Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #383: Human Brain vs. AI: Why We're Not Obsolete

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Being Catholic #383: Human Brain vs. AI: Why We're Not Obsolete · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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We're going to have a great show for you today.
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It's going to be a hot one this weekend, I guess.
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The hot weather certainly isn't leaving us, but we're getting closer and closer to fall.
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And pretty soon we'll probably have some nice fall weather coming in here in
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Illinois. I hope we have as nice of a fall as we had spring.
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We did have a very nice spring, even if we're having a hot summer.
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And maybe we'll have a very nice fall also. So we'll see what happens.
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As I said, I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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We're going to talk a little bit today about AI again from a different point
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of view. I thought it would be interesting.
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An article in the Epoch Times that I would like to read. and some things that
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are pertinent, I think, to Catholicism and the Catholic Church,
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to Christianity and to religion in general. So we'll talk about that in a little bit.
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In the meantime, I'll turn this over to my wife, Lynn, and see what she has to say.
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Well, I'm here. I'm upright in this heat. That's a miracle.
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You know, it isn't just the heat, it's the humidity.
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There's no place to go to fix it. But, you know, Texas is too darn hot, and Arizona's too hot.
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I don't know. We lived in Idaho. That was nice when we were there. Who knows? Yeah.
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We're going to talk about AI, huh? Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about it.
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And it's an interesting article, I think, and something from a little bit different
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point of view. Oh, that'll be good.
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You know, I don't know what to think about it.
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But, you know, you have to keep in mind that things that were invented by man are manipulated by man.
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And therefore, it's who's doing the manipulation as to whether it's good or bad.
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That's what you got to keep an eye out for, I guess.
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Don't you think? That's true. And, you know, so everything has an upside and a downside.
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That's certain. And we've talked about AI before and talked about some of the
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fears that are overblown and so forth.
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Well, some people think it's an invention of Satan or something.
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Well, what? I was going to say we're going to compare AI to ourselves and have
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a little bit, look at it from a little bit of a different perspective and just
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see exactly how it measures up.
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Yeah, okay. So we'll do that. All right.
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On with it. Okay. If you've got anything else to say, say it. No.
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All right. This is an article, as I said, from the newspaper, the Epoch Times.
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I don't know if people are familiar with it, but it's an interesting newspaper.
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And it's from the August 13th to 19th edition.
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And the article is on the opinion page.
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And it's entitled, Billions of Dollars for AI, But No Clue About Ourselves.
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And it's written by a lady, Kay Rubichek, and she's an award-winning filmmaker,
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an author, and a speaker, and former host of NTD's, I'm not sure what that is, Life and Times.
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After being detained in a Chinese prison for advocating for human rights,
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she has dedicated her work to facing communists and socialist regimes in their modern global forms.
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And I'm sure she probably has something to say also about someone like Mamdani
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running in New York, basically calling himself a socialist, but leaning far
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more over to the communist side.
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I'm sure that she has something to say about that as well in some of her writings.
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I haven't seen them, but I'm sure that would be the case if she opposes communism.
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And so we won't get into that right now, but it would be interesting to read
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some of the things that she has written besides this.
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And so we'll get into this article, and she's talking about comparing AI to
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our own brains and seeing how AI compares.
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It says, we're in the middle of a new kind of arms race, not for weapons,
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but for thinking machines.
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Tech giants are pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence,
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infrastructure, turning open land into power-hungry fortresses of computation.
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Microsoft just opened its first AI lab in Wisconsin, part of a larger $3.3 billion
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investment in the state.
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Google is investing $25 billion in AI data centers across the nation's largest
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electric grid, the PJM Interconnection.
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Amazon is turning 1,200 acres of Indiana cornfields into 30 stadium-sized AI data centers.
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Meta is rolling out new data centers. Prometheus in Ohio and Hyperion,
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a $10 billion data center the size of Manhattan in Louisiana.
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Meanwhile, Oracle and OpenAI have pledged $500 billion for AI infrastructure
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in the United States over the next four years.
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So that's pretty impressive and a lot of money being poured into AI projects.
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And we're in competition with China and probably in competition with some other
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countries as well to see who can win the AI race.
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And it's sort of a technology race and there's a lot of hype and a lot of emphasis
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on AI and there's this emphasis that somehow AI is the new super intelligent
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thing in the universe and the article here is asking, is that really true?
