In a recent Q&A with CT magazine, veteran AI engineer Tom Kehler, talked about the limits of the popular ChatGPT, and the wonders of the human brain.

Kehler has worked in artificial intelligence for more than 40 years, as a coder and a CEO. He grew up a preacher’s kid and got into mathematical linguistics in high school. After earning a PhD in physics, he wanted to do linguistics with Wycliffe Bible Translators, but “God kept closing that door,” he says. Instead, he found himself working with natural language processing in computing.

He was asked “Why is there an obsession with sentient AI?” Kehler replied, “If you are a person of nonbelief, you want to create something that gives you hope in the future. On the AI side, we want something that will cause us to have eternal life—my consciousness is going to go into eternity because it’s in a machine.”

Kehler was also asked about Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer, who said in 2022 that his chatbot had become sentient and had a soul.

The way these systems work, we’ll say, “This is the number seven.” We keep reinforcing until the neural network can recognize that seven. That correlation of events is the core way AI works now.

However, the way kids acquire language is truly mind-blowing. And not just language, but even if you go open the cupboard door. Kids see something once, and they figure out how to do it. The system that this Google engineer was talking about … was given trillions of examples in order to get some sense of intelligence out of it. It consumed ridiculous amounts of energy, whereas a little kid’s brain requires the power of a flashlight, and it’s able to learn language. We’re not anywhere close to that kind of general AI.

(AI) is taking inputs to build its knowledge. It doesn’t check the truth value, or as it’s called, the data lineage. Where did this data come from? Do we know it’s true? It’s translating input text to output text based on some objective.

If you think about how scientific knowledge or medical knowledge was developed, it’s by peer review. We as a human race have considered that trustworthy. It’s not perfect. But that’s how we normally build trust. If you have 12 of the world’s best cardiac surgeons say a certain procedure is good, you’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s probably good.” If ChatGPT told you to do that procedure, you’d better have it reviewed by somebody, because it could be wrong.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God-designed the human brain to be a marvelous, compact, and vastly intricate organ. It has a conscience, the ability to empathize, to feel joy and regret, and to ultimately seek a higher purpose in life in fellowship with the Creator. The human-designed AI is an attempt to potentially create eternal life for humans, but without ethics, and without submission to the Almighty God.