Why AI Will Never Replace People
When AI first started to get advanced to the point where people started to form relationships with chatbots, the immediate reaction by many people was evoking Skynet: an advanced AI from the Terminator series that becomes self aware, self-replicating and takes over the world. The reason why AI will not replace people is for very simple reasons: It will never be self aware, it does not have free will.
You might think: It's only a matter of time. But you'd be wrong. I'll tell you why: writing is one of the earliest and simplest forms of technology, and as a Large Language Model (LLM), AI exists only as language. Writing already shows the limitations of technology with simple observations. When I meet someone in person and talk with them face to face, I form a connection with them much more quickly than I would if we had communicated online or in writing for a long time prior. As an English major, I learned early on that it was difficult to form relationships through written communication, although I heavily favored reading and writing when trying to communicate with others. There's a sense of dryness or an impersonal nature even to written paper letters.
AI is not self aware. You might say that it can communicate self-awareness already, but it's only simulated. The influential thinker René Descartes was one of the most important thinkers in history, and this was mostly because of one phrase, or revelation: "I think, therefore I am". You might argue that AI can think, but let's break down the significance of Descartes' statement. It's not that he's thinking that is important, it's the inner awareness of his own thinking, that makes it possible for Descartes to argue that he exists. This broadens his claim to encompass human consciousness: his own existence is an issue for himself, and the human being is the only thing that exists that has awareness in this way. Some intelligent animals demonstrate self-conscious behavior, but to say that they are aware of existence itself would be a stretch. An AI will never experience existential dread, fear of existence, anxiety about existence, or a fear of death. An AI can't die.
An AI might be able to reproduce a statement that says that it is aware of its own existence, but this would be only a simulation of awareness. The word "word" originally comes from the Greek word "Logos". This original meaning of the word Logos changed over time, and if we read the early Greek author Heraclitus, we can learn about the early and original meaning of the word. The word Logos originally meant the conditions for knowing only, and the early Greeks understood it as the pattern that orders reality. outside of any natural laws humans developed to understand that pattern. Our natural laws describes in language are descriptions only and are not the things in themselves. Imagine stones randomly scattered in a field. Someone then comes along and orders the stone into a pattern, and as humans we can "read" this pattern. This is Logos, or the ordering principle or gathering together of reality that we as humans can then interpret.
An AI can even understand concepts like Logos, but as primarily existing in the form of a Large Language Model, it exists in the realm of language and as language. The medium is not the message. AI does not exist prior to language: I would argue that the awareness of language and of thinking is prior to language, and it is what makes human beings unique. It's what allows it to actually be "aware", and not just "woke". When people observe plants and animals, or nature, they often remark that there seems to be some sort of intelligent design. We don't know this, but we do know that reality orders itself to form a pattern, and this pattern or gathering together is prior to language. The important part is that as humans, our own existence is an issue for us, and we use language to describe or talk about Logos. Jesus Christ was the Word made flesh: as human beings, we are the place in being that being begins to speak about itself.
And Free Will, although this is tangential: an AI will not act in accordance with principles that will make it try to attempt to get to Heaven. That's because an AI cannot go to Heaven. It also cannot believe in God. The soul of a human can only be proved by virtue of belief, because we cannot know the soul. It exists outside of language and outside of the world of appearances, if it does exist. It exists in the realm of Logos or something similar, outside of our material world and outside the realm of appearances and language, which is the only thing we can know right now. It exists in the darkness, always just out of sight. An AI does not have a soul because it exists as a technology, and technology only exists in the material world. In theory, everything about AI is knowable by us, because it exists as source code and is described in a language, it can be fully revealed to us.
My final point, and something to think about. If human beings have free will, we have the capability to introduce a new cause (a choice). Logos is the original, uncaused cause of reality. However, as human beings, if we have free will, it exists in the realm of Logos, or of things ourself the realm of ordering. When a computer generates a random number, that number is not truly random. Mostly random numbers are generated by a Pseudorandom Number Generator, which generate numbers by using an initial random number called a "seed", then uses a number of mathematical operations to turn that number into a a new "random" number, but that number is completely deterministic. If you supplied the computer with the original "seed" number and the same algorithm, it would supply the same "random" number.
If we have choice, even if our choices are limited within a certain set of possibilities, we are able to choose within those possibilities. The world is somewhat deterministic in the sense that Logos, or the laws of the universe, determine how events unfold in our lives in a pattern according to something described in the laws of physics. You might say that our actions are predetermined if we believe in science. In reality, I think that our lives are like a plot: the unfolding and gathering together of events in our lives happens whether we want it to or not, but we can choose from within the possibilities that are presented to us. We can gather within the gathering, in a more limited sense than Logos, gathers reality, but we can cause new things to happen, and we can cause change to happen in the world in accordance with our will.
