More than 1,000 people attended this week’s CCA lecture series on artificial intelligence — the largest number ever to attend a wintertime CCA, according to Executive Director of Programs Matt Bell.

Guests gathered in Hillsdale’s Plaster Auditorium and overflow seating in the Searle Center to attend the four-day CCA lecture series, which explored the consequences of human interaction with artificial intelligence. 

Speakers in the lecture series discussed the decision humans have to make between responsibly using a tool or embracing AI as either an alternative or enhancement to human nature.

Mattias Desmet, professor of psychology at the University of Ghent, spoke about the importance of keeping a religious view of man and connection instead of the “mechanist-rationalists” who trust only in reason.

“The mechanist-rationalist worldview in which the entire universe is considered to be a rational machine, a view in which this large machine can be understood completely in a rational way,” Desmet said. “The guiding principle in our society is no longer an ethical principle. It’s considered to be rational knowledge.”

Desmet said the rationalist worldview views reason as the only truth, as long as the truth leads to survival. AI, he said, is a purely rational machine. 

“We are on the verge of the final stage of the enlightenment culture, the final stage of the machinist culture where we will expect the machine to speak the truth, where we will ask ChatGPT or AI to tell us what is right,” Desmet said.

Desmet warned against losing interpersonal connections, as that is what keeps individuals from the solitude that leads to overreliance on materialistic ideas.

“We are on the verge of the ultimate de-souling of the world,” he said. “The soul gets completely lost in the process of mechanizing the world. We have to re-ask what it means for a human being to speak the truth.” 

In a talk titled “Transhumanism and AI,” Aaron Kheriaty, director of bioethics and American democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, spoke about transhumanism’s attempt to incorporate a fully material view of man, in which the content of the mind is reduced to data in a massive computing system.

“We will have no use of our body. We’ll find the technological means to live forever,” Kheriaty said. “Transhumanism taps into unfulfilled aspirations and longings. It’s a substitution for our secular age.”

Kheriaty said those who control AI will control what it means to be human through its incorporation of big data, AI, robotics, and nanotechnology into political, economic, and medical institutions.

“Elites may gain the power to engineer the power of life itself,” Kheriaty said. “This will not just be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, it will be the greatest revolution in the history of biology, four billion years ago.”

William Gertz, author of “Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy,” spoke about how China is already using AI to control its own citizens. 

“It’s not designed to make life better for the nation,” Gertz said. “It’s solely to maintain an iron grip on power in the CCP.” 

With the help of AI, the Chinese government is already conducting mass surveillance, suppression of opposition, and its social credit system, Gertz said. Chinese citizens can no longer speak against the party.

“The Great Firewall is to both block information from coming into China and from going out,” Gertz said. “AI is able to do this in a much more rapid way. This technology can scan the entire internet than these censures.”

According to Robert Epstein, researcher at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, artificial intelligence has the potential to destroy the human race.

In his speech, titled “AI as a Tool of Manipulating Public Opinion,” Epstein said AI is as powerful as it has ever been before. Epstein said AI was used to influence voters during the 2024 election.

“We could find out whether Google was showing people unbiased search results or whether they were biased toward one candidate or another,” Epstein said. “Ninety-five percent of donations went to Democrats. A big tech company — a private company — was messing with our elections.”

While some people dismiss the idea of AI being an imminent danger, Epstein warned the situation is more dire.

“AI has crossed the line,” Epstein said. “I don’t care whether it thinks like humans or not. It’s extremely powerful right now. AIs are pretty much running all the software.”

Epstein said the best remedy for this issue is to expose it.

“Some day, historians are going to look back on this period in time and say ‘these humans were fools because they built these monsters and never built in any protections,’” Epstein said.

In his speech “Why Computers Can’t Think the Same Way We Do,” computer scientist and author Erik Larson said humans are not in danger of AI outsmarting and subverting them.  

“AI has invested first in deduction, now in induction. Those are not the powerful forms of inference that we have available to us as human beings,” Larson said.

Larson said the constraints of AI’s own system forces it to invent facts in an effort to make the user happy.

“There’s no greater proof that there’s still a gap between minds and machines,” Larson said. “We’re at this inflection point in history where we can see that we have a really powerful AI and yet it has no mind.”

Larson proposed a positive approach to AI innovation. 

“Nobody ever constructs an artifact without a specific purpose,” Larson said. “Eventually, we’re going to have a new way to look at these problems. We’re not going to be bound by heavenly AI and fearsome AI — we’re going to be able to look at our culture and ask what we want from AI.” 

Larson said as an artifact, AI is ultimately a static entity, only moved when acted upon.

“The systems have very limited utility,” Larson said. “There’s constantly things in the physical world that eclipse a model that thinks the world is just a collection of words.”

Attendees said they appreciated the lecturers’ perspectives.

“As usual, it was excellent,” guest Anita Parrot said. “There were great speakers who gave a lot of information. It would help a lot of people make up their minds about AI.” 

Freshman Masha Logvin said she attended the CCA out of curiosity. 

“It seemed like a relevant topic in the modern sphere of things,” Logvin said. “The technologization of the present and how everything is being introduced in the mainstream seemed fascinating.”