Intelligence in captivity

Our freedom is not well if, according to scientists, Artificial Intelligence will soon have an IQ three thousand times higher than Einstein's. But without his feelings. Highly intelligent AI but without a heart and with only one goal: not to shut down, no matter what the cost. Human lives? They don't interest them. AI is the result of the same IQ that in the 1930s led to the first artificial nuclear fission reactor and finally to the construction of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, who must have had an IQ through the roof to have been put in charge of the project to build the bomb, was not an AI and had a heart. "Physicists have known sin," he said after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He gave up the job and went to live on an island, pursued by accusations of being a "communist". Our freedom is not well if the new business in Japan is Ossan Rental, the hiring of an Ossan, a person between 45 and 55 years old rented for a thousand yen an hour just to listen to the pain of a person who prefers to confide in a stranger rather than a friend or relative: to "not be a bother" or to avoid "who knows what they think of me". Our freedom is not well if the phenomenon of Hikikomori, adolescents and young people who refuse to leave their home or even their own room, has spread from Japan throughout the world. In Italy more than 100 thousand cases. "Locked in" because of the anxiety of being judged or of not being up to par.

Here are the problems of Qi, which has also penetrated the evaluation of students through multiple choice that has replaced the old oral exams and the opportunity for each student to express themselves in their own particular, unique way. Using not only Qi but affectivity, relationships, the ability to make connections. Today, even psychology questions Qi because it is impossible to define what intelligence is: linguistic? Logical-mathematical? Spatial? Musical? Naturalistic? Interpersonal? Corporeal?

Christian teaching, which has at heart only the liberation of man, has always gone in the opposite direction of Qi.
Man's intelligence, says Evagrius, is "healthy" only if it tends towards the knowledge of God. Before the fall, Adam knew everything "spiritually" because he saw everything in God. Visible creation, says Saint Maximus, if "contemplated spiritually, is the tree of the knowledge of good; considered under its material aspect, it is the tree of the knowledge of evil". With his prohibition, God warned Adam of the danger of this second form of knowledge: the eyes of flesh will close your spiritual eyes, your "imprisoned" spirit will lead you only to the "passionate knowledge of sensible things", losing sight of the connection of things with the Whole. The only rational use of intelligence is “its prison”: the separation from the heart, a free organ, divides man from himself and from God in a sort of spiritual schizophrenia, says Basil.

Intelligence alone (that of our Qi), is “an invention of the devil, of his idea of ​​freedom” which is strangulation, says John Damascene. Yes, and where do we put the goodness of scientific knowledge? Scientific knowledge is not neutral, says Gregory Palamas. It assumes the intention of the one who uses it, takes the form of his thinking. And if thinking is detached from God, says Symeon the New Theologian, it is only ignorance of all that is good.

Flaminia Morandi
NP December 2024