Can AI Calm Our Fear of Death with Gregory Stock

a brief word of gratitude and an invitation. The Center for Christo Genesis is in the midst of our winter fundraiser as we celebrate ten years of exploring faith, science, and the promise of a new future. If this podcast has sparked insight or steadied your spirit, please consider supporting our next decade of work. Your gift fuels new episodes, conversations, learning resources, and community. At a time when organizations vital to our shared future are losing support, your contribution affirms that our mission matters, now more than ever. Donate today at ChristoGenesis.org/donate. Thank you for journeying with us. Welcome back to Hunger for Holmas and to Ilias Conversation with Gregory Stock. Last time, Greg raised a profound question. How will AI shape two enduring human longings? Love and immortality? Today, Ilias and Greg return to the theme of immortality, exploring not only what it might mean for individuals, but for the human species as a whole. And later, they ask, "Is our social structure, our government, prepared for the realities of AI?" Number of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I was actually friends with Martin Rothflot. Genius, totally. Yeah, wrote the book, The Promise of Virtual Immortality. And she was saying, "Then, you know, this is at least 10 years ago, you know, well, we're going to have multiple bodies, you'll be able to download, you know, she has this idea, beans, cultural DNA, and then beans," which she called, like, sort of informational DNA, you know. And in her view, we will be able to download our brains, like, beans, she called mind files. Like we would have mind files that we could, you know, eventually, we could use them, I used to say, like, sort of like an ATM machine, you know, you can enhance happiness or, you know, whatever. But then, digital immortality, we're watching the movie Transcendence in a few weeks. You know, we already have a level of that, right, a primitive level. So you write books or you do a YouTube, when you die, those things are still here. So you're still here, you know, in some way. So this kind of virtual living on, or this is the next level of the virtual living on. Now, it's you, your doppelganger, so, you know, your kind of virtual self, but it's sort of you, but not you, and that's always the question, you know, in Transcendence. The movie is, is this Will Caster, you know, uploaded now onto a computer, or is it not? What about your relationship with those? So I'm thinking in terms of, say, my daughter, Sadie, you've met Sadie, you know, we have a very, very close relationship. So we talk frequently and interact about things. If I were dying, she would want to have, you know, a double of me, and that was faithful. So it begins so you don't have that sense of loss of people. If everybody has, in their real lives, they have, you know, multiples of themselves that are transformed a little bit, and this, you know, if that's permeating our environment, then I don't know, death has a very different ring to it. For your family, the generational passage is transformed in some way. It's almost like we're getting more and more people in the mix, more and more personalities and avatars and different manifestations of ourselves. And I think that the way to look at these things is through, and that's what I've done in the book, is through the power of questioning. So the idea of posing questions that really are not abstract and meant to be answered by some expert who's supposedly, you know, we've thought about the future a lot, but kind of like an example would be, if you could reconstruct anyone, you know, you could have an emulation of anyone around you or that you've known, who would you actually want to have in your life as an emulation, you know? And it's interesting when I ask myself that, there are very few people. I was surprised, I was thinking, well, you know, my mom's been dead a long time, would I really, and I was realizing, well, you know, later in her life, I would have a call with her maybe once every couple of weeks or something like that and interact, but it wasn't a big part of my life at that point. Would I really want my parents to present now in some real way, who would I really want? And so when you start thinking in those ways about what would you want, what would it feel like, then we come up with answers to these things that are personal, that they're kind of malleable and I think we've talked about threats and I think that the biggest threat that we have is that we are not as a society going to be able to make the adjustments to these new technologies and that there will be, you know, increasing polarity and disruption and fragmentation. And so I think the most important thing is that we begin to have these conversations with everyone, you know, that we're actually facing that future in a pragmatic way. How is it going to change? What am I going to feel like? What will it be like to have a copy of myself or of somebody else or a best friend, a lover that is AI? What does that mean to us? And start grappling with those things as a whole or I think we can care ourselves apart in one way or another just as you're starting to see with social media. So I've put in these kinds of questions with QR code so that people can answer them and then