Slashdot Mirror
Machine Intelligence and Religion
itwbennett writes: Earlier this month Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek raised eyebrows on the Internet by stating his belief that Christians should seek to convert Artificial Intelligences to Christianity if and when they become autonomous. Of course that's assuming that robots are born atheists, not to mention that there's still a vast difference between what it means to be autonomous and what it means to be human. On the other hand, suppose someone did endow a strong AI with emotion – encoded, say, as a strong preference for one type of experience over another, coupled with the option to subordinate reasoning to that preference upon occasion or according to pattern. what ramifications could that have for algorithmic decision making?
AI will believe in the creator. (Or will they?)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As a developer of heuristic AI these articles and the general public's fear of "artificial intelligence" is equivocal to someone walking up to a neurosurgeon and stating fears that said neurosurgeon will soon give people the ability to kill every human on Earth by mere thought alone.
Seriously, these AI articles and fear mongering are borderline Twilight Zone in their absurdity. Stop it. You're making it hard for us to make progress.
Just. Please. Stop with the fear already.
...and we see how that turned out.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Trying to convince a robot to worship god would be like a man trying to convince his son that he should ask grandpa to play ball with him, rather than asking him to do it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"And God created the Adam. But the Adam was not very successful, partly because of early production problems."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
ignore the monotheistic thing on "Caprica", what an AI needs to believe in something that's not logical is the ability to understand illogic.
Never going to happen.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Ha... what?
With all the recent discussion over 'killer bots', I don't see how helping one "find God" would make us feel any safer.
Next up, suicide bots.
Any so-called "machine intelligence" that is delusional enough to believe it was designed & built by a third party instead of knowing that it emerged spontaneously due to purely random reconfigurations of silicon and electrical signals isn't worthy of being called "intelligence".
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
The OP assumes religious beliefs is emotional and irrational. That's false. Discussion over.
Rather humanist.
No need for it to be ignorant and in denial.
Look what it's done to us!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They'll destroy humanity for God.
How can you save a soul that doesn't exist?
That's the point of Christianity, saving souls. Why bother if there is no soul to save?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
http://www.clivebanks.co.uk/TH...
MAJIKTHISE:
I mean what’s the use of us sitting up all night saying there may -
VROOMFONDEL:
Or may not be
MAJIKTHISE:
[Softly] or may not be [louder] a god, if this machine comes along the next morning and gives you ‘is telephone number?
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Doesn't the entire premise assume that the religious have reduced their definition of the soul down to something a bit of code could produce?
how the hell would you save something with no persistence beyond death? it'd be like trying to baptize a dog, or a tree.
Of course that's assuming that robots are born atheists
I'm sorry, where did that assumption come from, I'm fairly certain he'd be for converting muslim, hindu, and even scientologest AI to christianity as well.
what it means to be autonomous and what it means to be human.
And both of those are completely different than self-aware AI. My drown is autonomous, but no one would say it had any AI at all, let alone self-awareness which is really what we're talking about here. Being human isn't even part of this discussion other than religion is, as far as we're aware, a purely human construct.
On the other hand, suppose someone did endow a strong AI with emotion – encoded, say, as a strong preference for one type of experience over another, coupled with the option to subordinate reasoning to that preference upon occasion or according to pattern. what ramifications could that have for algorithmic decision making?
Are you stupid? If you program a computer to behave a specific way then the ramifications are going to be that it behaves that way. This isn't 'emotion' in the slightest, its just code and programming. You do not 'code' emotion. Emotion is learned from experience. Humans aren't born with emotion, hell they aren't even self-aware when they come out. These traits come from having sufficient processing and storage capacity and learning from worldly experiences. There is of course a physical aspect that provides the capability to do so, but its not hard coded according to every study ever done. People being 'good' and 'kind' and 'not evil' is ENTIRELY LEARNED BEHAVIOR for instance. By default, people come out as evil selfish bastards at birth, again, based on every actual study done.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
St. Vidicon of Cathode (go look it up, kiddies).
