The Last Word
Fr. David Sherry
District Superior of Canada
Dear Reader,
The time has come for us to speak of Benny. Benny (or Benedict to give him his full title), is the priory parrot. Indeed, he could be said to be a paradigm among parrots, for, while all parrots remember some things and parrot them, Benny remembers all and says all.
One particularly embarrassing incident happened at table one day. Brother Zosimus, the cook, asked if the food was good. With a charitable regard for Brother Zosimus’s feelings, all hastened to affirm that yes, the food was good. Benny then chipped in with a gem he had heard ten years ago. “There’s more than one way of being good. Squawk.”
Awkward silence from us, cackle from Benny.
But of course, Benny was right. When necessary, there is more than one way of a meal being good. It might be good for nutrition, it might be good for taste, it might be good for dieting and, when charity requires, it can be at the very least good for exercising the spirit of mortification.
Which, by a roundabout route, brings us to artificial intelligence. Surely, there is more than one way that a computer can be called intelligent. It’s clearly not intelligent in itself as true intelligence is the action of a spirit, not of a material thing. Our human intelligence, for example, has three acts: apprehension, judgment and reasoning. I apprehend what is the essence of, say, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the essence of tasty and I judge that these two concepts are not compatible. Trading on this and on my true knowledge of the four last things, I reason that if eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is so bad, what must hell be like? Whereas a computer, using a so-called “large language model” by which it is “artificially intelligent” simply remembers everything that the machine has seen and regurgitates something based on the calculations of what one word is most likely to follow another, all according to the instructions of the intelligence which programmed it.
In fact, come to think of it, it’s quite like Benny, whom I know not to be intelligent. Although sometimes, I do wonder…
Fr. David Sherry