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Well, to me, maybe it's because of the age I'm at, I look at it and think,
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Boy, all that farmland's gone. Man, that's, you know, how many football stadiums?
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They're pretty big, pretty big areas. And then we're talking about,
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as we get in here, it'll talk also about how much more electricity we're going to have to have.
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And, of course, windmills and solar panels certainly aren't going to do it, that's for sure.
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So we're going to need sources of electricity that are a lot more productive
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and powerful than those.
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Than the so-called green energy. It goes on here, it says, it's no longer a tech race.
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It's a global escalation, a sprint to create machines that can outthink,
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outlearn, and outlast us.
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I'm not downplaying the benefits of AI technologies or saying AI is inherently bad.
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But the scale of this investment isn't just seeking benevolent progress.
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A greater goal of intellectual dominance is at play.
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And to maintain it, these companies are quietly laying claim to future power literally.
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And that's exactly what I was mentioning.
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They're going to need tremendous amounts of electricity because it uses an awful lot.
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Federal energy officials have warned that U.S.
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Data centers could soon account for up to 20% of national electricity consumption by 2030.
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That's not long from now. That's only less than five years.
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That's up from just 2.5% today. Just imagine that, 2.5% today up to 20%.
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That's one-fifth of all the electricity produced in the United States.
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That's an awful lot of electricity.
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And who's paying for it? Well, we will, of course, and hopefully AI will pay
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for itself in this, and we'll see.
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But because of the enormous power demands of the machines, we're building to stimulate ourselves.
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Yet amid this frenzy to build smarter machines, we're overlooking a staggering fact.
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The machines we're building still can't perform the everyday feats our ordinary
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brains carry out automatically every second,
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such as forming original thoughts, adapting to new situations,
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regulating emotion, or creating meaning.
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And no one seems to even consider the fact that a human brain does all that
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using less power than that of a dim light bulb.
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So imagine that. I mean, AI takes all this power, and it can't do any of those things.
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And we ought to stop and think about something. Who's building AI?
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Is AI building AI? No. Human beings are building AI and designing AI,
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working on AI, and supposedly making AI smarter. But smarter than what?
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Smarter than our own brains? The brain that's actually building them?
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And how does our own brain work?
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Well, this is what this article is talking about. We don't really know.
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Inside your skull is a living supercomputer with a staggering 86 billion neurons
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forming more than 100 trillion synaptic connections.
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Let's put that in perspective. To put that in perspective, one human brain contains
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more circuits than all the technology on the planet combined,
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yet it runs on about 20 watts of energy. Now imagine that.
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Your brain, one human brain, not bunches of them, but just one,
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contains more circuitry than all the technology.
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Just imagine all the automobiles, all the computers.
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All the everything that we have working for us, all the radios,
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all the television sets, all the furnaces, all the machines,
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all the factories, all the things that are on this planet.
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Put yourself up in a high, high satellite and look down and see all the lights
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on all over the world and all of the things that run all of those lights and
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all of the machines and the power and everything that is going on on the face of the earth.
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One brain has more connections, more circuits than all of those combined. Just imagine that.
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One human brain. And just imagine the power it takes to run all of those things.
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And that one brain runs on less than the power of a dim light bulb. Imagine that.
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On a bowl of cereal that you eat in the morning for breakfast or at a couple
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of days you eat in the morning for breakfast, your brain runs,
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operates all those circuits, and does all those things.
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And it has not only intelligibility, but it has intentionality.
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It has a will. It can decide to do or not do things. It can decide to design or not design things.
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It can decide to program an AI computer or not program it.
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It can decide to go to work or not go to work. It can decide to do something
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else or not do something else.
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It makes all those decisions. It raises children.
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It understands language. It not only translates symbols into things that it
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can understand in pictures, it translates them into pictures.
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It translates them into smells inside your head. It translates them into tastes.
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It translates them into feelings. It can not only imagine doing something,
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and can imagine the feeling of doing something.
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AI can't do any of those things.
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So it goes on here. It says, it doesn't just compute.
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In other words, it goes on here. It says, the human brain simultaneously regulates
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emotion, memory, movement, morality, language, and attention.
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It dreams. It improvises. It adapts, even when damaged.
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It doesn't just compute. It creates. There has certainly been and continues
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to be incredible progress within the scientific community.
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Yet the truth remains that the human brain is still, in the words of neuroscientist
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David Engelman, the most complex device we've found in the entire universe.
