Man vs. Hidden Men
The competition of man and machine is only made possible once we reduce men into machines.
Machines seem to be more and more powerful each passing day. First, it was the story of John Henry against the rock drill, winning the battle but losing his own life. Then it was Kasparaov against Deep Blue. Now, it's generative AI against artists. Can there be a bastion of human skill against machine activity?
If this is the question we are asking, we won’t find the answer we seek. In this question, we’re comparing between human and machine. The comparison of two things involves some likeness between them. For example, it is nonsense to ask whether the number 3 is larger than an orange tree. Comparisons have some metric. For the original examples, the metrics might be the speed of laying for a given section of rail track, the number of chess games won, and the cost/benefit analysis of the source of images in the financial operation of some website. These comparisons, in order to be comparisons at all, must be limited to what both people and machines can do: take inputs and produce outputs.
The Turing Test is a prime example of this limitation. Turing suggested that we could consider machines "intelligent" (for whatever that may be worth, as Turing himself noted) once a person could not reliably tell in a conversation what text is generated by a human and what text is generated by a machine. According to the rules of the original Turing Test, the significance of any internal process is not allowed.
The webcomic xkcd jokes that the extension of the Turing Test is to convince the tester that he or she is a machine, and not a human. Fortunately, that convincing is still ridiculous enough to be funny. Unfortunately, that convincing is happening.
The way our original question is posed - "can there be some bastion of human skill, something machines can't do" implies that humanity is measured simply in its doings. We are human beings, not human doings, as an old pastor of mine would quote Rick Warren. Ignoring this presumes we are machines, taking the mentality of economic production— not of Christ.
The Gospels are littered with stories that fly in the face of efficiency: the widow’s mites, the full day’s wages for an hour’s work, the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin. With a faithful, generous Father, we can be faithful, peaceful, receptive children.
A clearer account of some man vs. machine comparison or conflict is one person (in relationship with God, others, and the material world) against many people (in relationship with God, others, and the material world). A rock drill needs its machinists and its maintenance men. Deep Blue needs PhDs and silicon. Creating a generative AI needs massive amounts of power as well as the human labor of making and labeling the source data. To describe the source of these actions as something other than human is silly. Deep Blue doesn't play chess like a human plays chess, but how it plays is how humans have designed it to play, and why it plays is precisely because chess is such a prominently human activity.
This reframing can help clarify why there's a steady march towards "more technology." With the dominant development of technology being for the sake of profit, a victory of man over machine in the sense we've been speaking of is an economic bet that the power of one person will be greater than the power of many people. In general, this would seem to be a foolish bet. It may be a fine bet for domains where the cost of coordination is high or domains that are less economically viable and can't support multiple people, but there is nothing fundamentally impossible about a machine surpassing a human upon any task defined by its inputs and outputs.
The steady march of technology itself is not inevitable but is itself also the product of human action. The design, development, deployment, and use of machines are all human activities. Even though their impacts may be hidden, these actions still have moral weight - and in fact, subtle impacts imply more of a need for caution, not less.Â
Catholic technologists - or rather, all people of good will - urgently need a moral framework for the design, development, deployment and use of technology. This begins with a proper ontology of what technology is - and what it's not.