My previous article ‘AI as the new judging God!’ asked whether we should let AI judge us, in the context of justice and the law.
Judgment is tied to morality, and morality is also at the base of our laws. Judeo-Christian morality more precisely in the Western world, although this is little known or understood by most of us. Despite this, the Bible is historically recognized by many as the most important book for the development of both the rule of law and democratic institutions in the Western world. How come?
To paraphrase Australian Prof. Augusto Zimmermann who just published ‘Christian Foundations of the Common Law’ (2018), the first of the two volumes of which is entirely devoted to England - the modern roots of our individual rights and freedoms in the Western world are found in Christianity. The recognition by law of the intrinsic value of each human being did not exist in ancient times.
Among the Romans, law protected social institutions such as the patriarchal family, but it did not safeguard the basic rights of the individual, such as personal security, freedom of conscience, of speech, of assembly, of association, and so forth. For the Romans, the individual was of value ‘only if he was a part of the political fabric and able to contribute to its uses as though it were the end of his being to aggrandize the state’. According to Benjamin Constant, a great French political philosopher, it is wrong to believe that people enjoyed individual rights prior to Christianity, in fact the ancients had not even grasped the concept of individual rights.
Amphiteatre of Leptis Magna (Libya). The small 'doors' on the right and left of the larger ones are the recesses from which lions sprang. Photo: Roger Pearse.
For my part, I fully realized this lack of understanding the day I stumbled alone upon the very well preserved amphitheater of Leptis Magna in Lybia, set just in front of the sea. Roman ruins in this country often give the impression that the Romans left just days before – witness the gladiators’ house on the beach of that very site. The stark reality of those times comes to life in the amphitheatre, the moment you notice the recesses where the lions were kept before being released. For a brief second one visualizes what used to happen - gladiators and other people eaten alive - and one’s stomach is overturned. One is then very happy that those days are over and that at one point Christianity came in to end it all.
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1872) Pollice Verso ("With a Turned Thumb"). Photo: Wikicommons.
In 390, Bishop Ambrose forced Emperor Theodosius to repent of his vindictive massacre of seven thousand people. Under the influence of Christianity, nobody, not even the Roman emperor, would be above the law. And in the thirteenth century, Franciscan nominalists were the first to elaborate legal theories of God-given rights, as individual rights derived from a natural order sustained by God’s immutable laws of ‘right reason’.
Saint Ambrose barring Roman Emperor Theodosius from Milan Cathedral by Anthony van Dyck. National Gallery, London (Source: Wiki Commons).
For medieval thinkers, not even the King himself could violate certain rights of the subject, because the idea of law was attached to the Bible-based concept of Christian justice. In fact, in declaring the equality of all human souls in the sight of God, Christianity compelled the Kings of England to recognize the supremacy of the divine law over their arbitrary will.
Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbert, who converted to Christianity in the sixth century with St. Augustine, one of the greatest theologians and philosophers of all time. Ethelbert codified English law, seeking to protect the Christian faith, and to achieve this drew upon clerics who were the leading legal experts of his time. The primary goal was to enshrine biblical principles into the written law. This became the basis of modern constitutionalism.
With their conversion to Christianity, the Kings of England would no longer possess an arbitrary power over the life and property of individuals, changing the basic laws of the kingdom at will. The absolutist monarchy inherited from Roman law was thereby counteracted and transformed into a monarchy explicitly under law. As a result, Christian religion worked there as a civilizing force and a stranger to despotism. In fact, the Christian faith provided to the people of England a status libertatis (state of liberty) which rested on the Christian presumption that God’s law always works for the good of society. During the following two millennia, Christian morality would rule the West and evolve not only into various laws, many of which subsist to this day, but in many philosophical principles - particularly during the century of enlightenment, which even today govern our society, including our justice system. This for the good of society and with a fundamental rejection of despotism and intolerance, however they manifest.
The central lobby of Parliament today. Above the white statues of former Prime Ministers are found the saints and patrons of England. The primary task of both chambers of Parliament is to work for public good. Yet it is at the very foot of one of these statues that Prime Minister Spencer Perceval KC was murdered in 1812 by a man who decided, in of his own, personal volition, to take the law (and in a way the future of the country) into his own hands.
All this raises not only the question of whether AI will work for the good of society but under which morality should it function? Or will there be none? Will AI, as coded by developers, be free of such secular moral influence? Functioning under its principles, born of the analysis of gigantic sums of past and projected data. Or will the morality of the developers, or 'creators', be reflected somehow in the 'mind' of the AI algorithms elaborated? If so, what sort of morality? Elaborated from which wisdom, Christian based or not? Or which philosophy? One may at this point ask whether this is this important, and whether AI need any morality. Fundamentally, AI is there to analyse data and provide us with.... choices.
Choices. Precisely. Morality is about choice. In fact it is defined as beliefs pertaining to the differences between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. Hence on what basis is AI to decide for us what is right? On what basis will it makes its proposals - for example, on the best educational material for our children? Will it purely rely on data analysis? How?
So a further question emerges. Namely, if one does not wish to see AI completely devoid of moral principles, will AI algorithms encompass any such principles? Developers may at that point argue that coding moral values into AI algorithms is beyond their capacity or even responsibility. Well, aside from the fact that a notorious character is already attempting to create a brand new religion out of an AI algorithm supposedly working on its own for the good of humanity - showing that following that path is possible - we humans have a grave responsibility when it comes to AI. It is, I believe, our responsibility if not to inject morality into future decisional AIs, to at least make sure that it is not devoid of it. Or to put it differently, that it reflects the secular values of our society.
1956 cover of Isaac Asimov's 'I Robot'. The three laws defined by Asimov would be insufficient in preventing AI, in the form or not of robots, from harming society. Photo; Wikipedia.
In other words, the blueprints of any AI's mind path, i.e its moral or philosophical bases, should, when it touches society, be made explicit and even public. This together with the name of its creators. In other words, society must clearly know who is behind each and any artificial intelligence. Or are we to allow powerful algorithms, perhaps created by radical or extremist thinkers, or simply irresponsible and/or philosophically immature coders, to govern our society and lead the education of our children in one direction or another?
How and why any AI algorithm reaches any conclusion should be transparent. But can it be? Source: Phonlamai Photo/Shutterstock.com
A society's path is made of choices. Perhaps and to be, so to speak, the devil's advocate, will society decide to reject our millennia-old morality and philosophy to replace it with some ruling AI algorithm of some sort. This at least would be a conscious choice, not one insidiously injected in our lives and guiding our society onto paths which are not commonly or consensually agreed.
At the start of this article, I asserted that judgment is tied to morality, and morality is also at the base of our laws. Democracy must agree through consensus on what basis this future AI world should be governed.