AI

Steven Cave has an article in Aeon on the history of intelligence and why we should be scared witless. Interestingly, "intelligence" does not appear much in philosophical writing nor does it translate well into Greek or German. It is perhaps best seen as "reason or rationality."

Plato emerged from a world steeped in myth and mysticism to claim something new: that the truth about reality could be established through reason, or what we might consider today to be the application of intelligence. This led him to conclude, in The Republic, that the ideal ruler is ‘the philosopher king’, as only a philosopher can work out the proper order of things. And so he launched the idea that the cleverest should rule over the rest – an intellectual meritocracy. This was opposed to the obvious in history--that the powerful should rule--and the less obvious--that rulers had been chosen by God.

In his book The Politics, Aristotle explains: ‘[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.’ What marks the ruler is their possession of ‘the rational element’. Educated men have this the most, and should therefore naturally rule over women – and also those men ‘whose business is to use their body’ and who therefore ‘are by nature slaves’. Lower down the ladder still are non-human animals, who are so witless as to be ‘better off when they are ruled by man’.

So one generation after Plato's revolutionary declaration,  Aristotle presents the rule of the thinking man as obvious and natural.

The idea that intelligence defines humanity persisted into the Enlightenment. It was enthusiastically embraced by Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential moral philosopher since the ancients. For Kant, only reasoning creatures had moral standing. Rational beings were to be called ‘persons’ and were ‘ends in themselves’. Beings that were not rational, on the other hand, had ‘only a relative value as means, and are therefore called things’.

Cave sees this as the beginning of all sorts of oppression and injustice, particularly the goofy eugenics movement and slavery. His anxiety is Artificial Intelligence: How will we adapt to the creation of intelligent machines--perhaps our equals or even our superiors. My bet is such a worry is misplaced; the confident leaders and trailblazers might create such a threat but only by accident. No thought or political leader would create an opponent or rival on purpose. But they certainly would create an inferior to dominate.
My bet is the real threat with AI is the creation of beings inferior to humans, "humans" with missing parts like ambition, competitiveness and creativity, a diminished--and diminishing--subset of us.

That will cause some real theological anxiety.