I attended an interesting lecture the other day about AI, a very heavy-duty philosophical discussion by German professor Michael Hampe of the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. I won’t repeat everything verbatim here since there simply isn’t enough room… in the entire newspaper!

By Emad Aysha
But here are two interesting takes on what was said. The first is theological, and the second is political. The first deals with monotheism and how it relates to evolution since most monotheistic religions see the laws of nature as fixed by God, the supreme rational being.

Such religions also privilege man as the only other rational being capable of appreciating himself and God’s creation. This is in contrast to pantheism, which sees everything as alive and having some modicum of consciousness and some influence on its existence.

The challenge of AI, of course, is that it is like human learning—self-learning. AI is evolving at a phenomenal scale, thanks to data harvesting on the Internet, and has explored other areas it was never meant to, such as teaching itself Arabic. There’s no telling what it’ll do next.

Fortunately, there’s a way out of this supposed dilemma. Islam is an exotheological religion that ascribes intelligence and conscience to multiple entities, including angels and the jinn and is comfortable with extraterrestrial life. Moreover, verses in the Quran that say that everything worships God, even inanimate objects.

Sufism is even more developed in this regard, seeing everything as aspiring to be better than it is, from plants that replicate man in the form of a date palm (it has no branches but a head and dies if you cut it off), with base metals evolving to become gold and silver.

Muslim scientists in the past misclassified corals as living rocks and even had notions of the food pyramid and natural selection that bordered on Social Darwinism. (Ideas that filtered into Europe and helped influence early evolutionary theory).

Religion is not fixed but evolves as people impose their preconceived notions on it, based on their physical environment, class structure, and scientific know-how. It is no surprise that Arabs were great breeders of plants and animals—horses, birds, and even oranges.

The Greeks, by contrast, and this most definitely includes Aristotle, thought the mule was an insult to nature. This aberration did not conform to the original ideal form of the horse and couldn’t procreate either.

T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s own Bulldog, believed in ideal forms so strenuously it took the discovery of Neanderthal man to dislodge his Aristotelian-type beliefs!

Now, for the second issue of relevance here, which the lecturer designated as Techno-Fascism. A religious movement is forming in California that practically worships AIs and is led by the tech giant gurus in the US.

They look forward to all of the different AIs online merging into a single super AI, the new God of the new era, with them as the chosen few, of course. These people worship AI so much as a reflection of their egos, they want it completely deregulated.

Thank heavens the Europeans are dead set against this, warning that even peaceful AI for medical research, for instance, is dual-use and can be used to invent a way to exterminate our species, if not all life. You can’t let artificial organisms out into the wild, Dr. Hampe insists and correctly.

What is more, the Techno-Fascists are a bunch of anarchists at heart, wanting to remove the state because they see it as a conspiracy of the unintelligent multitude, holding back the intelligent and creative (business) elites. (Social Darwinism again).

That’s why Michael Hampe calls them Techno-Fascists. I should add John Dewey’s critique of Aristotle here since Aristotle believed that any knowledge geared to practical demands was inferior to purely contemplative knowledge.

Dewey argued this was just Aristotle justifying slavery since it was beneath him and the thinking elite to get their hands dirty.

That’s how Aristotle (conveniently) transformed God into a blind, deaf and mute entity that only knows absolute truths, without being able to influence anything in our daily lives. Not surprisingly, the philosophers fill the original role played by priests.

This just substitutes one autocracy or oligarchy for another, and the Techno-Fascists are no different. Democracy is passé for these dudes, without naming names.

People adapt religious notions to fit vested interests and are influenced subconsciously by the technological Zeitgeist of the era. How little has changed?

My solution, typically, is science fiction, especially the Arab-Muslim variety, given how benign it is, not just toward extraterrestrials (and the jinn, of course) but also toward sentient robots.

In our way of thinking, citing Dr Hosam Elzembely’s The Last Voyage, man’s soul comes in part from God (breathed into the clay mould of Adam), and so to unlock the secrets of the universe, you have to look inward.

A robot scientist does just that by bequeathing sentience to his robots. While they do wreck the apartment, fighting over who has cleaning duties, they slowly but surely develop a conscience and wonder if God exists and if they are worthy of worshipping him.

You find something similar in Abdelhakim Amer Al-taweel’s story “A Problem of Faith” (from Libya), where a humanoid android goes to a mosque to ask if he has a soul and can go to heaven. Not coincidentally, the mosque is decorated with holograms of gardens from Islam’s glory days.

Ahmed Salah al-Mahdi and Ammar Al-Masry (from Egypt), and Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi (Iran) have similarly themed stories, as do I.

I suppose we have to lead by example. From my experience with AI image generators, they always follow the flavour of the month, giving you stereotypes of Egyptians, Iranians, or Arabs.

The trick to humanising technology, then, is to humanise ourselves first. A tall order, especially nowadays!

Author’s Note

Lecture held at German Academic Exchange Service, “How artificial is AI?”, 26 February, part of the OIB-COSIMENA Research Colloquium II.