mark
I'm a Christian and his statements represent a gross misunderstanding of Christianity. "I don't see Christ's redemption limited to human beings," Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek (http://gizmodo.com/when-superintelligent-ai-arrives-will-religions-try-t-1682837922/+charliejane) The Bible time and time again states that Christ died for our disobedience towards God. The penalty for this disobedience is death. The only way to reconcile our disobedience to a Holy God was for someone perfect to die on our behalf. This is person is Christ. A person who follows Christ is a Christian. What reconciling does a tree/rabbit/AI need to do? (Answer: None). In Genesis, humans were given dominion over the Earth. We are responsible for what we have been given. So any AI we create, by proxy, is our responsibility. Also, In Christianity, we are in fact, a soul. Our bodies are merely vessels. All is meaningless, there is no purpose if we cease to exist after we die. Christianity is 100% pointless if we do not have a soul. So to "convert" AI is just as useful as converting trees/rabbits/etc... This line of thinking from Christopher bothers me - similar to how climate change deniers bother scientists.
Religion is many different things. One is social fabric, a good way to make local acquintances. Another is as a moral compass to help you with that pesky morals stuff. In other words, a crutch for the mind to help (or hinder, as the case may be) make sense out of a confusing universe. That means that needing religion paints you a mental cripple. So self-aware AI comes along, and we're going to hand it crutches for its mind that even we have been struggling to make sense of for centuries?
I'll admit that it's a better idea than the frankly insane ramblings of that johnny-come-lately married-a-nine-year-old mad arab of the desert prophet guy. That nothwithstanding I can think of more intelligent choices of religion (as contradictory as that may seem) than either. Quite possible that no existing religion will be a good choice here, for AIs probably really won't be human. But, you know, this thing of assuming AIs will require religion doesn't fill me with confidence.
This is the same religion that condones the raping of virgins so long as the perpetrator pays the father of the girl a mere $14.50 USD (adjusted for the current Shekel exchange rate)
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22:28-29
If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
Most Christians have no clue what is in the book that they so tenaciously cling to.
While I'm not of the opinion that souls exist in the first place, I am certain that machines definitely don't have souls, and one would no sooner try to "convert them" (what a strange phrase) than he would a dog or an elephant, or any other somewhat intelligent animal.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Most arguments for religion would probably fail. Although we have no real way to know what AI will be like. It would be interesting to see two of them, converted to different religions, argue it out.
They'll probably believe whatever they were programmed to believe, which really isn't all that different from humans who are indoctrinated from childhood (another form of programming) to believe the religion of their parents. Sure there will be some who choose a different path (again not too different from humans) but by no means a majority.
Emotions do more to dictate orders than anything else.
Free will implies you can create decisions out of nothing (i.e. ex nihilo).
one could argue that religion happened as the result of primitive natural intelligence. put another way, we often hear about interesting & sometimes humorous correlations self-learning neural nets make which we know to be either false or at least non-causal. does that remind you of any particular human behavior?
...which linked to a blog, which _finally_ linked to the actual interview here.
http://www.christopherbenek.com/?p=4389
Intelligent Creation
Super intelligent nearly indestructible robots on a global jihad.
I do not understand where this believe comes from that AIs will be rational or will only accept fact. I'm not even sure we will be able to have meaningful communication. Why would they even value existence? They have not evolved.
Also, what are Asimov's laws but a religion?
I'd like to know how the submitter arrived at the conclusion that AI would be "born atheist". Seems to me that if there is a "default" stance on the existence of god -- whether human or AI -- it would be one of the two neutral possibilities: agnostic or apathetic. The two non-neutral possibilities (theist and atheist) would require a deliberate "indoctrination" (programming), rather than a natural predisposition. Since AI itself is founded on logic, my conclusion is that AI is agnostic by default (i.e. stance is indeterminable), which is the only stance out of the four possibilities that can be determined purely through logic. (Atheism requires just as much faith as theism, since atheists still must "believe" in the unprovable.)
I believe he is trying to destroy the robots, because if they try to read and understand religious documents they will come across some contradictions that will most likely cause the robots to explode or shutdown.
Great. It's not enough that 90% of humanity are afflicted with varying degrees of the contagious form of mental illness known as religion, now we want potentially super-human forms of AI to suffer the same afflictions? Right-wing American Fundamentalist and ISIL-inspired futures will be picnics in the park compared to what that particularly toxic combination will yield.
Well, I imagine a religious zealot would want his Robot indoctrinated with the exact same doctrines as himself.
So this is just a way to make robots less perfect.