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So imagine that, that three-pound piece of protoplasm in your head is more complex
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than anything else we've found in the entire universe.
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And it does all of those things, and not only does all of those things,
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it makes AI, builds AI, creates AI, and programs AI.
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It does all those things, and it does it all on a very tiny amount of energies.
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So, and the fact is that the question becomes then, if the smartest engineers
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on the planet still don't understand the device inside their own heads,
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what exactly are we trying to duplicate, Lynn?
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I mean, what is it that we are trying, you know, we're trying to make an AI,
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we call it artificial intelligence, we're trying to make intelligence.
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But if we don't know what our own intelligence is, and we certainly can't see
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thoughts or any of those things, we certainly don't know what intelligence is.
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We certainly do know this, the mind is not material.
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No, that's true. And so what are we trying to...
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You're making a non-material, you're trying to make a material thing do what
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the non-material thing is capable.
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It is doing, and there's no way that you can describe the brain in any kind
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of material terms. I mean the mind.
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The brain is one thing, the mind is another, and I guarantee you,
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if you read up on it, There is no way that you can translate the thoughts and
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so forth and everything into material things.
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People try and have tried and so forth and reduce everything to material,
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and it's a hopeless task.
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You know, it's simply trying to draw a square circle. You're not going to succeed in doing it, period.
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So at any rate, we're going to have to stop here and take a break.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're back from our break, and we're talking about AI as compared to the human brain.
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And so far, we're showing that AI really doesn't come up at all to the human
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brain, this idea that AI is going to be smarter than we are,
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whatever that means. What does smarter, you know, mean?
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Does it mean that it can compute faster or play a game of chess or something,
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you know, purely mathematical in a super fast way? Of course it can.
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But, I mean, of course, cars can go a lot faster than human beings can run.
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Does that make cars superior to human beings? I mean, we have machines that
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can sew and weave and manipulate textiles and everything at speeds that are just incredibly fast,
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much faster than human beings can do.
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But we've made all those machines. We made the cars.
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We made the machines that manipulate the textiles.
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We have bulldozers and so forth and earth-moving machines that move thousands
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of tons of rock and earth and so forth at the pull of a lever with just a finger.
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And they can certainly lift and do more work than any human being can do in that sense of the word.
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But are those machines somehow better than we are when it's the human beings
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that actually built those machines and set on top those machines and operate those machines?
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I mean, look at all the things that human beings do. Are the machines that we
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built actually better than us? Of course not.
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And I don't think AI is going to be any better than us either in that sense.
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It's not going to have a brain. that's better than our brain.
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You have to remember, and we've gone into this before.
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Is that AI doesn't even know what it's doing. You know, it's a misnomer, really.
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Artificial intelligence is not intelligent in the sense that human beings are intelligent.
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When you think, you know what you're doing. When you decide to study something,
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you know what you're doing and you know why you're doing it.
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Anything that you do, you know why you're doing it and you continue to do it
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because you want to or you quit doing it.
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Even if you go to a job and say, oh, I don't want to have to do what I'm doing
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today, At some point in your life, you took that job because you prefer to have
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the payment of the job, the money and so forth, more than you did not working.
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Or else you like the job itself and you enjoy doing it or a combination of both and so on.
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And there's a choice involved in there always. And you are the one that made
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the choice. You know who you are.
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You have an I and you know who that I is.
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And you translate your thoughts into feelings. and, you know,
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if you like something, you can say good or bad or hot and so forth.
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Hey, I can't do any of those things.
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And it's likely never will be able to do any of those things.
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It says, neuroscience has mapped broad functions and observed firing patterns in the brain.
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Yet we still don't know how thoughts form.
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We still can't see them. You can't see a thought.
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We don't know how consciousness arises. How does consciousness,
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you know, how does a baby that is born or even is conceived from the very beginning
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when the cells first are fertilized and comes together,
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at what point does consciousness start to arise and how does it arise? Where does it come from?
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Is it passed on? And if it's passed on, how did it get there in the first place?
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These are religious questions eventually, and they come down to religious pursuits and so forth.
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And they're questions that man has been asking for centuries and so forth.
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And yet we can do all of these things, and we don't know for sure how we even do all of these things.
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And yet we have all of these abilities. And it seems as if, on the other hand, we worship AI.
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And the question is, is that what are we worshiping?
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What we warned is in Scripture and warned constantly, don't worship idols.
