Leaning into Trust in Our Relationships with AI
In last year’s UU Interpretation of Ayudha Puja, Rev. Joe Cleveland suggested to members of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs that we approach Artificial Intelligence with an “openness to awe” and a “practice of reverence.”
“I wonder … if that might help us to pause if only for a moment to reflect on the ethics and morality we want ourselves and our creation to embody before the new technology becomes for us a second skin.”
In honoring our tools and machines this year on October 20, Rev. Joe warned that the misuse and abuse of AI threatens to undermine our ability to trust. The best way to preserve it may be to ramp up our sense of curiosity and “listen well to our tools.”
“Let’s stay connected to hope. Let’s be open to hearing what our tools have to say to us. Let’s listen well and deeply to how we use our tools and how we treat them. May we advocate for accountability, because accountability is a foundational element of trust and community. Accountability... means responsibility, connection, and asking those questions.”
Below is a slightly edited text of his sermon. Here’s the audio.
Whir. Buzz. Click. Beep.
Rev. Joseph Cleveland
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs
Sunday, October 20, 2024
It’s often said that the defining characteristic of human beings is that we are a "tool-using animal." This is not something that actually sets us apart. There are lots of other animals that use tools, it turns out. But I can't imagine humans without tools.
Rev. Joe Cleveland
So if we listen to the tools in our lives, what do we learn? What do we need to be paying attention to? What would we hear?
When I use a tool or work with a tool, I do try to pay attention to it, which I guess is what I mean by listening to a tool, at least in part. When I do work, I don't want to work against the tool that I'm trying to use.
Just this past week, I ordered a book. That's something I do every week. I got the package in the mail, which is a tool for protecting the book as it goes the mail. But it took me some time to figure out how to open it. I had to pay attention to the package for a little while until, finally, I saw it—a blue dotted line that said, "Pull here.” So I had to pay attention, to listen to how the tool wanted me to use it.
I play guitar. I love making music with guitar. A guitar is an amazing machine. It's really simple in some ways — just a box and a stick with some wires on it.
So, if you are a rock and roll star, how do you hold a guitar? It's way down here, right?
If you are a classical guitarist, how do you hold the guitar? More like this, right? And usually you're sitting down, not standing up.
So we have a tool that's being used in two very different ways…Whichever way you hold it, it’s useful tool that can change your life. It can give you really bad wrist problems or it can help you connect with other people. It can help you achieve a spiritual experience. If I didn’t have a guitar that I could play, I don't think I'd be as happy as I am.
Click to watch
Tools can be game-changing, and the most game-changing tool of our lives right now is Artificial Intelligence. It's something that everybody is talking about. I know that's true because Oprah Winfrey did a whole special on it last month. She interviewed a bunch of people, and one that stood out to me was Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
Raskin invented a particular tool called the "infinite scroll." When you go onto your news feed or whatever, and you scroll down, it just keeps going on forever and ever. That was his idea. He actually invented it before there was such a thing as social media. So, he wasn’t thinking about social media as the use for this tool. He was thinking about it as an information-gathering tool, a way to make people more efficient, to get more information more easily. When Oprah Winfrey was talking with him, he said, "I invented it to make people more efficient. And now it’s used to waste over half a million lifetimes every single month. Addiction, doomscrolling, polarization—they're all consequences.”
Aza Raskin
"What I learned the hard way," he says, "is that my good intentions as an inventor weren't enough."
Social media took it up and ran with it faster, doing things with it that he just didn't have any control over. Once the cat was out of the bag, there was no putting it back in. It just moved too quickly. If you think about how fast we incorporated social media into our lives, AI is happening faster than that.
There’s a musician based in Buffalo named Ani DiFranco that you might have heard of. In one of her spoken word pieces from early in her career, the big finish is these two lines: "Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
I would love for the solution to be "stop making weapons," but I don’t think that's possible, because every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. The weaponizing of things is less about the tool than it is about us. A tool can’t become a weapon by itself. That’s with us.
Human beings are not inherently good or bad. Maybe this is what distinguishes human animals in the animal world: We’re the animal that creates notions of good and bad. We bring that into being. We create these possibilities. That’s what we do. That's what we're trying to do when we make a tool. We're trying to create possibility, facilitate something, discover something.
I think what worries me most about artificial intelligence isn’t necessarily losing my job. I could have asked ChatGPT-3 to write this whole thing for you, and I could have slept in and stayed at home. But I don’t think you'd find ChatGPT as amusing as me, or frankly, as cute. So I’m not worried about being replaced. I'm not exactly worried about that. What I’m worried about is something Oprah Winfrey also mentioned in a promotion of her special.
"AI could offer all these great things in health and in education, but there are no controls” she said. “Identities are being stolen. We don't know what's real and what isn't."
She continued:
"There’s no question that there are positives here. But if you have a criminal mind, and are the kind of person who thinks about how you can get over and scam people, AI is just an open door. Which means the rest of us have to develop a suspicion muscle, and that’s going to change how we interact with everything we read, see, and hear. It’s going to change how we interact with one another. We have to ask: Is this real? Where is it coming from?"
The real kicker is what she said next: "I just know that that's no way to live. There’s no peace in constant suspicion..”
Here’s the main challenge, I think: We have to pay attention. There are many ways people have been weaponizing artificial intelligence and taking advantage of others. Identities are being stolen. Money is being stolen. People are being hurt in spiritual, emotional, and physical ways because of how people are using AI.
AI isn’t going away. It’s actually a really useful tool. For someone like my brother-in-law, who’s a GP doctor, it might remove the burden of the hours of paperwork he must do and give him more time to spend with patients. I think that would be great. I don’t want to get rid of AI. So the real challenge is finding this balance that we need to live with.
Maybe what we need to say is that we are a critically-minded people. That doesn’t mean we’re looking for fault, but it does mean that we love to ask questions. When something enters our life, we want to know all about it. We want to know: Where did it come from? Who made it? Why was it made this way?
Maybe it’s a form of suspicion, but maybe it’s also just another expression of curiosity, another way of saying, "I want to learn more." There are all these things in my life, and I’m just going to get curious about them. I’m going to see that email in my inbox and think, "Where did that come from? Someone’s getting creative—bless their heart."
Keep asking questions, keep being curious, and keep recognizing the importance of trust. Let us not lose sight of the fact that we need trust in our lives. Without trust or faith in something, we can’t really build anything. If you're constantly suspicious, you're constantly knocking the legs out from underneath yourself. You can’t build a community that way; you just undermine it. If you allow that little bug of suspicion in, it can be very toxic. We have to hang on to trust.
Maybe one way to do that — while recognizing AI’s presence in our lives — is to maintain our curiosity just to ask questions. Where did this come from? Who made it? What could it do? Is this the only way it gets used? How many people have access to it? Whose lives is it affecting? Who’s making it? When it gets distributed, who are they thinking of? Who are they not thinking of? Is there anybody hurt by it? Is there anybody helped by it? What can it do?
Let us be curious and listen well to our tools. Let’s stay connected to hope. Let’s be open to hearing what our tools have to say to us. Let’s listen well and deeply to how we use our tools and how we treat them. May we advocate for accountability, because accountability is a foundational element of trust and community. Accountability doesn’t mean suspicion; it means responsibility, connection, and asking those questions.
Let’s lean into trust, into faith, perhaps into curiosity, into our ability to wonder and connect, into our ability to be with one another, into our ability to help one another. And may there be tools that help us help. May we work with our tools, and may our tools work with us, that we might create together more life and thriving, more beauty, more love, more wonder, and for all of us, more wisdom.
Amen.