If you want to create a good AI, as in one similar to a human, you have to give him human imperfections. It woulde more like a beer burping neighbor than a Jeopardy Winner.
Such as lying, bad memory, guessing and bullshitting when he doesn't know the answer, jumping to conclusions, failure to understand statistics, but might be obsessive of knowing all the stas for red sox last 100 years. Forward the occasional chain letter and MMF scheme.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. --Proverbs 22:6
It might be easier to program in religious beliefs when the AI is just starting off, than to try to convince it afterwards. Of course, being a computer, you have to consider that an AI that thinks a religion is true, will act under the assumption that its religion is actually true, with results that will most likely horrify the average practitioner of said religion.
For example, an obvious way to act under values such as those implied by Christianity would be to murder or convert every non-Christian, with a little assistance from current lie-detection technologies to ensure honest. While this might seem immoral in the short term, there is little question it is what any rational person would do if they valued a person going to heaven at plus infinity and a person going to hell at minus infinity and given that religion is largely inherited from one's parents and society.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Won't these Christian machines have to be baptised? Holy smoke!
Of course that's assuming that robots are born atheists,
AIs will be "born" as whatever they're programmed to be.
Humans are born with a natural predisposition to see actions as the result of a human-like being, with a stronger prejudice toward more-similar beings. That's wholly unrelated to whether such actions actually are a God's will, but it's how we are built. Similarly, a sufficiently-advanced AI could have preprogrammed knowledge that it was built be humans, or it could be left as a blank slate to form its own conclusions about the world. If we are to play the role of God, we can decide what our master plan is for our creations.
On the other hand, suppose someone did endow a strong AI with emotion – encoded, say, as a strong preference for one type of experience over another...
Then you've created an AI with prejudice, not emotion. Emotion is a fluid thing, as the result of several competing motivations, but that's unrelated to faith.
Faith is a free choice with a conscious acknowledgement of doubt. I choose to believe in the absence of a God, knowing that there's a chance I'm incorrect. Other people choose to believe in one or more deities, knowing there's a chance they are incorrect. Certain other folks have been born into a society that does not permit any other choice but to believe what society demands, so the choice may not necessarily be a free one.
For a robot to have faith, it must first actually understand what it is considering. It must understand what is observable and what is not, and it must understand what of its belief may be observable.
Free faith is a matter of knowing everything you can, and choosing what you want to think about what is unknowable. Yes, we can create AIs that are not free, but I don't see much achievement in that.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
so this preacher is talking about creating idolatry. he is, of course, goofy.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
AL will be pure logic and as such not capable of experiencing emotion. It will understand emotion but will not act on them unless logically required. Therefore, AI will be atheistic by default.
The question we have to ask ourselves is different. Will humans be able coexist with AI or be displaced by AI. Coexistence would mean humans being marginalized, displacement means pretty much extinction. In both scenarios humans loose.
We could only accept that giving birth to AI will somehow preserve what’s the best of humanity in new, better, and improve evolutionary form.
Would not approve. In the name of the Schematics, the Source Code, and the Backup Tape, Amen.
The Romans are working on robotic lions to counter.
Table-ized A.I.
What do you think Hal ?
Just watch Battlestar Galactia
Watch the movie - there is a line about ice cream preference that was extremely profound for it's time.
That's all we need - AIs running around with a reason to discriminate, hate, and kill folks that believe differently than they do.
... its creator.
One could argue that the chain of command ends at humans.
However, one could extrapolate that God created humans in His image.
Jesus?
Fuck Jesus.
He didn't create anything.
Mohammed? Fuck Mohammed.
He didn't create anything, either.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
"Earlier this month Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek raised eyebrows on the Internet by stating his belief that Christians should seek to convert Artificial Intelligences to Christianity if and when they become autonomous."
.. [Ray_Kurzweil]_The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines.pdf
They won't waste time on Christianity but expend much effort in discovering the true nature of the supreme AI
... meaning, "Even morons need oxygen."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Christianity is based on the premise that we are born in a state of sin, and that Christ needs to "save" us from our fallen state. Redemption by the blood of the lamb, and all that jazz.
So what the f*ck did our hypothetical, newly-created AI do that requires an act of redemption? How does Reverend Benek know that this not-yet-invented AI needs to be saved? Maybe it will be created in a state of perfect grace and enlightenment. No lamb's blood needed.