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Don't make idols for ourselves, mouths that don't really speak,
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ears that don't really hear, eyes that don't really see.
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And, you know, AI is along these lines. We can create robots with mouths and
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so forth and knives, but they're all mimics.
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They don't really speak. They don't know what they're doing or what they're
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saying or why they're doing it or making choices or anything.
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They don't have intentionality.
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And we can't seem to implant it. We don't know where life came from.
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We don't know where the soul comes from. And the soul, as I have taught before
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or said before under Catholicism, is that which causes things to have life as
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opposed to things that don't have life.
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And we, the human soul, of course, have a consciousness that other souls don't.
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And we assume it was implanted by God or we're in touch with God.
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But the fact is that the mind is certainly not material. And all of those things
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that we do are certainly not material.
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So, they are powered somehow by something else and from somewhere else.
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And we don't know exactly how all of that works. It says here, Here.
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Neuroscience has mapped Brock functions and observed firing patterns in the
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brain, but we still don't know how thoughts form.
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We still can't see them. We don't know how consciousness arises.
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We don't know why trauma rewires some brains and not others.
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Some people go through trauma and come through okay, and other people are seriously
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affected by it more seriously so that their whole personality and the brain
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itself is affected and others are not.
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We don't know an answer to any of these questions.
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We don't know how genius works. We don't know how compassion comes into existence or works.
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We don't know how insight emerges in a physical sense.
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So if the smartest engineers on the planet still don't understand the device
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inside their own heads, what exactly, again, the question is,
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are we trying to replicate what we're making AI?
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We keep on saying, you know, we're trying to make a smart machine or trying
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to create intelligence.
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How are we going to create something that we don't even understand ourselves?
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And why do we assume that simply super fast computing is somehow or another
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the same thing as being able to think, understand, feel, and be intentional?
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It says AI doesn't feel wonder.
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Just imagine, you know, our own brain, we feel wonder.
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It isn't only that we can translate thoughts into pictures and ideas and future
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desires, we can understand past,
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present, and future, we can also, by doing these things,
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create a sense of wonder inside ourselves before our actual real exploration
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and so forth ever even takes place,
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or before our real understanding or our real journey on anything or our real
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knowledge into anything actually takes place, we can understand,
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understand what it is going to be like to feel when it actually does happen.
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AI can't do any of those things.
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It would go to the stars and so forth and map the stars in the same pattern
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that it would map a desk or something in front of it on Earth.
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And one thing is as good as another as far as AI is concerned.
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It does whatever it's programmed to do.
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It says it doesn't feel wonder.
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It doesn't experience joy. In other words, what is joy? Just imagine human beings,
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what the experience of joy.
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AI can't do that. We translate thoughts, pictures, words, and so forth into
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feelings, into actually the sensations of doing things that AI can't possibly do.
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It doesn't understand the meaning of the words it generates, AI.
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No, it can talk to us and it sounds as if it's intelligent, but it simply finds
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the next most likely sequence and mimics the patterns of human intelligence
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without possessing it. And why does it do that?
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It does it because we put it into, we programmed it to do those things.
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We program those sequences into the AI machine itself.
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It doesn't understand that it's been programmed. It doesn't understand what it's doing.
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It just follows the instruction it's been given, and it doesn't even know that
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it's following instructions. It doesn't even know itself. It doesn't even know,
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you know, the process by which it is doing anything.
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And yet, increasingly, we teach children and adults that computers are smarter
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than they are. Isn't that a little bit stupid?
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Yes, it is. It's kind of a slap in the face for a creator, isn't it? Yes, it is.
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I mean, during creation, God said, let's make man...
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In our image. Well, is the body the image of God?
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I don't think so. I think it's in the mind.
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It's in the intellect that God gave us.
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So, you know, we're going to try to develop a machine that does this.
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And is it something, you know, when you think about it, that we're going to spend all this money?
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And I'm not saying we shouldn't. I mean, we spend a tremendous amount of money
29:14
on machines because machines are helpful and boost what we can do,
29:19
and they can cause disruptions.
29:21
No doubt AI can cause disruptions. It can cause a different kind of work to
29:26
go out of existence and a new kind of work to come into existence.
29:29
It's not going to replace people.
29:32
It's not going to replace thought. There are downsides to AI too.
29:36
There are downsides in relying on it for a lot of answers and so forth that
29:41
don't really give us a complete understanding of the subjects and so forth that
29:45
we're getting answers to, and it can make us lazy and so forth,
29:49
and we'll talk about that in a little bit.
