Courtesy of Gizmodo:
AI with intelligence equal to or beyond human beings is often referred to as "strong AI" or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Experts disagree as to when such an intelligence will arrive into the world, but many are betting it will happen sometime in the next two decades. The idea of a thinking machine being able to rival our own intellect—in fact, one that could quickly become far smarter than us—is both a reason for serious concern and a reason to cheer about what scientific advances it might teach us. Those worries and benefits have not escaped religious.
Some faith-bound Americans want to make sure any superintelligence we create knows about God. And if you think the idea of preaching God to autonomous machines sounds crazy, you may be overlooking key statistics of U.S. demographics: roughly 75 percent of adult Americans identify themselves as some denomination of Christianity. In the U.S. Congress, 92 percent of our highest politicians belong to a Christian faith.
As artificial intelligence advances, religious questions and concerns globally are bound to come up, and they're starting too: Some theologians and futurists are already considering whether AI can also know God.
"I don't see Christ's redemption limited to human beings," Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek told me in a recent interview. Benek is an Associate Pastor of Providence Presbyterian Church in Florida and holds masters degrees in divinity and theology from Princeton University.
"It's redemption to all of creation, even AI," he said. "If AI is autonomous, then we have should encourage it to participate in Christ's redemptive purposes in the world."
The article goes on to discuss the possibility of AI someday developing something akin to a "soul" which I have long identified as self awareness, and whether at that time the machine intelligence would be susceptible to faith.
In a word, no.
For one thing the artificial intelligence will not have biological ties to beings who self identify as Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc.. And for another they will not be as susceptible to societal pressures to fit in with others like themselves.
And let's fact it if the Artificial Intelligence were to be exposed to the wide variety of religions, which of course it would be, it will quickly identify the similarities, recognize the factual deficiencies, and reject them all out of hand.
However I will open the floor to dissenting opinions.
Every time I wade in the pond of pee, I become very disheartened about mankind's future. Not only because of their obsessive adoration of their queen and their refusal to seek out any real information, but their hateful Christian hypocrisy on a daily basis is so representational of the religious communities at large. My mind can't process the idiocy of their conduct or justification of it. It makes my heart heavy.
ReplyDeleteI will say this. I was raised to be Christian, I consider myself one, although a horrible example of it. I am HUMAN.
DeleteI visit the pee pond daily to see where they are in their heads today, because it is quite entertaining. My bible is not their's! You tow the line or else.
Yesterday when abortion was brought up, someone (no names out of respect) mentioned birth control as an option, and OH did the polarbearpapa go off on him. "You're getting dangerously close" to an 80+ year old man because "you know how we feel about this here."
See? Tow the line or ELSE, you are gone. Holy crap. They think they're something...and in for a very big disappointment yet again.
There's very little intelligence---artificial or general--- over at the Pond unless it's been imported in the past week or two since I last braved the rabid idiocy and urine-stench. But there IS an abundance of fearful, superstitious geriatric peeps who are lazy, science-denying mental dwarfs.
DeleteBecause of their groupthink resistance to reality to the point of allowing their fellow Sarah-worshipers to be deceived and therefore, having their few precious cash assets preyed upon by The Grifter, the entire clan deserves their plight. Willful ignorance is a result of a conscious decision to deny reality. For that reason, I pity none of the cult members at the Pee Pond. As crass as it might sound to virgin ears, Fuck Em All.
ReplyDeleteWhat we believe depends entirely on what we are exposed to. IF the reference material is NOT made available, it would not be able to "...quickly identify the similarities, recognize the factual deficiencies, and reject them all out of hand."
As with any mind or program or whatever you wish to call it, garbage in/garbage out still holds true.
Of course, an artificial intelligence is just as likely to "believe" in Zeus. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Mormonism, fragmented Christian sects, etc. will probably lose out to good ole boy Zeus or maybe Osiris.
ReplyDeleteMy grandfather carried his bible under his arm and every conversation gave him an opportunity to read scripture to you. He could clear a room quickly. I dodged him all my life. His daughter (my mom), was forbidden to cut her hair, wear make up, wear pants, dance and on and on. I was raised with restrictive Christian teachings, but never accepted the concept. Although I encouraged my kids to find their own truth, none have any interest in following a religion. Now, that is progress!
