A REAL battle of the pomposities this last week, on an undoubtedly vital topic: Tony Blair shouting at us to get on with the AI revolution, the current Pope warning of its propensity to reduce our humanity.
There are blunt reasons to dismiss such interventions quite speedily.
Blair’s institute is taking at least £257 million from the AI giant Larry Ellison of Oracle. Blair was proclaiming in this week’s essay that it’s “the thing” that will define societies and economies. Let’s say this is coincident with the commercial ambitions of his patron.
Those of us blessed to be alive in the 90s might remember that this trope – human construction presented as natural force – is a favourite one of Blair’s.
READ MORE: House of Commons issues statement amid fears Peter Murrell 'embezzled public money'
“All governments for the foreseeable future will govern in the age of AI,” he writes this week. In 2005, he said this at the Labour Party conference: “You hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”
There’s clearly a permanent place in the Blair brain for the heroic surfing of unstoppable torrents, with him up there on the leading board.
Yet the charge of a lack of integrity is hardly confined to The Manic One. Something also has to be said about the Catholic Church elite.
Are they quite the appropriate organisation to make a critique of artificial intelligence’s dehumanising tendencies? Leo warns that AI “reduces victims to data” and lowers “the threshold for resorting to violence”.
Isn’t this the same dynamic that operates in the Church’s notorious child abuse cases? Children treated as objects, as sex machinery; their “magnificent humanity” (as the title of the Pope’s encyclical rings out) being utterly disrespected? Children cheaper to silence than protect?
Once reminded of this, there’s a reek of unearned piety staining many of Pope Leo XIV’s proposals. He warns against the “Babel syndrome”, characterised by an idolatry of profit and efficiency that attempts to translate the “mystery of the person” into mere data and performance. Yet what could destroy the “mystery of a person” more than child abuse?
In another strong claim, Leo claims AI lacks the “affective, relational and spiritual perspective” inherent to human wisdom. Why?
Because, goes the Pope’s claim, it does not possess a body, feel joy or pain. Or mature through the lived experiences of love, work, and responsibility. What of those fully embodied and experienced humans who abused, nevertheless?
We may agree that AI is a “technocratic paradigm” that renders humans as “mere cogs in a system”. That it has a “mindset of extraction”, compelling the miners of rare minerals for its construction, as well as the mining of our interactions for its intelligence development. So far, so progressive.
But the hackles rise with the encyclical’s critiques of the ideologies of transhumanism and posthumanism. These Silicon Valley creeds apparently view human vulnerability and limitation as “defects to be corrected”, rather than essential realities through which our humanity matures.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon hits out at Scottish media over coverage of Peter Murrell's crimes
So what view of “human vulnerability and limitation” was being taken on the six continents where priestly abuse took place?
Point made. What I’m really resisting is the temptation by anti-AI advocates to shelter their critiques from beneath the spreading foliage of a Papal encyclical. Which I would say is a lot patchier in its humanism than it claims to be.
Blair is easier to take on – a rather conventional capitalist figure now, with AI as his chosen engine of exploitation. All that is solid melts before his fiery pronouncements.
Net zero must go, rendering up cheap energy to placate the humming data servers that will “change everything”. The NHS and welfare must be chopped down and made more efficient, sectors deregulated to generate ready employment.
There's an awesome stupidity here. If millions of human administrative and service jobs will be permanently replaced by automatons and AIs, then won’t there need to be more social spending (and economic regulation), in order to transition people sanely and calmly to what’s on the other side of the Singularity? Not less? We can begin to discuss what that “other side” entails.
The care and craft economy will become central.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon hits out at Scottish media over coverage of Peter Murrell's crimes
Almost everything AI does badly is exactly what underpaid humans do now: embodied care, sensitive teaching, absorbing domestic work, skilled trades, ecological restoration.
These jobs may be an instance of a broader reallocation toward work that defies automation, by virtue of being relational and material.
I’ve long thought that artistic practice and arts appreciation are set to be enhanced by white-collar work (and maybe also much manual work) transferring to automation.
John Maynard Keynes, writing in the 30s, thought that this was the greatest challenge of the advance of machines. Exhausted, ex-machine-like, post-economic humans would have to recover the skills of “living wisely, agreeably and well”.
The choices that artists make – seeking intrinsic valuations of themselves, prioritising rich experiences over commoditised objects, being creative with community, self-training to serve their animus, not their boss – are choices that many others will have to learn anew from.
The general leftward policy drift that Blair’s intervention wants to oppose is, it turns out, a real response to the transformative tumult of our times.
If an unharnessed, techno-powered hypercapitalism is destabilising our everyday lives – raising costs, worsening the biosphere, revolutionising our occupations – we expect the democratic part of that same modernity to respond.
Scotland's choices have been a consistent centre-left-green policy consensus, desperate for the full powers of national sovereignty to start the fully joined-up solutions to these deep changes.
I would suggest that some of the “human dividend” of time and space that AI could liberate for us – if sufficiently well directed and regulated by a confident state – would support an enrichment of democratic practice.
For example: why isn’t deliberation of the direction of society something we could enjoy on our mobile devices, as engaging as the games and services we already play there?
And equally, why shouldn’t that also drive a more convivial, face-to-face and civic democracy?
There’s a famous quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: “The problem of socialism is that it takes too many evenings”. If machines are to liberate us from weekly drudgery, can’t they then liberate us into our full citizens’ identity?
We should give Blair and the Pope something – in that they show the power of big framing ideas, proclaimed from a clear pulpit (secular or religious).
Scottish independence has always been an opportunity to connect everyday life with the biggest ideas of the day. We should recover that ambition.
We shouldn’t be judging AI by productivity or efficiency, but by whether it enlarges human capacities for care, creativity, culture and citizenship.
It’s certainly too important to leave to wild-eyed former prime ministers – or morally compromised patriarchs.
Share