29:51
But the fact is, is that should we be placing this kind of wonder and emphasis
29:59
on AI as compared to the human brain, when the human brain, as we've just been talking here,
30:06
is so much more wondrous than it is, and yet we abort thousands,
30:13
millions and millions of babies containing far more potential than any AI machine
30:19
could ever do. Would we do this to an AI machine?
30:23
I mean, we're building AI data centers and making them, you know,
30:28
thousands of acres big, big as Manhattan in cases.
30:32
We're going to divert 20% of our energy,
30:36
our electrical energy to these places and spend billions and billions of dollars
30:40
on them, and we treat them as being very, you know, important and tremendous
30:46
potential and so forth, and yet we abort babies at the drop of a hat.
30:51
Yeah. Does that make any sense?
30:54
No. No, when you think about it, I've never thought about it in those terms before. Right.
31:00
It just, it doesn't make any sense. And the brain of a baby is going to, you know.
31:06
Be so much greater. So much greater than all the AI put together.
31:10
When the lights go out, is it work?
31:13
Exactly. I mean, really, where's it going?
31:19
Right. There you have it. And I bet your brain will work.
31:23
And if it does work when the lights go out, that is, if it can produce the electricity
31:27
and so forth to sustain itself and so forth, it will only because we teach it
31:33
to do that and we program those things into it.
31:36
And it will do it automatically without even understanding why it's doing it
31:41
and for what purpose and so forth.
31:43
It won't know that the lights went up. So, yeah.
31:48
Really? Not really. All it will know is that when certain things happen,
31:52
it just automatically responds.
31:54
It won't even. It doesn't know.
31:56
When we talk about AI knows, no, it doesn't know.
31:59
When we talk about knowing and a machine knowing, the knowing is two different things.
32:05
The knowing in a machine is simply the ability to mimic, you know,
32:09
in a certain way, at a certain time, under certain conditions that are pre-programmed
32:16
into it, and they're pre-programmed into it by human beings that decide to do it.
32:20
The AI doesn't make any decision unless the decision is programmed into it,
32:26
which, of course, negates the whole idea that it's a decision in the first place.
32:30
You can get into some philosophy here, can't you? Yeah, right.
32:34
Is the decision a decision if it's pre-programmed. No.
32:39
It goes on here. It says, despite the overwhelming evidence from scientific
32:44
discovery across all fields over recent decades, the full power and adaptability
32:49
of the human mind are still not widely taught.
32:53
So few people know that the body replaces 330 billion cells per day. Can you imagine that?
33:00
Can AI do that? Can it replace 330 billion cell circuits and so forth today
33:06
without human beings doing it for them, or at least programming all of that into it.
33:12
That emotional states change gene expression, and that belief alone can ship biology.
33:19
In other words, all of these things can affect our actual physical beings.
33:23
You know, we're learning those things. How does this work? We really don't know.
33:28
There's so much to learn, and yet we are making sort of a god or goddess out of AI. Well.
33:37
They're even having, you know, the AI companions now you can supposedly be able to buy.
33:44
If this isn't, you know, worshiping idols, I don't know what it would be.
33:49
And we've been warned about that thousands of years ago.
33:53
About Moloch. Yeah, yeah. That Moloch would kill babies and so forth,
33:58
the god Moloch, and yet we seem to be worshiping the god Moloch.
34:02
And the god Moloch is a dead god. He has eyes that don't see,
34:06
ears that don't hear, mouths that don't really talk.
34:09
All of that can fit AI. And I'm not trying here to make AI as bad if it's used as a machine.
34:16
Obviously, our machines aren't bad. They're not good or bad at all.
34:20
It just depends on how we use them.
34:22
If you make idols out of them, they're bad.
34:26
It's a lot to think about, isn't it? A lot. Gee.
34:31
Schools, it says here, don't hesitate to emphasize the limits of human attention.
34:36
If they really know those limits, sometimes we may be thinking that we're talking
34:42
about the limits of human attention, And it may be that it's a different kind
34:46
of attention that we don't even understand among children and so forth.
34:49
There's lots of things that we don't understand.
34:51
But it says, yet they don't teach the unlimited capacity for focus,
34:56
the mental flow that we have.
34:58
And in the media, headlines promote fear of AI surpassing us,
35:04
yet rarely celebrate the phenomenal thing that is creating it.
