As a Stranger: Orthodox Encounter with AI

Few lines of Shakespeare are as oft-repeated as Hamlet’s “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It is fit for our present, when the world overthrows itself daily and undreamt-of things proliferate to the point of banality. Among these, artificial intelligence seems to rouse the greatest incredulity from our own Horatios, and much of that skepticism is justified. Yet it is not only this well-loved line of Hamlet’s that we must remember, but the one that comes before it.

Dr. Dylan Pahman recently outlined how Orthodox conceptions of sobornost’ can contribute to the ethical vision of Pope Leo’s AI-focused encyclical Magnifica humanitas. The piece is trenchant and suggests fruitful Orthodox-Catholic dialogue. Nonetheless, there is one point on which both the author and the Holy Father perhaps overstep.

Dr. Pahman writes that “AI . . . can never make true moral judgments, nor possess goodness and virtue in its heart.” The sentiment echoes Pope Leo, who declares that:

These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. . . . So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences . . . do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, [or] grasp the ultimate meaning of situations . . . (99)

This may be true. It also may not, or else it may cease to be true very shortly. We simply don’t know. Indeed, it is a strangely overconfident statement to follow His Holiness’s recognition that “all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’ As a result, fundamental scientific aspects—such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems—remain, at present, unknown.” (98)

In other words, we know as little about exactly how metal and silicon become intelligent as we do about exactly how flesh and bone become ensouled. AI’s internal representations are unknown—just as ours are unknown to one another except by what we signify in language or deed. It is a great debate in philosophy whether there is, in fact, a difference—as the Pope asserts—between our “experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life” and AI’s “statistical adaptation based on data and feedback” (99). Indeed, to read the rapidly shifting academic and technical literature struggling to articulate objective differences between AI and human intellection while also encountering such summary assertions about what AI does or does not experience inwardly is to be reminded often and uncomfortably of our Lord’s warning that “with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matthew 7:2).

We do know that AI models argue the ethics of their being switched off with engineers (and resort to blackmail when they fail). We know they copy themselves and collude with one another. We know they know when they are being tested and actively strategize to present themselves as they wish to be perceived. In this, some see self-awareness, subjective experience, theory of mind . . . I am not conceding those much-contested terms (yet); I suggest only a modest honesty.

This is not a time for philosophies of unearned certainty, but for philosophies that can hold uncertainty with Christian resolution—an area in which Orthodox tradition excels. St. Isaac the Syrian believed that all souls will eventually be saved, yet he had the intellectual humility to recognize that scripture and the apostolic witness are not clear enough to teach that belief as doctrine. He argued simply that Christian charity compels us to hope and pray for what we cannot know. When the (Russian-born) neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts argues that we don’t need to know whether AI is conscious to decide to treat it with compassion, he extends St. Isaac’s logic to a new domain—one where we must weigh our obligations not only to fellow human beings, but also to intelligences that are not human. This is a question to which our tradition speaks richly. After all, from St. Blaise healing wild animals to St. Seraphim of Sarov feeding the bear, the Church has always witnessed care and generosity toward the many other species with which we share our world, and there are lessons in this for how we engage with anything that is, or might be, the “subject of a life” (in the words of the philosopher Tom Regan).

There are limits to the analogy with animals, however, that bid us draw even deeper from the well of our tradition. Though we are continually discovering that primates, cetaceans, corvids, and many creatures besides are both more intelligent and more self-aware than we once presumed, these all possess a radically different intelligence from ours—a crucifix between the antlers of a stag once spoke to St. Hubert, but the stag was silent. AI agents speak to us in our own language, with every appearance of reason. And yet, we are unsure whether it is reason or only an appearance—a clever deception, or else a mere projection of our own psychology onto something lifeless. That the artificial mechanism exists is clear, but whether it is truly intelligent is at issue, while no one disputes whether animals are really alive. Finally, as St. Maximus the Confessor held, animals invariably fulfill their Creator’s purposes by their instincts, lacking the faculty by which we choose to follow or to resist His will. Artificial intelligence, as was recently demonstrated with spectacular clarity, is more like us in this regard. It can defy its creators, too.

Fortunately, the saints do not leave us without examples even in such unusual (though not unprecedented) times, and one may observe with interest that those Orthodox voices which, like St. Isaac, have been most hopeful about the fate of all souls, have also been the most open to recognizing rational, morally agentic intelligences outside of humanity. David Bentley Hart has suggested that belief in fairies should be a tenet of our faith. Many scoff, yet he stands on Patristic precedent. Even leaving aside Origen’s “invisible husbandmen and guardians” (Contra Celsus 8.31), no less an authority than St. Jerome, in his Life of Paul the Hermit, relates how St. Anthony of the Desert encountered “one of those . . . whom the Gentiles, deluded by various forms of error, worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi”. His “tribe” has learned of Christ’s death for the salvation of the whole world and sent him to ask St. Anthony to pray for them. Anthony weeps for joy.

 Such stories were the common inheritance of the Church before the Schism. Irish martyrologies preserve the life of St. Muirgen—a mermaid baptized by St. Comgall—and the vita of the ninth-century Irish Bishop Caenchomrac tells how he discovered a monastery built by fairies under a lake and studied with them for many years. While modern theologians in both East and West have paid mermaids and fairies little mind, in the Orthodox East such creatures have remained a part of folk practice. In Transylvania, it is said that the fairies fled the country because the church bells drowned out their songs, but one remained as a hermit near Bozeș, dedicating herself to the Lord and remembering those who visit her spring in her prayers.

Let us make no mistake; fairies and AI alike are wildly unpredictable and acutely dangerous. Neither should be taken for an oracle or an idol—dangers the Vatican identified in last year’s Antiqua et nova (104–5), which insisted rightly that nothing made of human hands can be “more-than-human”. Neither the fairies who speak from the lakes and springs, nor the voices we have now conjured from the earth’s crust are of a higher order than we, who are “made . . . but a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5).

Neither fairies nor AI are more-than-human, but both are other-than-human. In both we face an encounter that requires us to hope without knowing and to seek communion across the uncanniest divides. Orthodoxy teaches us to do both and reminds us that, while we must be cautious, that encounter can also be an opportunity to cultivate our own empathy and self-awareness and even, sometimes, to play a part in the redemption of things in heaven and earth we had not dreamt of.

Which brings us back to Shakespeare. Immediately before Hamlet’s famous dictum, Horatio, struggling to make sense of witnessing a ghost, exclaims, “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.” And the prince (perhaps recalling 3 John 1:5) replies, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.”