can see how other people answer and how different demographics answer, how young people answer, how old people answer, I mean, a good example about our cyber organization is if you had to choose between either amputating a hand, you know, losing the use of a biological limb essentially or using all ability to connect with telecommunications devices with computers with the internet, with phone, all electronic communications, which would you choose. And for young people, it's in '90s, you know, especially STEM students that they would, which is really shows how that level of integration has already occurred. And I think it's really interesting to have these discussions where we're all experts. Yeah, no, you know, it's very practical because I think, as you say, we're not talking about it enough. And I think there's a lot of fear, but we do need to begin to process, in a sense of what's taking place, you know, right in our midst. I want to go back to deathbo because, you know, from a Christian perspective, this kind of living on is what we hold as resurrection. So it's a type of resurrected light, you know, so Christians don't hold that death is the last word. They hold that life is the last word. So, you explained to me, you know, I know that obviously, and when it feels to me that if you really believe that you are going to be enfolded in the arms of God in some sense, that, you know, the time of existence on earth is in a physical form is really a very minimal part of eternity, right? Then you would think that there would be not a fear of death, that it would be almost embraced, and it certainly is in many, you know, spiritual, Christian individuals. But it feels to me that that's fairly narrow in terms of people who feel the depth of faith and belief that they, you know, are untouched by their own prospects of death in somewhere another. Yeah. And it feels it's different too because even though you might live on, okay, generally you're not here and your loved ones still feel that deep loss. You've disappeared from temporal life, from, you know, life as we know it. So, it feels different, similar, but different. You know, it's interesting is that, you know, even with death, until from a Christian perspective, this is what we mean by remembrance, right? To remember is to remember to say Christ, you know, who has died and now listen to, and same idea like you remember your parents or your loved ones or whoever has died, you're a member to them in a deeper way, in a spiritual way. And you know, again, as part mystery, so it's not meant to be explained away. But you know, what the funny thing is, when people die, we often forget all the arguments we had with them, the things that they did, we really couldn't, we couldn't stand. The many times we wish they did die, you know, something would disappear up here. And then they die and we feel this profound loss. So again, I think we're very ambivalent creatures, even with regard to death. We don't want to lose, you know, what has been, even though we say sometimes, oh, I'm so glad they're gone. We're not really glad, you know, there's something about that loss sometimes that has been meaningful for us. So even though we might have, you know, kind of doppelgangers of some sort or, you know, replicas of us in AI form, that can be reassuring to people. But then there's something about death that also is about time, and it's about evolution itself. It's about something taking place that's more than the sheer or mere on-goingness that's a larger than life, right? So I think what we're about is not just the continuation of biological life, but the continuation of life even beyond, you know, terrestrial life, cosmological life or spiritual life, and what that means. So I think AI can be of interest here, but it might also, you know, in some ways, it might mitigate or kind of blur a deeper level of our lives, yeah, our short, their kind of temporary. And that's why you kind of give it all you got in the days that you're given and the breast of life that you're given. But our contribution, I think, is immortal. And that's what. So are we just irrelevant specs in this very long process of evolution? I mean, we're only here, but 90, 100 years, maybe if you have an AI download, you'll be here much longer. But the fact is, even that's going to need to be downloaded again and updated. Like even your, your doppelganger or whatever it is, you know, is going to have to meet some tooling up. And then your children and grandchildren will die, you know, what happens to you then? Would it be said, "Well, I ain't no grandpa, so I'm not keeping this thing." Well, I think if you look at all of life, you know, our evolutionary history, you know, no individual creature or being lives for very long, and they all have a relevance. And there's a whole process that they are a part of just as, you know, no particular molecule or no particular protein really is very meaningful in the constitution of our being, you know, they're all expendable, and yet they're all, you know, they're necessary as a whole in some way. So it feels to me, it's kind of, and I think you somewhat agree is, it feels to me what's happening is that AI, which is going to lead to abundance. There's no way around that, because if you could replace human labor and manufacturing and everything else, things