Discovery Institute fellow and ENV contributor Erik Larson has a beautifully insightful essay today, “The Humanist’s Paradox,” at The Atlantic. It draws together themes that Larson has written about here, particularly the overhyping of artificial intelligence both as a boon and a threat by people smart enough by far to know better.

Our friend Dr. Larson adds a new formulation to the discussion. He calls the skeptics and critics of AI and over-computerization the “New Humanists.” How do they differ from Luddites?

Humanists have a seemingly simple point to make, but combating advances in technology with appeals to human value is an old stratagem, and history hasn’t treated it kindly. The modern counter-cultural movement seems different, somehow. For one, the artificial intelligence folks have reached a kind of narrative point-of-no-return with their ideas of a singularity: The idea that smart machines are taking over is sexy and conspiratorial, but most people understand the differences between people — our minds, or souls — and the cold logic of the machines we build.

What’s at stake? Erik concludes powerfully:

If common sense remains valid and computers ultimately must lack real intelligence, then hype about smart robots can only do harm, by self-consciously imperiling our own standards, and our own intelligence. [Technology expert Jaron] Lanier suggests that when progress in artificial intelligence becomes our benchmark, we begin acting in subtle, compensatory ways that place our tools above ourselves. It’s these subtle shifts away from our own natures, say the New Humanists, that lead us astray. It happens, perhaps, much like falling in love: first slowly, then all at once. The deafening silence of a world without human excellence at its center is a picture almost too chilling to entertain. If New Humanists are right, though, we’re already on our way. The lesson of AI is not that the light of mind and consciousness is beginning to shine in machines, but rather the dimming of our own lights at the dawn of a new era.

The emphasis on humanity over machines reminds me of what draws together all that we do under the banner of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. As Erik points out, the New Humanists — among whom we certainly number — focus on the uniqueness of intelligence and humanity.

Intelligent design is nothing more than a reminder, in the context of biology and cosmology, that worlds are not created by automated processes like natural selection. “What brings a world into being,” to borrow the title of a David Berlinski essay in Commentary, is intelligent agency.

Intelligence, ideas, information, wisdom — these lie at the heart of life and of existence. They are not replaceable by a process of blind churning, nor by a computer algorithm. They are what endows intelligent life, human life, with sacredness and dignity. Erik Larson’s “New Humanism” and our colleague Wesley Smith’s “Human Exceptionalism” sound alike, and that’s no coincidence. They are two ways of saying the same thing, in different but overlapping contexts — bioethics (Smith) and technology (Larson).

It’s telling that Erik Larson and Wesley Smith also identify a suicidal impulse in the ideologies they criticize. Wesley analyzes the “war on humans,” the “culture of death” that hungers to euthanize the weak and vulnerable and that, he writes today, is “never satiated, it never says ‘enough.'”

In a parallel I find fascinating, Erik notes something very similar in all the buzz about AI:

Even as our technology represents a crowning enlightenment of human innovation, our narratives about the modern world increasingly make no room for us. Consciousness, as Lanier puts it provocatively, is attempting to will itself out of existence. But how can that succeed? And to the paradox: How can we both brilliantly innovate, and become unimportant, ultimately slinking away from the future, ceding it to the machine’s we’ve built?

See how it all fits together: Ceding the future to animals, or to machines — these are two futures against which Smith and Larson respectively warn. The theory of intelligent design, for its part, directs our attention to the history of life and of the cosmos, appealing to thoughtful people not to cede it to mindless materialist processes.

The human mind, human consciousness, is a problem that Darwinian science cannot solve, a parallel to evolutionary biology’s failure to solve the riddle of biological information in the study of life’s origins. It’s a hopeful sign that an increasingly diverse spectrum of thinkers recognize this truth. The other day I noted its eruption on, of all places, the London theatrical stage in the form of Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem, which owes a debt, in turn, to atheist Darwin critic Thomas Nagel.

Human intelligence, a designer’s wisdom — powerful currents in science, media, and culture insist that these are disposable, mythical. Our role is to present an alternative to such ultimately nihilist thinking. Thank you, Erik, for reminding us of the urgency of that work.

Image: Edelweiss / Dollar Photo Club.