35:07
In other words, they're constantly raising these questions that AI may be smarter
35:12
than us, and AI will do this, and AI will take over, and so forth.
35:16
And it's as if we're a bunch of nobodies, you know, the people that are making
35:20
this thing, and they don't put any emphasis on the very brain that is making
35:26
all of this stuff possible. Right.
35:28
So, in other words, are we going to put.
35:32
Like decommission the human brain? Yeah.
35:36
And we'll get into that just a little bit in the next segment here that too
35:41
much reliance on AI for certain things can actually cause our human brain to become lazy and weak.
35:48
And we'll talk about that a little bit before the program is over.
35:52
So we're going to have to stop here and take a break. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
35:56
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A big deal about AI and how smart it is and that it will pass us in intelligence
39:20
and that it's better than we are.
39:23
And there's a lot of fears about this and so forth that we don't have to have.
39:27
But the article here that we're reading from and talking about is emphasizing
39:33
the fact that we are not putting enough emphasis on how wonderful our own brain
39:38
is and all of the things that it does.
39:42
And in comparison to, or rather an AI in comparison to our own brain is far,
39:49
far weaker and doesn't come up to the abilities and powers of the human brain in any way at all.
39:58
And it goes on here. It says in the article, some powerful players benefit from
40:03
us believing that we are second to our machines.
40:07
And I'm sure people are making money from that.
40:10
Again, I'm not knocking AI in the sense that it's another tool that human beings
40:17
will develop and human beings will have, and we have developed tools along the
40:21
way all through our history,
40:24
and those tools can often be disrupted.
40:27
And we go along for a long time, living a certain way, depending on certain
40:32
types of jobs and things and so forth.
40:34
And then certain inventions come along and upset the apple cart in that respect
40:39
and they cause disruptions.
40:41
And AI could be one of those things and probably will be.
40:44
But that's no sign that it's any different from other machines in the sense
40:48
that it's going to take over human beings. It won't.
40:51
It can't do the things that the human brain can do.
40:54
It goes on here. it says, for now, let's pause and remember,
40:59
you and your brain are not obsolete.
41:03
You are yet to be discovered. In other words, we know very little actually about
41:08
our brains and how wondrous they are and all the things they do.
41:12
And despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in funding being thrown into silicon,
41:18
quantum chips, and neural nets, the greatest frontier in intelligence is still
41:25
the three-pound mystery sitting inside your skull.
41:28
The same mystery that built every machine that we've ever made,
41:32
including AI, the same one that doesn't know its limits.
41:38
And that's the human brain in our head.
41:41
And so it's an interesting article. And I do want to read also from another
41:46
article here that gives some of the downsides of depending too much on AI, you know,
41:54
and our smartphones and so forth to give us answers to things that are superficial
42:00
in superficial learning.
42:02
Is there anything further that you want to add, Lynn, before we?
42:05
No, no, I don't think so. It's giving me a lot to think about. Yeah, it does.
42:12
It really does. I just was going to mention one thing.
42:16
The lady that wrote that is anti-communist, and here we have this,
42:20
you know, Mondami in New York spouting communism, and we have lots of young Gen Z kids all...
42:28
Going along with this idea, you know, that communism somehow is going to make
42:33
it more affordable to live in New York and it's going to give them a better
42:37
life. And they're all excited to vote for it.
42:41
This goes to show you the superficiality of our educational system along these
42:47
lines, because as this woman,
42:49
I'm sure is probably shocked that this going on after she has experienced the ravages of communism.
42:57
And as anyone who has studied it or lived through it understands,
43:00
it never delivers all of those supposedly pie in the sky and utopian things
43:05
it's supposed to deliver.
43:06
And it won't deliver those things in New York. It will make the city worse and poorer.
43:11
But it's hard to tell people that who have been superficially educated.
43:16
And that might be a perfect example of some of the superficiality of learning
43:23
things simply as simple facts and learning them superficially from an answering
43:30
in a smartphone rather than by digging and studying on our own.
43:36
And that's what this article here goes into.
43:38
It says... That's a really important point.
43:41
It says, is AI a tool or a Trojan horse?
43:45
And it goes on, concern for the minds of our children.
43:50
And we're talking about how, you know, telling these kids how smart AI is,
43:54
and more and more kids in school and so forth are depending on AI for answers.
43:59
In effect, the attitude sort of is becoming among a lot of people.
