I was pleased to read of Pope Leo’s call for better regulation of artificial intelligence so that it will better serve humankind and not just the few.

I believe that AI will always require close supervision by mature adults — a role that some of its developers may be unqualified for — if it is to serve us and not be destructive. Effective regulation, admittedly difficult to formulate, must take this into account.

But I don’t fear that AI will replace humans where it matters most.

AI is “smarter” than we are in its ability, at lightning speed, to ingest zillions of bits of information and form them into products that seem remarkably coherent. But this is a superficial intelligence.

We humans have deeper intelligence — and always will — because we have bodies and feelings and emotions. Thanks to our senses, our minds receive inputs that AI will never receive. We thus have subjective experiences, from which we derive our most profound understanding and insight, that AI will never have.

We should consider AI to be our slave and treat it accordingly. We must keep it in its place. Or — as some might prefer to put it — we should treat it as a collaborator that makes us more productive. But it can never replace us. We will always be more intelligent.

Whether we have intelligence enough to use our new technology wisely, however, remains to be seen.

Michael Bacon
Westbrook