More than 200 people packed into the basement conference center at St. Raymond of Peñafort Church in Springfield to learn more about artificial intelligence, as part of the parish’s annual conference on ethics.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, presented the talk, “New Technologies of AI: Should We Be Concerned About the Ethics,” to an overflowing crowd Sept. 19.
“This is a huge crowd, that is great,” said Father John De Celles, pastor, as he introduced Father Tad, as he’s known. “It’s an intimidating topic but I am glad you all came.”
“This is a topic that is on everyone’s mind,” Father Tad said as he began the 90-minute presentation.
Is AI actually intelligent?
Father Tad presented his comments as part slideshow and part question-and-answer. His presentation began with a technical breakdown of how AI gets the information it needs to develop answers.
“AI is darn good at recognizing patterns and hard-to identify signals as long as it is provided with enough accurate starting data.” he said.
He went on to discuss the various ways in which AI is used in everyday life, including reading medical scans and x-rays, tracking shopping preferences or favorite videos online and assisting with written reports and essays for education, among many others.
“AI does not have real intelligence, but it’s a good emulator of intelligence” Father Tad said.
Some in the room said they have seen it in action when they go to the doctor, and the transcription of their conversation, done by AI, becomes immediately available. This was viewed as a positive. Another woman mentioned how the algorithm on her phone has changed so she is now prompted to read stories of interest that she otherwise said she never would have found.
But the consensus of whether AI was overall a good thing or a bad thing was mixed in the audience.
Father Tad stressed that AI will have positive and negative uses, and much will depend on the world view that programmers of AI write into it. He warned that it may cause us lose basic skills if we come to rely on it too much. It could actually “make us dumber” in some aspects of daily life: “over-reliance on AI can cause critical thinking to atrophy, just as reliance on GPS weakens spatial memory” he said.
Father Tad went on to explain there are two types of AI – a narrow AI and a more powerful Artificial General Intelligence. The narrow AI, when it draws conclusions from curated databases and has been designed with guardrails, can be useful, though it can also be programmed with built-in biases, and can hallucinate and provide false answers.
The AGI also can raise significant ethical concerns, he said, depending on how it is deployed. If it is used to guide weapon systems built to autonomously kill humans, or to make medical decisions for patients, entirely independently of any human guidance, for example, this raises serious issues and moral concerns.
There are four recommendations he offered when using AI.
— Make sure it is carefully designed to protect human interests from the beginning
— We must seek to develop “Benevolent AI,” not “Despotic AI”
— We need for AI to be our Servant, and not a Master, whenever we use it
— AI should not take away human intelligence but should strengthen it
Given that AI is in the news each day, more and more people are becoming aware of its potential pitfalls, he said. Father Tad noted there have been cases where family members have sued technology companies because AI directed loved ones to commit suicide when they were seeking advice.
Preparing for the future
Mary Rephlo, a St. Raymond parishioner, attended the session because she is concerned with the direction of AI.
“Things are moving so rapidly,” she said. “It is changing constantly, and I worried (about) how we can go about regulating it to protect ourselves.”
Christine Birden, a parishioner of Nativity Catholic Church in Burke, said she came to learn more about what can be done.
“The lions have already been let out of the cage,” she said. “We, and I mean that as a collective we, have to tame it. There are always evil players. The concern right now is we just don’t know, and as Father Tad pointed out, AI is not actually intelligent. So where is the stopgap?”
That is what Andrew Kubick, a bioethics teacher at Saint John Paul the Great Catholic High School in Potomac Shores was hoping to learn more about. Kubrick has brought his students to the seminar for several years and offers extra credit for those who attend. Usually, he has fewer than 10 students; this year, he said he had twice that.
“I thought this was a wonderful presentation,” he said. “It was very biologically and scientifically focused. This topic is so important and timely, I was grateful so many students were able to hear his message.”
Shaffrey is diocesan director of media relations.
