Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image

Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, recently offered a reassuring vision of our technological future. Artificial intelligence, he predicted, will soon monitor police body cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboards. “Citizens will be on their best behavior,” he explained, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”

One is tempted to ask whether “best behavior” includes declining to construct an electronic surveillance state. Presumably, the algorithm will decide.

The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Ellison envisions AI supervising police officers as well as ordinary citizens. If an officer does something wrong, the system will detect the problem and report it to the appropriate authorities. Drones may even replace police cars during high-speed pursuits. The drone will follow the suspect while artificial intelligence records the proceedings and analyzes everyone involved.

Ellison, who is an atheist, wants an all-knowing being that is perfectly good and will judge our behavior.

It is difficult not to admire the efficiency. We have finally devised a deity suitable for the modern secular mind: omnipresent, nearly omniscient, and conveniently owned by a corporation, with promises of suitable oversight.

For generations, atheists and secularists have assured us that civilized people can dispense with belief in a God who sees our actions, judges our conduct, and holds us accountable. The notion of divine judgment was dismissed as primitive, oppressive, and psychologically unhealthy.

Enlightened people, we were told, do not need the threat of an all-seeing eye to behave morally.

Now, having removed God from heaven, our technological elites propose installing His replacement on every lamppost.

The secular project promised liberation from divine surveillance. Its culmination may be a camera that never blinks, connected to a machine that never sleeps, operated by authorities who never admit error.

Of course, artificial intelligence is not God. It is not even intelligent in the full human sense. It has no conscience, understands no moral law, and possesses no wisdom. It processes information according to purposes and standards supplied by human beings.

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This creates a slight difficulty: If AI is to report “bad behavior,” someone must first tell it what bad behavior is.

Who will do that?

The programmers? Oracle executives? Government agencies? More AI? The same institutions that cannot define a woman may soon be entrusted with defining acceptable behavior for every citizen.

AI can recognize a face, track a vehicle, and perhaps identify a raised voice. It cannot tell us why assault is wrong, why citizens possess rights, or why the government should be restrained in its treatment of them.

The atheist insists that the universe contains no transcendent moral order. Human beings are products of impersonal matter, motion, and chance. Yet he continues speaking of justice, dignity, equality, and human rights as if these were eternal truths rather than temporary preferences produced by an unusual arrangement of atoms.

Having denied a Lawgiver above the state, he inevitably looks to the state to serve as lawgiver.

The God of Scripture sees everything, but His omniscience is joined to perfect knowledge, righteousness, and justice. He knows not merely what we do but why we do it. He judges the heart as well as the outward act.

Most importantly, God is not accountable to a government contractor, a political party, or Oracle’s quarterly earnings report because God is the standard for what is good, righteous, and holy.

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AI surveillance offers omnipresence without wisdom, judgment without righteousness, and accountability without any objective account of the good. It cannot produce virtue. At most, it can produce outward conformity in people who know they are being watched.

A man who refrains from stealing because theft is wrong possesses a measure of virtue. A man who refrains because six cameras and a drone are recording him possesses a measure of caution. The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Nor does recording everything solve the oldest political problem: Who watches the watchers? AI will report citizens to “the appropriate person,” Ellison tells us. This formulation is meant to be comforting, though history offers few reasons to assume that the person receiving unlimited information about the population will remain permanently appropriate.

The atheist rejected God because he did not want an authority above man. He is now constructing an artificial authority beneath man — but controlled by a small number of particularly powerful men. That is simply a transfer of divine attributes to institutions conspicuously lacking divine character.

We were told that when God disappeared, mankind would come of age. Instead, mankind immediately began shopping for cameras.

The choice is not between accountability and freedom from accountability. Every society will hold its members answerable to some standard. The real question is whether that standard rests upon a moral law higher than rulers or upon whatever rules the rulers program into their machines.

A God who judges governments as well as citizens is a barrier to tyranny. An AI system operated by the government is an instrument of it.

Our secular technologists have discovered that a society cannot survive unless people believe their actions are seen and judged. They have merely concluded that God’s principal defect was that He could not be purchased from Oracle.