God Human Animal Machine

A review of Meghan O'Gieblyn's book, from Bonnie Lea Book Club

God Human Animal Machine was the book selection for our October book club meeting, recommended and led by Bill M. We all enjoyed the topics covered in this book; the themes prompted great discussions about consciousness, AI, spirituality, and diverse philosophical threads.

We began our discussion on author Megan O’Gieblyn who is clearly a incisive and clever author. Having attended Moody Bible college, she subsequently renounced her Christian faith and stumbled along for a few years as a waitress while battling alcohol and substance abuse. Ms. O’Gieblyn graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA), hardly a prerequisite to discuss philosophy, artificial intelligence, religion, and other highly intellectual topics. And yet she did so well in this book. She self describes as a writer, a narrator.

One of the first topics we discussed was that what had been the foundation for religion for millennia, that is, answers to the many mysteries of the world, are now attributable to science. As science advances, the mysteries formally attributed to gods become fewer and fewer with every advancement in science. It is a shrinking palette in this sense.

On the topic of the authors rejection of Christianity, Geoff objected to what he felt were strawman arguments, including citations of the book of Job, Saint Augustine, Dante, and other thinkers from centuries ago: Faith is not based in reason, but resides mostly within the minds of humans. And yet, she admitted hope in the idea of trans-humanism, the next extension of human–machine interaction beyond where we are today, cyborgs walking around with supercomputers at our fingertips.

This brought us to the topic of consciousness, another topic we delved into and handled extensively throughout the book. For a long time, consciousness was simply described as a person’s soul; today it is still difficult to define, especially where “soul” has been attributed as broadly as to a group of plants, or groups as diverse as the Internet. If a form of consciousness emerges from collections of experiences, souls exist in many forms not recognized in traditional western thought.

The concern and message that we discussed about emergent or sentient AI is that we know that deep learning often starts with a human or machine developed algorithm, but continues to develop its own solutions, many entirely unexpected or unforeseeable to the human mind. It seems clear that if machines develop consciousness, it will be its own consciousness, and entirely different from what we as humans perceive as consciousness. We cannot understand the nature or direction of AI consciousness or self-awareness now, and possibly ever.

Thus, it is difficult to understand where all this is headed. Today’s entertainment and social media companies’ users are simply receptacles for data collection. And big data is indeed bigger than most humans can conceive. Consider the number of sentences that a child will hear before becoming intellectually mature and functional, compared to deep learning machines that are fed trillions of sentences from myriad languages and cultures from all history, from all over the planet. It’s not even close.

One interesting casualty of the development of big data is the that ‘the scientific method’ has nearly become an anachronism. The scientific method used to say, ‘get a theory, go out and test it. If it tests in a way that confirms the theory, the theory has standing.’ Today put an algorithm to work on big data, and a machine will discover patterns that humans simply cannot conceive. When deep learning machines reach singularity, will the loss of humanism be complete?

Back on the topic of social stratification from today’s technological social platforms, because confirmation bias is a more comfortable approach, people self select confirming information portals. The deeper one drops into these echo chambers, the more people who will truly believe really weird stuff. Thus, while data analysis has brough us great insight and material advancement in biotech, space, crime, construction, health at the highly functional end, it has also brought deep division, depression, intolerance and social strife at the bottom end.

Discussions continued on to the multiverse topic, that is was Descartes correct when he declared ‘I think therefore I am’ (Cognito, ergo Sum)? Or are we simply simulations within a multi-verse? As with the south Asian concept of reincarnation, an episode on Star Trek’s holodeck, and the Matrix series, will we get to be used again and again?

One of the effects of the ubiquity of social platforms is that parental influence has been overwhelmed by other inputs for young people. Somewhere, such as the loss of enchantment and the use of science as our new enchantment, something within humanity seems to have evaporated.

While the progression of ideas within the book did not follow what some of us would have expected to be a rational order, the chapters themselves were thorough and clear. But there was a lot here. Consider a few of the chapter headings: Pattern, Paradox, Metonymy, Algorithm, Virality, and realize that this book is worth reviewing again for deeper insight into who we are, and where we are going as a species.

Next book, The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky: One of the great classics that examines love, teachery, faith, all within a murder mystery.

The goal of the Bonnie Lea Book Club is to read books that we would never ordinarily go out and read. By reading these together, we discover new ideas about ourselves and the world around us.