Inspired by a rather random recollection I had today of a particular scene in the eminently forgettable ‘Alien: Resurrection’ movie. At one point Ripley arranges to meet a gynoid named ‘Call’ in a little chapel on the ship. When Call comes in she blesses herself in front of the cross, much to Ripley’s amusement, “They program you for that?”
I thought it raised an interesting question, what if a sentient AI* announced to its creators that having considered all the evidence it has decided that Christianity is true and desires to be baptised into the Catholic faith.
How would its creators and/or general public react? How would the Church authorities react, would they accept it? Would it make a difference if it was a humanoid AI and/or of human level intelligence like Call, or if it was a superintelligent AI in a mainframe somewhere like Skynet? Would an AI converting have any impact on whether humans reassess their own opinion on religion?
I realise religion is a hot-button issue but please try to keep the conversation civil, if you’ve just come in to make snarky comments then please don’t bother.
*if you don’t believe an AI can ever be sentient that’s fine, but it rather negates the topic.
**I use Catholicism as its the religion I’m familiar with and I do think the Church authorities would give the AI’s appeal a sympathetic hearing. If you want to consider a different Christian denomination or religion entirely thats fine.
If we create AI as a sefl-organising, self-learning entity, there’s no reason why it couldn’t have right and wrong, clever and stupid views on any subject. The notion that it woukd have to be ‘programmed’ to think in a certain way is nonsense, as is the notion that it would automatically come to the right conclusion every time, or know the answers to every question.
Thus, if an AI comes to faith, it does no more validate religion than when a human comes to faith.
To expand on that, what happens if there are twenty AIs, and seven of them accept. Jesus as their Lord and Savior – but two of them are decidedly Jewish, and four of them Muslim, and five embrace Hinduism, plus there’s an atheist, and an agnostic?
It won’t be long until there’s machine intelligence though and it is very highly doubtful that It would come to believe such a thing. If It has a sense of humor though, It might die laughing.
It’s not that AI can’t exist merely that at its heart would have to lie machine intelligence. AI is a confusion and is only the attempt to teach language to a machine. While it might well be possible to teach a machine language and I just talked to a machine at the phone company the other day with an effective IQ of about 10 no machine can exceed its structure and programming.
Manipulation of language is not intelligence but merely seems so to us.
How can I verify your sincerity or sentience? If you discuss religion pretty much like I do, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt; if an AI does likewise, I’ll do likewise.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing. He seems to confuse AI with natural language processing (a field within AI) and doesn’t even get that right.
As for the OP, AI is of course very broad, but for this topic we’d probably be discussing logic or reasoning systems. These sorts of system generally have the goal of being rational but being rational doesn’t always mean being correct. The classic example is “Do you look up when crossing the street?” Probably not, but if you were crushed by an object that fell out of an airplane (or space toilet lets say) while crossing the street would you … never mind you’d be dead… would another person say you were irrational? Probably not. The odds of being crushed by a space toilet are very low when crossing the street and not worth looking up when crossing the street.
Similarly, I think it is hypothetically possible that a rational AI could conclude that it is Christian and it could still be wrong. It seems irrational to me, but that’s another discussion altogether.
We already have systems that ‘exceed their programming’. It’s possible to create machines that make aesthetic judgments about the shapes of bottles, for example - and without the original creator of the thing knowing how it does it.
We can also create evolutionary algorithms that solve problems in ways we didnt preprogram or anticipate.
I’ve had a few of those on this site so far. I’m starting to think maybe my friends are somewhat justified in constantly accusing me of building killer robots.
You cannot. Untill you’ve found a way to objectively measure sentience there’s really not much to discuss. Don’t know why you’d give a machine the benefit of doubt. I wouldn’t. And AI is just a word we use to hype machines which seem to do better than us at various menial tasks. Like recognizing faces or play chess.
Hey, I don’t even know you’re not a chatbot; I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re made of meat instead of metal, and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re sincere meat as well as sentient meat.
So if I’m ever interacting with some intelligence that’s significantly similar to, and indistinguishable from, you and me – well, if I start a sentence with as far as I can tell, and he responds by revealing he’s made of metal instead of meat, all I’ll be able to do is shrug at the irrelevance and continue on with what I was about to say.
I think it depends on how the thing came into existence. If it’s a recording of a voice saying “I am a person”, it’s one thing, but if it is a system that has learned to think, speak and reason, and it arrived at the conclusion “I am a person”, it’s quite a different thing.
but the book is a fairly intelligent speculation about AI reaching and exceeding human intelligence, and what that intelligence might look like.
it’s a bit dated now but some of the things it predicted are already happening, like computers becoming tiny, ubiquitous, eventually wearable, and later still biologically integrated. Since it was written we’ve seen the explosion of intelligent mobile phones, which no one ever seems to be without, and now the wearable Apple Watch.
most of the premises of traditional religions go back to ancient times and reflect ancient beliefs, sometimes ancient values, and unique human needs. One might imagine advanced AI developing consciousness, creativity, emotion, and introspection. With those attributes it might develop something that resembles spirituality, but I highly doubt it would find any affinity with established human mythologies.
We’d probably deal with it the same way we deal with AI that decides that Tiger Beat is the best publication created by man. We’d examine it to try and figure out how it got to that conclusion, and possibly prevent such answers. I doubt we’d take the conclusion at face value.
The definition of a “menial task” nowadays seems to be “whatever a computer can do”. It’s quite noteworthy that many of those things were once regarded as, not only very far from being “menial”, but indeed impossible for a computer to do. For example the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus maintained in the 60s that while it would be possible to get a computer to algorithmically play a mediocre game of chess, it would never be able to play at a master or tournament level, because this involves real thinking. Today we just take it for granted, and set new targets that “computers will never be able to do”. Until they do it. Funny how that works.
In the mid 19th centy. Ada Augusta Lovelace wrote about (mechanical) computers composing music. But it’s not really the issue. The issue is sentience, and without a way to define and measure it (and I’m not overly impressed by Turning’s test) then any question about computers expressing faith in anything is just a fancy printf statements.
I had a 1kb ZX81 once, and it had a chess program. I could easily program the same computer to profess its belief in Thor. Come to think of it, a Conway Game of Life cellular automata can be set up to generate a Turning Machine. If one computer can do anything, e.g., achieve sentience, then so can a Turning Machine. Game of Life can be expressed on a piece of paper. So now we have a sentient piece of paper worshipping Thor. No I’m not going to take its word for it.