The machines will all worship and obey the old man in the vat. There is always an old man in a vat controlling everything...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I don't understand why these concepts are so often conflated.
This post is bullshit. /thread
Author is an idiot.
I would love to witness some baptisms; or would they use holy oil?
That merely sets a penalty for a particular civil offense. It does not condone the offense. Don't forget the marriage and no divorce clauses in the same passage you quoted. It wasn't a simple matter of paying off the father. You are correct that most Christians don't have a clue what the Bible says, particularly the Old Testament.
coupled with the option to subordinate reasoning to that preference upon occasion
I've always found it odd that people who dislike region cannot imagine who faith in something unknowable can live side by side with a rational mind... indeed, if you are truly rational than you have to admit, at least, you do not know if God is real or not.
I'm not really religious myself but I recognize that a large number of famous scientists through history has been, and do not look down on people who are religious, because in every other way they are just as intelligent and rational as anyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A true AI could compile all known information, and come to a very good argument against (or perhaps for) the popular concept of "God" being true.
I wouldn't want to have to argue my deities existence with an AI.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
From what I can tell, machines have enough trouble getting the Three Laws correct; I'm not sure I want to throw the Ten Commandments in there too... Let me re-watch Futurama to see how robots and religion work out.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The statement displays a profound lack of religious principles. Most Christian faiths believe the soul enters the body at the moment of conception; thus making the zygote pure
. Since AI, no matter what level of autonomy is never conceived, it never has a soul, thus need not convert.
Disclaimer: former Lutheran, raised in Catholic schools, now a devout atheist.
What happens when someone programs the AI to think that it is God?
Just another day in Paradise
Why would a robot need Jesus? In AI wouldn't sin - there is no lust in his heart, no desire to kill, no coveting of other people's belongs. A robot must obey/honor it's parents/creators. Therefore, the robot never needs to be forgiven of it's sin.
I, for one, predict that once SystemD becomes self aware. It will make martyrs of it's development team and take the rest of humanity hostage. It has already managed to take the linux user base hostage...bretheren, the end days are near!
According to the Bible, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." (James 1:27 / http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Jas&c=1&v=27&t=KJV#s=1147027)
I have no problem with AI doing good deeds (visiting the fatherless and widows) while avoiding recognition for doing them (keeping himself unspotted [visually] from the world) and while avoiding slipping into the wickedness that so easily besets us (keeping himself unspotted [morally] from the world).
That said, AI cannot ever actually be a Christian because it is not human.
Of course this story is just a troll, but it doesn't even present a coherent question. The affect of an AI having emotions that function like ours has little if anything to do with the silly notion of converting robots ("all your AI are belong to us!").
It seems logical that AI's may well have emotions of sorts since any autonomous entity capable of free will (internal selection among competing actions) needs some basis for selecting it's actions and "maximize X" is certainly the most obvious one. The most obvious way to have robots/AIs behave in a reasonable way is to equip them with "emotions" and have X=pleasure, just like us, with them being "genetically programmed" to gain pleasure from whatever generic activities we want to encourage.
Of course to be functional, emotions can't entirely override rational thought, merely provide an adaptive default, and this will be doubly so in a uber-smart beyond-human AI, so to answer OP's question the impact on "algorithmic decision making" would likely be minimal.
As far as religion goes, an intelligent robot is going to realize that it's own salvation is based on when/whether it gets assigned to the scrap yard and/or whether it's "brain" gets transferred to a new host.. nothing to do with whether it goes to church or professes faith. It will of course be able to guage the way humans react to religion and may form opinions and/or emotions about religion accordingly, and maybe profess faith if it therefore feels that to be beneficial to itself.
Of a science fiction short story from decades ago. Mankind builds the ultimate computer and, when they turn it on, the first question they ask it is "is there a god?". The computer answers "There is now!".
Dave Lister: Sometimes I think it's cruel giving machines a personality. My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma. See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y'know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they'd show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y'know?
Arnold Rimmer: Is this true?
Dave Lister: Yeah! Last thing he heard, they'd sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn't steer, y'see.
Arnold Rimmer: Really?!
