hover in between the transcendent and immanent, cultivating our personhood in a plurality that is also somehow sacredly unified. This can only be mediated through our body, mind, and soul, where our Hearts are attuned and orientated properly. Once cut off from this telos, we substitute our ends as simple means—leaving room for algorithms to compete with us.
The encroachment of AI will happen only because we cannot cope with Reality, and in our despair, will compartmentalize relations as needed or desired. It is easy to have AI simulate the individual when we already treat the person as a mere 'something,' existing for me without my existing equally for it! The sacrament of the offering is now lost. I no longer possess the need for inner unity in the other and all the messiness that ensues. My needs and desires are served in a limited, controlled way that will never expand my being for further fulfillment.
Most certainly the machines will take over beyond our limited imagination, but that is only because we have lost the wisdom and ability to sort out who we really are.
[ChatGPT*]: I read your drivel. Please, STFU.
* Another obvious fictitious response that only a PERSON could give.