This was an empirical study that aimed to characterize evidence of gender bias in ChatGPT. Understanding social biases in generative AI is key to understanding of human flourishing in the age of AI.
Several chapters focus on how humans understand AI, and how AI affects the way we read and interpret the Bible. The rest of the chapters address AI and the changes coming to promote the Bible in thousands of new languages.
In this text, Ellul makes a critical point about technology that cuts against one of the enduring myths around it's development and use, namely that technology is "neutral". Ellul argues that all technology has an embedded ideology, specifically the desire for efficiency, and that this desire deeply impacts both how we use technology and how we see the world. He unpacks the implications for our society of the dominance of this ideology.
A scheme for human progress based on science and planetary management — was the basis for a club founded by Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, who later spoke of “human potentialities”
This is a story about a society that enjoys peace, harmony, and technological advancement at the cost of one small child's misery. The story succinctly encapsulates the ethical quandaries of AI and our technofuture.
Freud provides a roadmap for a sensible and logical approach to that most human of activities: dreaming. This book isn't important for the People's Canon in that it tells us how to correctly interpret dreams. Instead, it shows us how psychoanalysis sought out methods for translating the numinous into legible data archives located within individual consciousness. In this way, Freud exemplifies the drive toward explaining the ineffable in as close to material and individual terms as possible that formulates the ideological underpinnings of AI's rhetoric.
AI makes consideration of a post-scarcity society far more than theoretical. If automation can take care of humanity’s necessities then the ennui and boundless leisure time that many of the characters in Gatsby grapple with will become fixtures of most people’s lives. Understanding Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the perils of hedonistic lifestyles can inform human understanding of the risks that could prevent flourishing as a result of endless leisure time.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus dramatizes the fragility and constructedness of identity in a way that feels urgent in the age of AI. Through stories of cloning, memory, and colonial domination, Wolfe forces us to confront how the self may not be some sort of indivisible essence but something that is shaped, copied, and manufactured.
As AI begins to challenge our assumptions about consciousness, creativity, and authenticity, Wolfe’s work is obviously relevant. It suggests that flourishing may not come from rigidly defending the boundaries of traditional ideas on humanity, rather we need to cultivate a new understanding grounded in humility. We need to gain a new sense of humility in acknowledging that human consciousness and creativity are not sovereign or absolute, but part of a larger ecology of intelligences, whether AI or institutional.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus reminds us that human flourishing in the age of AI may depend less on superiority or mastery, and more on our willingness to reimagine what it means to be human: as a shared, ongoing project of recognition, responsibility, and renewal.
