I find a striking structural similarity between the current controversy around A.I. and the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1–9. Ultimately the story of the Tower of Babel is about the price of hubris.
God saw that people were trying to attain a kind of god-like status by constructing a grand tower all the way up to the heavens. For that they needed to be punished.
Recent efforts to build an ever more powerful A.I. are in some ways similar. We humans are taking upon ourselves the god-like power to create a new form of intelligent life.
We really don’t know yet how that will play out. I just hope we don’t end up as a cautionary tale in some future civilization’s biblical lore.
Interestingly enough, that’s the parallel the Pope use in its recent book Magnifica Humanitas about that same question (freely available online, but you can just read the introduction).
What a cool mythological story: what we believe brings us together, like a shared tool of communication, can bring us down.
Well, if we did decide collectively the shape of the tower maybe we would be more inclined to accept its downfall, but I guess we have to accept and follow the desire of our non democratic techno overlords instead.