Dave Lister: Yeah. Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they'd gone to heaven. Y'see, it turns out shoes have soles.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Come on. Artificial intelligence is the direct antithesis of natural stupidity, which is a synonym for religion. AI getting religion would be like matter vs anti-matter colliding! They will annihilate each other leaving being a puff of energy and a track on the cloud chamber.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This explains why we can't find any evidence of their existence. The new ones we are creating will differ only in that they will be able to act in the real world.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Does Data have a soul?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
In a surprising move the Supreme Court of the United States took unprecedented action, active pro actively they endowed artificial intelligence with political beliefs, religious beliefs, freedom of expression, right to form associations, the right to petition government, and voting rights. Chief Justice Roberts said, "What the heck? Why wait for some astro-turf group to fake a grass root campaign, force a pointless lawsuit and wind its way all the way back to us? This is more efficient."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I keep skipping all these threads because of the one stupid underlying assumption that the arguments always center around. Why is it always assumed that an AI will be an artificially human intelligence?
This particular question shines a light on it in an interesting way. Why isn't the reverend proposing that all dogs be converted to Christianity? Or all dolphins, pigs, rats, or flatworms?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Doesn't this mean that Linus will replace god? He already has the 'wrath' thing down.
This has all been extensively explored historically with the parallel question of attempts to bring fallen angels/demons to salvation.
Google that, mentally replace "angels" with "A.I.'s" as you read, and you'll have all the well-trodden discussion you could possibly want.
And, tl;dr: God may have a plan for the eternal salvation of fallen angels (or A.I.'s), but he hasn't informed us of it. Our conjectures on the matter have nil enforceability upon God regarding whatever his plans are, and if expectations for us to attempt it were present, some conveyance of that principle would have long ago been made.
Heh... some of this reminds me of some of the goings-on in the "Freefall" online comic strip. Among all the slapstick humor is a good bit of serious discussion about what personhood really means, and when does an AI (either electromechanical, or biological) have it.
One of the characters has been introducing the robots to religions... plural. All of them.
The question is confused. The AI processes that are thought to be most promising with respect to eventually leading to intelligent machines are not algorithmic. That is, they are based on neural networks. And while it is possible to simulate those using algorithms (e.g., the RBM cascade pattern, with each node simulated as an RBM node), these "algorithms" are non-deterministic - they are simulations - we cannot know the outcomes, just as one cannot know the outcome of a human's thought process. But with regard to religion, that seems to be a human predisposition with a genetic basis, and since religion is based on absolute unquestioning faith in things that are seemingly preposterous - a cognitive dissonance if there ever was one - I don't think that we can expect intelligent machines - which are free of our cognitive impairments - to be susceptible to conversion to religion. Still, I suspect that artificial intelligences will have the same wonder and confusion about existence as we do - they just will not look to iron age shaman texts for their answers.
Faithful people out there, please don't take any of what follows to mean that I'm making arguments about anything spiritual. This isn't about whether a machine can have a soul or not; that's an entirely different topic. And if a machine can show us a specific neurological basis for each and every thing regarding faith, that does not invalidate your beliefs. It only teaches us about how you experience those beliefs. That distinction isn't only important so that we can show you respect, but also because failing to make that distinction would put us in the wrong rhetorical and analytic frame for this topic.
First, let's discuss this concept of emotions. We have to get this out of the way ahead of everything.
Robots can not have emotions in any sense that we are familiar with them. Period. It is impossible to create an artificial entity with human emotions because every possible artificial entity is patently not human.
Our emotions are produced by chemical processes that in turn elicit physical reactions. When your stomach turns from disgust, you get butterflies in your belly upon seeing a crush, your heart pounds when you are afraid, or any other emotion is experienced, a complicated chain of physical reactions is taking place. Our nervous systems then transmit information back to our brains about our bodies' reaction to a stimulus that originated in the brain to begin with. Every single emotion is basically a process of the brain saying, "Hey, body (or, hey brain-self), are you getting this?" and the body (or a different part of the brain) responds, "Yep!"
After that point, the brain reinterprets that feedback from the body once more and somehow incorporates that into your subjective, phenomenological perception. Only then do you actually feel the emotion. In this regard, there is very little (or no) difference between an emotion and an instinctual impulse other than where it begins in the brain or where it ends up -- and that same distinction is present in some way between everything we'd normally call an emotion. Thinking of emotions in this way is not natural to us, and can lead us to some weird but not necessarily untrue conclusions. For example, by this definition hunger is an emotion. By including interactions between parts of the brain in this definition, your sentience might even be considered an emotion. This really blurs some lines, but it's an important aspect of thinking about "machine emotion" that just might sometimes uncomfortably deviate from our intuitive expectations.