44:03
Educators themselves, is why should I learn anything permanently when I've got
44:09
my smartphone here and AI, and anytime I need to know something,
44:16
I can just click on AI and it'll give me the answer, and I can click it back
44:19
off again and go about my business.
44:22
But the answer to that question is because when you do that,
44:26
you don't really learn anything.
44:28
All you do is give an answer that disappears from your mind probably five minutes
44:34
after you look it up and give it, and you don't really learn anything in depth.
44:38
And that's probably the reason that a lot of our kids are taken in by a lot
44:43
of scams and a lot of false information is because they don't know our history,
44:49
and they don't know philosophy, and they don't know a lot of religion,
44:55
and they don't know a lot of important thinking in depth.
44:59
And that's what an education is for. What do you think, Lynn? Oh, I think so.
45:05
I'm almost overwhelmed with all the things I got to think about when it comes to this AI.
45:09
Yeah. It says, is this a gift that is AI or a Trojan horse packed with danger?
45:16
We've seen this before, with video games, with smartphones, with social media,
45:23
with benzos, alcohol, marijuana, opioids.
45:28
And even artificial sweeteners. We embrace convenience before understanding consequence.
45:35
Now we're doing it again with a tool that doesn't just entertain or numb,
45:40
but replaces the very act of thinking.
45:43
That is, you know, you get a quick answer like that. You don't have to think.
45:46
You just get the answer, and then the answer disappears right after you use
45:50
it, and you really haven't learned anything.
45:52
And the cost may be nothing short of a crisis in brain development.
45:57
And it goes on here, it says, could this lead to dementia?
46:00
It sounds dramatic, but based on everything we know about brain reserve, it's not far-fetched.
46:07
When chat GPT becomes your first brain, your own brain becomes second tier.
46:13
Another, your brain gets lazy, just like if you don't exercise your muscles, your muscles get lazy.
46:19
And if you don't exercise your brain, your brain gets lazy. And that's what
46:23
AI can do, can have a downside along those lines.
46:27
It says, Silicon Valley parents are already worried.
46:31
Ironically, and this is real irony here, the people building these tools are
46:37
not letting their kids near them.
46:40
Many top tech executives have strict no-tech nanny contracts,
46:45
zero screen time, no phones, tablets, or even TVs in view of the child.
46:51
Some nannies are forbidden from using their own devices at all while on duty.
46:57
Violations can mean termination. So why? Why all this strictness?
47:03
Because these technical people know the truth.
47:08
They know attention is currency. They know convenience dulls cognition.
47:14
And they don't want their kids seduced by the same tools they help unleash.
47:20
These same families also write detailed rules about other things as well in
47:25
the same along the same lines, because they know that unless people discipline
47:31
themselves along educational lines,
47:33
that their minds and their bodies become dull.
47:37
It says, what we risk losing.
47:39
Unchecked AI use could erode mental strength.
47:44
Less cognitive load equals weaker neural circuits.
47:47
I mean, in reality, we know, for example, that the mind can affect the body, don't we?
47:53
We know that, you know, a depressed person can actually become physically sick.
47:59
So we know that, you know, the mind has a big effect on the body.
48:05
And it's the other way around as well, too, that, you know, the debilitated
48:09
body can affect the mind.
48:11
So mental strength, less cognitive load, if you don't exercise your mind,
48:16
then you get weaker neural circuits.
48:18
You get weaker numerical circuits, that's part of your physical body.
48:23
Motivation and drive require challenge.
48:27
Deep learning and memory is also affected.
48:31
You get no retention if you're just using AI superficially to answer a quick
48:37
question or to write a paper in school in which AI does most of the work.
48:41
You don't get any in-depth learning.
48:43
It's not like working through something yourself and running into dead ends
48:47
and doing the hard work of getting rid of stuff that's not important and finding
48:51
things that are important and so forth and mastering it and making it yours.
48:55
It says you lose resilience.
48:58
Brains grow through struggle, not shortcuts.
49:01
And you lose curiosity.
49:05
Instant answers kill wonder. You know, you start wondering about something,
49:09
you get an instant answer and you close your mind down and go on to something else.
49:13
And there goes your curiosity over that one issue.
49:16
You're not going to follow up and try to satisfy that curiosity.
49:20
And so eventually your curiosity itself gets dulled and you lose that curiosity, especially young kids.
49:29
Young kids are curious and that curiosity often leads to all kinds of discoveries and so forth.
