Humans Will Always Have the Advantage Over AI (Hank Unplugged Short)

Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast, has been re-reading Jay Richards’ outstanding book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. We so often swallow the skin of the truth stuffed with a big lie—in this case the myth that artificial intelligence will soon replace us. Richards shows that while AI certainly brings challenges, it also has its opportunities. And in this sense the age of AI is like the agrarian age, the industrial age, and the information age—they were all ages of opportunity. And the age of AI is ripe for doing only what human beings can bring to the table. Mind and creativity trumps matter. Machines are not aspirational and will not ever be able to do much of what human beings can do—parent, heal the broken hearted, produce homilies empowered by the Spirit of God. So why the hysteria? Because we in the West have swallowed the myth of materialism. Elon Musk questions whether there is such a thing as consciousness—emblematic of the myth that our minds are simply meaty machines. In reality, a machine will never be able to have first-person subjective experience. Self-awareness is, in principle, beyond AI. Richards quotes George Gilder: “The inability of modern techno-philosophers to grasp the difference between machines and human beings is a great trahison des clercs [treason of the clerks—intellectuals] of our time.”