IDEA 16
Artificial Intelligence
When faced with the reality of growth, life, death, and resurrection, an intelligent response is not to revert to meaningless, impersonal regurgitation of data, like a server, but to gratefully accept what Reality means for me, as a servant. As a person, I was created not only to process meaning, but to interact with it. (IIQ, page 382)
Long before what we now call AI — perhaps as long as there have been academies, ivory towers, and self-styled sophists and scholars — mankind has been plagued with droves of the artificially intelligent.
I should perhaps interject a disclaimer here before my harangue. I enjoy the products of scholarship. I am an avid reader of insightful articles and books that could not have been written without the labours of scholars. So thank GOD we have them, and may He grant me some of their giftedness.
Now I can continue my rant against the clear trend over the past few centuries to identify such work with intelligence, and especially the kind of intelligence rated so highly in the Qur’an. Muhammad (may GOD bless him and give him peace) was far more intelligent than we can even comprehend, let alone imitate, and he was not a scholar. He was illiterate, as the Qur’an makes clear in several verses, and yet his knowledge was, though not infinite, immeasurable by our standards.
He was intelligent by Divine Standards, which is to say that he responded with his whole being to the cosmic message found not just in the words of the Qur’an but in this multidimensional university of life otherwise known as Reality.
His knowledge did not body forth in manuscripts or videos, but radiated from his speech, his gestures, his facial expressions, his lifestyle, his vigour and restraint, his joys and sorrows, his struggles and his moments of rest, and above all in his worship. It was a knowledge that anyone could learn from and all of us can practise, each in a way that suits our own character and circumstances.
This was the kind of knowledge that we repeatedly find in verses such as this: When the signs of the Most Gracious were recited unto them, they fell down in prostration and in tears. (Q19:58)
A response like that cannot be programmed, except as a command to a soulless robot. Most of our intelligentsia today also lack the awareness and motivation to even start to make such a movement of the spirit. They might have a reputation for intelligence, but it remains artificial.
Download the PDF version for free at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’ān – Mont Redmond complete version, or purchase a hard copy at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an: Redmond, Mont: 9781738842506: Books – Amazon.ca.