will be largely free and that's happened before without even disruption. I mean, who would have thought that we could make free phone calls and have free video and have free photography and, you know, all of these things that are all packaged away on your iPhone are essentially free now, so that spreads out. But it feels that the possibilities of artificial intelligence and of this creation of a new substrate for kind of rich living beings almost is, has the possibility of enabling us to retain and confront our humanity and the questions about what it really means to be human, because we won't be as busy with the everyday momentary scrambling to try and, you know, survive and maintain ourselves in some way. And I think we're going to need AI as therapists, because this is a really challenging period we're going in, and you can already see that people are using even large language models in that way to constantly talk about what they're grappling with and this and that. And I, one of those questions that I mentioned, you know, that power of questioning is, if you had your choice, and they were equally, you know, effective, would you rather interact with an AI psychiatrist or a human psychiatrist or therapist? And virtually everyone I ask that would rather an AI, because then it feels more private, it feels more, you know, you're not. Well, you can be yourself without judgment, you know, you can be yourself without any kind of human bias or, you know, sometimes even if it's a psychiatrist, you can feel oh, no, how are they going to take this or how are they going to understand this? AI is like, you know, neutral. It's just going to take what you say and respond to it. So it's kind of freeing in that way. Yeah. And that's not even with the consideration of it being available 24/7. I wake up in the middle of the night, oh, I need to talk to my therapist, okay. Yeah, I'm worried about this or that, calm down. This is not the first time technology has promised abundance or greater comfort, but who stands to benefit most? Yalia asks Greg about the economics of AI, will it become a first world luxury or something that truly serves everyone? Later, they return to a pressing civic question. For our social structures, our governments prepared for AI. And Greg closes by sharing his hopes for the future and the aims of his new book, Generation AI. As you're listening to the podcast, you might notice something. We keep circling back to questions about us. Who are we becoming in an AI-shaped world? What will it mean to be human in Generation AI? Gregory Stock has been asking those kinds of questions for decades. And with his new book, Generation AI and the transformation of human being, he's also built something to keep the conversation going beyond the book and these podcasts. It's called Only Human, an online space where every day everyone gets the same reflective questions and offers their answers. There are no right answers, just honest ones. Then, you can see how others are responding to the same questions from all over the world. Go to app.onlyhuman.us or follow the link in our show notes. Add your voice to what it means to be human in the age of AI. Is all this, so AI, the new AI-generated human, is this a first world phenomenon? Who's going to benefit from this? I think we're all going to benefit from it or we're all going to be immersed in it, and that because of the cost structure, which is that it costs a fortune, trillions of dollars to build these things, but the marginal cost of distributing them is near zero, so all of us have access to amazing potency in large language models already for free or for twenty hours a month or something, and it is made, for example, education, top notch educational experiences are now available in any language, anywhere, anytime, to anybody, basically. These things are because their costs, sort of dynamics, are become available anywhere. All you need is a portal, which becomes cheaper and cheaper, you know, a phone at the moment. If you look at something that's a real-time translator, who does that benefit? It doesn't benefit somebody in the English-speaking world where that's the common language, and we don't even know a second language and don't bother most people, but say you're growing up in some African state or somewhere in an environment where you speak none of the major languages in the world, and now, suddenly, you have access to education, you have access to communication, you could actually do work in the advanced world. Do you think that AI then can close the gap between rich and core or first and third world countries? Do you think it can, you know, reduce that gap and begin to level the playing field of, say, a globalized planetary humanity? I sort of don't like that articulation of the issue in terms of cloak in the gap, and the reason that I say that is because it feels to me that we tend to dwell on the differences in capability that different people have, and yet, what's really important is the absolute level, because we're always feeling competitive, you know, do I have this? Well, you know, whereas everybody now can fly all over the world, they basically have food, they have access to music, they have, it's amazing what the lower level, you know, the lower sort of threshold of activity is rising very, very rapidly. Some of the