Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us

at to mystic institute.org. We live in a wondrous time in which artificial intelligence

is increasingly and impressively a part of our daily lives. It answers questions on our phones.

It chooses the advertisements that we see, and it recommends our next

musical selection. With each release of chat GPT and the progressive introduction sometimes

mere hours later, of chat enabled derivations that now beckoned to us in social media services

and even academic research websites, contemporary techniques stand at the

threshold of artificially intelligent tools that, in professional interaction, casual

conversation, and perhaps someday even shallow romantic relationships, seem persuasively personal.

Small wonder that two years ago, Google engineer Blake Lemoyne declared his personal opinion,

for which he was later fired, that Lambda, one of Google's chatbots, was indeed conscious.

Long before humanoid robots will look like us, we are already having

conversations with our smartphones that evoke from us much of the empathy that adults habitually

reserve for their fellow human beings. This situation will only be intensified. Soon, by subscription, we will be able

to own the services of assistants and companions that will feel as if they are persons.

Concerning such a future, we must wonder, what is it that we will have made? And more importantly, what will we make

ourselves become? In the remainder of this talk, I'd like to pose four questions. First, how does

an apparently personal AI work? Second, what is it? Third, what might we become by our use of it? And fourth,

how might we seek to live a fully human life with such AIs? So first, how does it work?

...