From Blackboards to Black Vestments: Where Do We Put Our Trust?

Experts' "blah blah" words, the inevitability narrative, and digital theophanies

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533

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From Blackboards to Black Vestments: Where Do We Put Our Trust

“Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either.”

- G.K. Chesterton

It’s a cold midweek evening in January, and a friend is giving us a private tour of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. From the outside the building looks like a space station, with black aluminum walls and slanted golden windows, and from the inside its flowing angular spaces of concrete and glass give it the feel of S.T.A.R. Labs of DC Comics. You feel you might just run into The Flash, although more likely it would be the ghost of Stephen Hawking, who had an office here for a time.

This is a place of big ideas. There are chalkboards everywhere¹. Hundreds of physicists and students work at the Institute and go through over 6000 pieces of chalk each year, scratching out equations on cosmology and quantum reality and everything in between. The equations are everywhere, in every glass-walled office and seminar room and even in the bistros, the numbers and symbols scrawled out in white dust like alien languages. Being here makes you want to be a mathematician. Makes you want to ponder big ideas.

Here’s one of the blackboards we passed by.

Tonight, in the Institute’s auditorium, a panel of experts has gathered to discuss one of those big ideas: Artificial Intelligence: Should it Be Trusted? It begins with an inspirational video filled with images of great explorers, from the scientific to the aesthetic, from Albert Einstein to David Bowie, set to inspirational music that stirs a sense of impending wonder. As the video draws to a close, a bearded assistant raises his hands and begins to clap, which is the pre-arranged cue for the audience to start applauding as the panelists take the stage.

There’s an industry rep, two professors, and a NASA researcher, while the moderator is an engineering director from Google. With so much brain power, we’re hoping to see ideas clash. Whether we should trust AI has been on a lot of people’s minds since Chat GPT went viral in early 2023. The man from NASA points out it took humans 300,000 years to master language, but it took AI about a year². That’s a bit unsettling. What’s coming next?