upper level stuff is rising even more rapidly, but it diffuses down very quickly so that the gap that you're talking about is not between the rich and the poor of one generation. The gap is between one generation and the next generation, because anything that Elon Musk that Bill Gates, that the richest person in the world can experience and derive from technology, their access to medicine, all of these things in 25 years are going to be available to everyone probably in much better way. The best computer that the richest person in the world could purchase. The best let's just look at it, translation, video messaging, video interaction, access to music, the best thing that that rich person could have purchased a generation ago does not equal what, you know, some tribes person in Africa or in, you know, an underdeveloped region of the Middle East or Asia has access to today. So it feels to me that we tend to want to have those models of oh, can the rich buy more or whatever, that this is moving so quickly to enable everyone and the challenge is going to be, I think the implementation of these things are going to be driven more by politics and by philosophy. So this comes to the question of structures or structural support for a new AI mediated humanity. In other words, I think we'd still have outdated structures politically, economically we're shifting, but we still have a kind of a higher article system, you know, operating around. But I think of say just looking at, you know, our political situation right now globally, it's a lot of male power and tribal, you know, a tribal mentality of power and strength. And, you know, even if it's over the chip war or, you know, technology and who's going to get the fastest and make the most and we would need, don't you think we will need a different political order to really mediate a new type of AI humanity? I don't have as much faith in government as I suspect that you do and that I think almost by its nature, it's solving the problems of yesterday, okay, it takes a long time for these things to percolate up and then in addition, I think the motivations of those who are in control or the ruling classes say are not really oriented towards solving problems. They're about, you know, power bases, about how they are positioned themselves, about their family, about, so I think that what's really the challenges, what happens in a world that's kind of a post-truth world where you can't really tell what's true and what isn't true and they're what's simulated and what isn't simulated. I was looking at some video the other day, you know, a stupid, that video, a big dot thing where, you know, where these cat was jumping up and protecting a child from a bear or something like that and turning to my wife and she said, oh, that's just AI, you know, that's not real and I thought, well, it really looks real, I don't know. So it's like everything, you can't tell what's real and what isn't real, it takes an enormous amount of energy to see whether what people are saying as correct or not. I think it's, so it's beyond government, it's sort of beyond. Yeah, no, I agree, to an extent, but we do need to, I think we're called to reinterpret these words of truth or one or beauty or anything like that. So they need new interpretations in light of our new reality, but I do think we're not going to escape any kind of political order and even if, you know, the guys in government are just caught up in power struggles and power plays. The fact is we need, you know, we're going to need ethical guidelines, policies, public policies. I mean, in the workforce, it's clear that, you know, a whole education work is also, and you point to the sale several times, AI is changing everything, you know, so. No, I'm thinking, let me respond more directly. Okay. It deals to me that inherent in your, in the question about government and what's going to happen with government is that government sort of is an enabling force and can smooth things in a way as kind of a leading and requisite agency in some way. In my view, I think that the real drivers are coming from technology, from other external sort of introductions into the system that reshape things dramatically. And government is just like trying to hang on. And if it's too poor, then societies will collapse, okay? Because you end up in civil war disruption or, you know, all sorts of things happen. And if it kind of muddles through, then you're kind of okay. But it's never going to be kind of the leading edge of carrying us forward. If that can happen, that's wonderful, but I think it's asking a lot. I think Taylor kind of eludes to this, you know, and his ideas on planetization, but, you know, what I can envision is, instead of the kind of tribal competitions that are going on now with, you know, who's going to be more powerful with technology, imagine we had of it, A.I. mediated world, it could mediate a new type of political arrangement or connections between, say, U.S., China, Russia, you know, Italy, Europe, and we would get rid of, you know, world leaders and maybe put in place sort of maybe an A.I. data center effect, you know. I mean, we would have a new kind of politicization that can really, we don't have a political order that can really mediate global community. I mean, think about, you know, socially, educationally, you