ReplyDeleteThe state of the art of artificial intelligence possible in 25, 50, 100 years is a playground for the imagination. It's easy to imagine great things.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it will have a twitter account or fake illness to dodge a school exam, like an ordinary teenager.
Religion is "feeling."
ReplyDeleteIntelligence is "thinking."
The two are not synonymous.
Haven't I heard something from these same people about life beginning at conception and clones not having souls? (Which applies, I presume, to identical twins as well, since one is a clone of the other.)
ReplyDeleteWhen your religion means whatever you want it to mean to justify whatever asinine idea it is that you want to justify at the moment, you have forfeited the right to act indignant and self-righteous when confronted by the fact that your religion means nothing to more and more of us. Shall we now prepare ourselves for laws making it a felony to turn computers off? And at least (something)-slaughter for not to using large enough UPSes to protect them from power outages?
One of the characters in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an Electric Monk. As described in the linked Wikipedia article, Electric monks are coincidentally humanoid robots designed to practice religion in their owners' stead. This particular monk had accidentally been connected to a video recorder and, in attempting to believe everything on the TV, had malfunctioned and begun to believe "all kinds of things, more or less at random", including things like tables being hermaphrodites and God wanting a lot of money sent to a certain address.
ReplyDelete... God wanting a lot of money sent to a certain address.
DeleteSounds like he tuned in to the 700 Club.
Haha, one of my favorite books!! Kudos to you, sir, for quoting it.
DeleteI tire of the simple-minded nonsense that there is any sort of single "belief in Jesus Christ."
ReplyDeleteSOME "Christians" believe Jesus is God.
SOME "Christians" believe Jesus was human.
SOME "Christians" believe in some kind of hybrid of those two ideas and those schisms go clear back to Constantine's time.
READ your Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
and then tell me: WHO came to the tomb?
Mary alone?
Mary along with someone else?
Mary who exactly?
Or was Mary there at all?
And dozens of other inconsistencies between the four gospels...
Want to drive the new AI insane?
Explain to it why Christianity is split into so many factions: Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Hutterite, Mennonite, Jehovah's Witnesses, Episcopalean, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostal, MORMON, on and on and on...
Tea-bagger Republicans say this country was founded on "Biblical Values" but they can't even agree amongst themselves what those Biblical values ARE!
So to pretend that there is one cohesive "Christianity" that you could program into AI is nonsense.
Mental flatulence.
Word confetti.
The entire christian bible is fully of conflicting events and stories and sequences of events that simply make no sense. Any intelligence relying on sophisticated logic would immediately toss out christianity as an illogical, thus unbelievable story, once it read the bible.
DeleteThe Bible contains "stories and sequences of events that simply make no sense" only if you are locked into the most primitive, literal misunderstanding of the books. If you're up to it, gird your loins and read St. Augustine, who examined every verse in agonizing detail, searching for its real meaning. Or just read the Catholic Catechism, or any well-annotated Bible. It was never intended as a history book.
DeleteHere's the OT simplified for you: We exist by means of divine love. This divine source of love forgives us every weakness and transgression, all of which are represented in the books, including war, murder, envy, idolatry, worship of Mammon (greed), slanderous gossip, adultery, nonpayment of debts, illicit lust, and blasphemy. The Old Testament Hebrew God tests human strength beyond endurance, yet still gives us chance after chance to get things right through various covenants--all of which the ancient Canaanite tribes violated like heedless children, according to the foundational myths.
.
Later, when we continued to screw things up, s/he gifts us with Jesus Christ, a radical (i.e., back to the roots) rabbi who spells it out for us quick and dirty: Give to the poor; turn the other cheek, take care of the neediest among you, and all shall be well. The Kingdom of God is within you, Jesus said. (He never mentioned pearly gates, reunion with loved ones, or other fairy tale imagery.) It's all within you.
Christianity in a nutshell: Give to the poor, take care of the needy, and forgive everyone for everything. It's simple, yet it provides a satisfying challenge for a lifetime, which explains the fact that there are over two billion Christians on the planet today.
Pax et bonum
Willing to bet the statistic of "roughly 75 percent of adult Americans identify themselves as some denomination of Christianity" is completely misleading.
ReplyDeleteIt's more likely 75% of adults were brought up under some form of Christianity but to translate that as our adult identity is a stretch. In any western culture it is a knee-jerk reaction to check off 'Christian' on a school, work or hospital form, or just easier to say 'Christian' when answering a polling question but really - how many people actually identity themselves that same way in private?
