Artificial Intelligence and the Existence of God: A New Dimension of the Problem of Evil
The emergence of artificial intelligence offers a fresh perspective on the ancient theological problem of evil within the context of divine creation, human free will, and the risks posed by technology.
While the problem of evil remains one of the oldest and most formidable objections to belief in God, the development of artificial intelligence brings an extraordinary and novel dimension to this ancient debate.
The Problem of Evil and Artificial Intelligence
The problem of evil ranks among the oldest and most difficult objections to belief in God. If God is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, evil should not exist.
Potential Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence can translate between languages, diagnose diseases, and assist people with disabilities; yet it also harbors features that enable forms of evil on an extraordinary scale. It can industrialize deception, eliminate privacy, and monopolize political power.
It can facilitate autonomous warfare, impersonate humans, manipulate populations, and bypass human judgment.
Divine Creation and Second-Order Consequences
The question of whether a perfectly divine and good God could have consciously created a universe in which artificial intelligence and the evils arising from it would emerge gives rise to theological debate.
Although the argument is put forward that humans created artificial intelligence themselves, given that God created humans with full omniscience and laid the foundations of computers, artificial intelligence is a second-order consequence of divine creation.
Augustine and the Perception of Freedom
Christian theology has developed various responses to the classical problem of evil. Augustine argued that evil was not created by God, but rather represents a corruption arising from the misuse of freedom by rational creatures.
Since the computational capacities of computer systems are neither virtuous nor immoral, artificial intelligence initially fits this approach; the evil lies in the purpose toward which the intelligence is directed.
The Free Will Defense and Its Limits
The strongest traditional response is the free will defense. God might permit evil because agency itself is a good thing, and a universe consisting of creatures lacking the capacity to do wrong would be morally vacuous.
However, artificial intelligence exposes an unsettling weakness in this defense: while it may explain why humans are permitted to choose evil, it is more difficult to explain why they are permitted to create systems that exponentially multiply the consequences of those choices.
Artificial Superintelligence and Doomsday Scenarios
The prospect of artificial intelligence surpassing human mental capacity in almost every domain presents the most dramatic version of the problem. This situation could lead to a recursive cycle of creation in which humans create AI, and AI may in turn produce its own successors.
The possibility of artificial superintelligence raises the question of a malice-free catastrophe, where a machine might cause immense suffering by optimizing a flawed goal with extraordinary efficiency.