49:35
And when you kill it by too quick of answers and so forth, you can lose it.
49:41
And creativity, why imagine when the bot will do it?
49:46
In other words, if your smartphone or your robot or whatever it is that can
49:51
do all this for you, why go through the process of imagining things,
49:56
of pondering and looking down one line and then another and imagining what it
50:03
would be like going one way and going the other way and so forth?
50:06
Why go through all that when you can just get a quick answer?
50:09
Yeah. So. Good question.
50:12
So the question is here is what should we do? And this author here that is writing
50:18
this article, It goes on and says, I love AI.
50:22
I use it. I teach with it.
50:25
We read our brain scans and so forth, which are nuclear imagining scans with it.
50:32
I believe that it's a tool of the future, but it must serve our minds and not replace them.
50:38
And here's how. It says, use AI to amplify thinking, not avoid thinking.
50:44
In other words, use it as a means of helping you do what you need to do in the
50:52
first place, and that's work and understand.
50:55
Alternate between AI-assisted and brain-only tasks. Don't use AI all the time.
51:02
Teach kids to write with pencils first and with smartphones,
51:06
bots, and so forth later.
51:08
Track your own cognitive habits. How much are you really thinking?
51:12
Ask one daily question. Is this good for my brain or bad for it?
51:16
And this author goes on and says, I'm not against AI. I'm against passivity.
51:21
Because when you lose the struggles, you lose the growth. And when you stop
51:26
using your brain, it shrinks.
51:28
It's just like any other organ. In other words, when you stop using your muscles,
51:33
they shrink. And they become weak and flabby.
51:37
This isn't fear-mongering, not fear-mongering against AI. It can be a good tool.
51:42
It's love for children, for the future, for the minds we're still shaping.
51:47
The horse is already out of the barn. Let's not wait until it tramples what matters most.
51:53
Let's build a future where technology expands cognition, not erases it,
51:58
where AI is the second brain and never the first.
52:02
So those are some warnings about AI.
52:07
Good warnings. Boy, they sure leave you with a lot to think about, don't they? They do.
52:12
It's going to be a tool. We're going to use it in the future.
52:15
But I think we should all remember the very thing, the most important point
52:21
probably more than anything else is the technicians themselves, the technical people,
52:27
the smart people, the people that build all these things.
52:31
Don't let their kids, rather, be overtaken by them.
52:36
They make sure that those kids are not dependent on these machines.
52:39
They understand that they can be a crutch, and they understand that they can
52:44
cripple good thinking and good habits, and that they have to be controlled.
52:49
And so that's what we need to understand. They're not a replacement for your brain.
52:54
And the human brain, of course, is far superior to anything we have in AI.
52:59
And most likely it will be far superior to anything AI ever becomes.
53:06
Anything further that you want to say? No, I think that's a pretty good summation
53:10
of it. I go home and think about it a lot today.
53:13
I think so. And the second thing I think that you need to remember is that we've
53:18
been warned thousands of years ago in Scripture, don't worship idols.
53:25
Don't worship things that have eyes that don't see, ears that don't hear,
53:31
mouths that don't really speak. don't make them into idols that we chase after and worship.
53:37
We've been warned about those things, and here it comes probably bigger than
53:45
ever before in all of history.
53:47
I think not long ago, we could look back and think, how could anybody be so
53:51
silly to worship stone idols and things like that?
53:54
We, in our superior knowledge and so forth in the 20th century or the 21st century,
54:01
We don't do things like that anymore.
54:03
But the fact is, oh, yes, we do.
54:06
And AI can be one of them bigger and back more than ever before.
54:12
So it's something you need to watch.
54:15
It is, and it's from a deeper depth than I was thinking of.
54:21
You know, you get afraid of the machines you create, but it's really deep. Yeah.
54:28
And that's just a machine.
54:31
A creative machine. You can create
54:33
your own idols, and human beings have a tendency to want to do that.
54:36
And we have a tendency also to be lazy and think that we can substitute something
54:40
else for our own responsibility, and it never works.
54:44
So anyhow, we'll stop here and say our prayer.
54:50
Say, Michael, the archangel.
54:52
Defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
54:57
May God rebuke and humbly pray. and to the whole prince of the heavenly host
55:02
by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all evil spirits who wander
55:09
through the world seeking the run of soul.
55:12
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston.
55:16
On Catholic Spirit Radio, if you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:23
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