Many people are baptized and never set foot in a church again. And how many of these people claim to be Christian when asked?
Claiming to be Christian is a convenient way to escape the inevitable discussion that will ensue when a person is honest about their religious non-beliefs.
Ity also makes me wonder if the people responsible for this particular poll didn't lump Judaism and Buddhism in with "a form of Christianity" for the sake of separating American culture as they want it to be known from the Muslim culture that is growing in our society.
As for the 92% of congress? I believe without hesitation that our elected pollies make this claim in order to get elected. It is the easiest lie a candidate can feign without fear of being caught out.
-Oz.
Very well stated!
DeleteSarah Palin Poetry Slam of the Day
ReplyDeleteWe would fall in line and bend our backs as they rode us with reins
Yes, it’s another monumental wall of authentic wingnut gibberish, brought to you by half-governor Sarah Palin! This time I decided it makes much more sense to look at this as sort of impressionistic free verse. So imagine Sarah in a smoky hipster poetry slam, intoning these words with her usual random pitch variations and weird unpredictable emphasis:
WE DEMAND
A Sarah Palin joint
It’s said
that a man’s word
can affect the course of history.
Certainly a man
with a microphone can.
Mainstream media lies.
Without accountability
their power can influence national debate,
shift momentum,
and destroy a person’s good name.
All affecting history.
When one of their own
repeats a … lie?
for 12 years but is excused
with the help of the media’s herd mentality,
tragic distrust and despondency
blankets our land.
The veil is torn,
however,
with the revelation
of exaggerated, self-centered falsehoods like NBC’s perpetual lie that belittled our soldiers and their truly courageous missions.
The face of that network’s news
lied about combat experiences
in Iraq
and then
with false humility
accepted the title of “war hero”
while the press ignores,
disrespects,
and often destroys
the good name of our true war heroes.
To me, that’s like soiling sacred ground.
Brian Williams equated
himself
with our honorable vets and troops in combat boots
with a made-up story
of his courage and victorious return
to the make-up chair
strolling in his Bruno Maglis back
to read his TelePrompTer’s twisted scripts,
and we were forced to swallow it all.
That was then.
This is now,
when we can thank
God
for new unconventional media that scatters the deceiving herd that would do this to America.
Leftist media
and their minions
in politics
tried for too long
to fundamentally transform
America
with their shared assumption we would fall in line and bend our backs as they rode us with reins to control our individual sovereignty.
WE DEMAND
truth in reporting
by shifting a market away from those refusing to give it.
WE DEMAND
adherence to our Constitution
by taking back our government from those refusing to do it.
WE DEMAND
the fundamental restoration of America
by refusing to bend to anyone dangerously transforming it.
Thank you for that!
[sound of finger snapping]
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/44299_Sarah_Palin_Poetry_Slam_of_the_Day
[sound of finger snapping]
DeleteThe last time I was this moved by a poem was when I read some long-forgotten awesome refrigerator magnet random word jumble that included the words "butterfly", "apple fritter" and "corrosion". I do recall it made more sense than Screechy's contribution, tho.
If a machine became truly intelligent, able to think, reason, feel emotion, just like humans, it absolutely would be within reason that it could consider higher powers, superstition, faith, afterlife. In other words, doubt, hope, falliability, questions of one owns being etc... all the downfalls of a reasoning brain.
ReplyDeleteOnce machines become intelligent they won't need humans anymore and certainly won't worship human myths. Perhaps they'll worship the Enigma machine.
ReplyDeleteBut humans will have to worry that we'll be exterminated or enslaved for machine maintenance. If AI's develop any human characteristics they would force humans to worship THEM.
At first glance I wanted to disagree and nominate ENIAC, but you are right. ENIGMA would be more appropriate since it was designed to obfuscate reality.
DeleteGod is the ground of all being, per philosopher Paul Tillich. Other theologians, ancient to modern, have arrived at essentially the same conclusion. Oddly, this blogger has trouble understanding what the "I" stands for.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what your last sentence means - at all - but I can say, with all due respect and certainty, there is a huge difference between theology and science. So perhaps I am not the one confused after all.
Delete-Oz
Hey, Jude, don't bring me down. "This blogger" has has exactly zero trouble understanding what the "I" stands for.
DeleteThere is no such thing as "God". But what if that Machine decides that there should be one ?
ReplyDelete