AI and the potential challenges to human dignity – The Tablet

Irish philosopher Dr Gerard Casey has criticised the drive towards transhumanism saying, Christians should resist any policies or procedures that diminish human dignity or contribute to the displacement of human beings from the Biblical commission.

In a talk titled Christians in a post-human world: a sneak look at our near future, organised by the Iona Institute, the former head of the Department of Philosophy at University College Dublin spoke about artificial intelligence and a possible transhuman or a post-human future. This postulates the merging of humans with technology to allow them to transcend their physical and intellectual limits and achieve a kind of immortality.

Transhumanism, and its precursor and ally transgenderism, baulk at the restrictions, as they see it, that the human body imposes on them, he said, arguing that transhumanism rejects the bodys limits to human health, cognitive functioning, immortality and the cosmological animation of the universe.

You might say that transhumanism wants human beings to leave the world. AI wants humans to do it by ceasing to exist; transhumanists want human beings to be transformed into a new species.

For Christians embodiment is not an optional extra to being human he underlined. We are essentially embodied creatures. What you say at Mass every Sunday is, I believe in the resurrection of the body.

He continued, As the Word was made flesh, so too our ultimate destiny is the resurrection of the body. For Christians, the end of the world is not the end of the story but an introduction to a reconstituted world in which the dead will be raised incorruptible. We shall be changed and live in the presence of God.

On the challenges of AI to education he said that if he was still a university lecturer, he would get rid of all continuous assessments and insist on exams being held in places screened for electronic devices.

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AI and the potential challenges to human dignity - The Tablet