GEORGE PITCHER: The humanity of business linked to AI

The professional world seems to be splitting roughly into three in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

A third of us have an aphorism for it as a pound shop. If I had a fiver for every joke and cliché, I would take all of you, dear readers, for a big Christmas lunch – and then we would go somewhere nice.

You know the kind of thing: 'Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence time and time again' or 'artificial intelligence lacks artifice and therefore intelligence'.

I believe that what is missing in AI is the same thing that is missing in artificial insemination: a human body.

My Christmas message will shortly discuss what being human means in the business context. But first the other two groups. One of them predicts unprecedented commercial benefits from AI. The third screams that the robots are coming to kill us.

None of these three groups, from the smart alecs to the technocrats, come close to cracking it.

But in terms of the public good, the most worrying group is the over-enthusiastic techies: carpetbaggers trying to convince us that AI is a miraculous elixir to cure all ills in business.

Some of you may have encountered these types in the media and marketing professions. AI-powered analytics are capable of processing unlimited amounts of data so that sales campaigns can be practically targeted to us as individual consumers.

“Salespeople” of the future on your smartphone may be robots indistinguishable from their former human equivalents. Admittedly, if you follow me, this may not just have to do with the cleverness of the machines. Then we have the masters (and, disturbingly, relatively few mistresses) of the tech universe.

This is where some of our best human brains try to artificially replicate themselves. The problem and the danger is that some of them try to do this without due regard for their – and our – humanity.

Take the corporate chaos at OpenAI, host of the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, which has spawned a million student essays.

OpenAI is credited by financial information group Bloomberg with starting the “global race for artificial intelligence supremacy.” Yet management behaves like a playground gang, worse than our House of Commons.

Founding chief executive Sam Altman was ousted by his board for not being 'candid in his communications', then hastily reinstated just five days later when an open staff revolt threatened collapse.

A mature management of the kind that reassures global investors, that was certainly not the case. But it's not actually the AI ​​that's scary here. It is the insensitivity of the people in charge.

It is said that AI will threaten the jobs of junior and middle management and free senior management to focus on important matters. The problem comes when the important things are seen solely as profit and power motives, rather than people and their hopes and fears for the future.

This is where the Christmas story, among countless other things, offers us a leadership lesson in management.

It's all too often said that AI could take on godlike qualities, become omnipotent over humans, and that we could ultimately serve machines, rather than the other way around. But that's not what Christmas teaches us about being God-like (with a capital G, note).

The story of the incarnation – the birth of the Christ child – is about power that makes itself vulnerable. There is nothing more vulnerable than a baby born into poverty. Yet this humility is growing and leading to the greatest global faith the world has ever known.

Corporate leadership consistently views vulnerability as weakness. The same goes for humility. In this season we might consider how the greatest power on earth chooses to lead. AI cannot be like God. If it were, in the Christian sense of the word, it would offer itself to suffer and die for humanity, rather than trying to dominate it. But it will do neither of those things because it lacks – completely – humanity and consciousness.

The greatest purpose in life is not to dominate, but to live, to give and to love. That is our Christmas message.

And another thing. Many managements, like those at OpenAI, would do well to be reminded of a gospel imperative this time of year: that we must come to serve, rather than to be served. Merry christmas.

• George Pitcher is a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.