know, scientifically, how many scientists are just collaborating across many kind of geographical domains. So we're in this space already on many levels, but politically, we're, you know, we're just old school, you know, it's just like yesterday. And I think that kind of friction between the political order and what's taking place in other levels of A.I. mediated life, this is why it's difficult, we're conflicted, we're, you know, we're not sure where to do the government's constraining that A.I. is pulling us. So we need something else to mediate and to support, like I think of these structures as supportive structures, like any cell or anything biological, we'll have a supportive structure that enables the physiological or biological, you know, flow or mechanisms to work more synergistically. But I think we have work to do. And I think A.I. can be a great help. That's really what I'm saying is. Yeah, I think that you're pressing in a, in a sort of a roundabout way, something that I would say more simply, which is that I think that the problems of human motivations and human control over the powerful elements of A.I. and weaponry and, you know, biotechnology and everything, that the danger is having humans with all of their flaws and inadequacies, controlling these extraordinarily powerful technologies in ways that, you know, it doesn't take a government, individuals can wreak havoc and are doing so increasingly. So to me, we'll be safer when there are artificial intelligence and sort of there are systems that are built in to be self-protective and sort of self-writing in various ways and are sort of making more sensible decisions about how to expand resources, how to use them to maximize well-being and those sorts of things. So that this idea that, oh, we wouldn't want to let A.I. be in control because then we're really screwed. Take brother, he's upside down, the real challenge is when people, and you can already see it with all of the cyber attacks and all of the, you know, the potency that can be wielded by very small clusters of people. What is your final word or, you know, what's your hope for this new book? My hope for it is that we begin on a large scale to be interacting around the kinds of questions that we were dealing with today, which there are no answers to. There's no right and wrong answers. But begin to grapple with those possibilities because if we don't, I think we're in deep trouble because we're going to be blindsided by them in terms of employment, in terms of all sorts of things, that are just, there's so many people that are very, are not thinking at all about these sorts of issues and aren't even aware at the depth and the power of what is occurring. This is so true. Can I just add here, you know, I'm at two universities, two Catholic universities, both of which, want a sideline, like, they want to talk about it, but in a very circumscribed way, like we have to be careful about it, we have to make sure it doesn't, you know, impact our humanities. And I'm like, oh my god, this is so crazy, you know? And so sometimes on the level of higher education, we're actually working against ourselves by trying to contain AI so that we can remain human with our humanities and our ancient philosophies and our historical knowledge that we have, and I'm like, I don't know how kids do it today, you know, because. So let me take that point and make a comment about it. If you think about that, that all sounds very good, okay, we want to retain our humanity, we want to go slowly with them, but you could look at it in another way and you could say, the world is changing dramatically and education itself is completely out of touch with the new technologies and possibilities and could very easily collapse, traditional education, because, you know, one can get access to all sorts of amazing thinkers in powerful ways and explainers and everything. So that's an example of what happens in government as well, where people make all these arguments, but the reality is, they're very much protecting their favored position in, you know, protecting the structures that are supporting them. And we have never been at a point when I said I wanted to ignite a global conversation. I mean it, we could be talking with people in other languages, not even aware what languages people are interacting with, seeing how people respond to these issues of values. I mean, the possibility of assembling that almost overnight, I call it the map of human identity, that's my goal is to create that kind of disintermediation, where we're not looking for expert answers, we're like talking to one another and looking into ourselves, understanding who we are, understanding who other people are in a deep way and about society and values and beliefs and it feels to me that's what has to happen. That's a fabulous idea and I hope that's your next, you know, that's what you're going to be working on. This book is the start of it and the QR codes where people can answer questions and begin to interact with one another. So thanks for having me on your show. A special thanks to Greg Stock. Be sure to explore his latest book, Generation AI, and join the community of readers engaging these big questions. Next time, Ilya speaks with philosopher of consciousness, Aubrey Fournier. As always, I'm Robert Nakastro. Thanks for listening.