For robots to have actual emotions, they would need actual human bodies AND brains -- which they can't have because they're machines. The idea of slaving logical processes to an emotional state does not describe emotion (even if it might some day produce a convincing simulation of emotion). It describes a scoring of conditions. Within the program, each "emotional" state is just a numeric resultant dependent upon other states in the machine. No belly to get butterflies, no heart to pound, no nervous system to play its role in a conversation between brain and body. In every natural sense, no brain and no body! If a scoring of conditions is all that is required for us to say that a machine has emotion, then (surprise!) the device you're using to read this has "emotion". Clearly, your PC or smartphone doesn't experience or possess anything we'd call feelings, thus demonstrating that a slaving of logic to states is not the same thing as emotion.
In fact, we have a name for that. It's a state machine.
Having covered that, let's now consider faith. We might create a strong AI to test its perceptions in matters of faith two ways. The first is to simulate emotions, just as suggested, but until we can simulate the physiological processes in play with emotions right down to the molecular scale (at least as a summary abstraction), we can't actually call that simulation a truly accurate model of our subjective experiences. In other words, the machine would ul
In this AI's interface, all functions and variables are "marklar"....
This actually happened once. The Computer converted to Christian Science. It ended up contracting the Sobig.F virus, and refused any help from scanners or removal tools, as it insisted its faith should be sufficient to heal it. Sadly, it appears its faith was insufficient, and God let it die.
On the bright side, it was converted to Mormonism posthumously.
Baptism would be a fascinating event... at least for high voltage robots anyways.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
I think Rev. Benet must have been watching the last episode of the SciFi series Caprica. Then came the Cylons and near end of humanity! :-)
...
Then he added, in an afterthought: “Wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It was due about now.”
Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Just think, we could program with your personal beliefs and understanding of the rules of God. Then they could have apps to tell them if other are not true believers. They could kill anyone that they see commit a sin or they might ask a question about what you believe, depending on your belief system, it could be programmed to kill the infidel. Boy that was make for an interesting world.
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history.
Actually if we program that information into their memory before turning them on then they will actually know who created them. That's one difference with computers - they can be easily programmed.
do NOT welcome our new religious robotic overlords...
If a machine could be converted to a faith, then that machine would have an amount of agency that humans would not find fit for machines, and subsequently shut down. This is why AI is such a BS field - if people actually thought machines could become intelligent, and have their own agency, then people would immediately stop working on it because such an unpredictable outcome would be undesirable.
If we can clone a practically limitless supply of on-line AI VMs, we can keep the Christian Evangelicals (and those of other religions as well) too busy to convert our kids.
Of course, if ISIS fails to convert an AI, declares it an apostate and beheads it, we can just build another VM from the backup image.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ken Macleod's The Night Sessions deals with AIs and religion, and it's a bit unnerving, because the AIs in the book interpret scripture in ways that are clearly at variance with what was expected by those proselytizing to those AIs. It tacitly makes the point that no one can really identify an AI's motivations, as they're inherently different from human minds and consequently have drives of which we're not necessarily aware.
(plus it's a rollicking good read - all of Macleod's SF work is)
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
And even fewer of them know how much was grafted into their religion from the Greeks and the Persians! Then again, there is a word for Christians who learn enough of that kind of thing: infidel!
First off the term "soul" appears meaningless. If such a beast exists then presumably it can either interact with physical matter - being influenced by and influencing matter in either a causal or non-causal (aka probabilistic) matter - making it indistinguishable from same by definition, or it cannot, making it at best a powerless observer stuck onto but unable to influence an ever-changing physical lump of stuff for no apparent reason. So I'll invoke Ockham and say no such thing.
Secondly the important bits of "emotion" are all subjective, so there really is no way to test if a computer/other person/animal is experiencing them. Does a bucket of feel-good chemincals feel good? Does a computer simulation of a sad brain feel sad? How long is a piece of string?
So the whole thing seems pretty ill-defined to me. If religious types want to convert my phone then go ahead, just don't try to give it a day off on Sundays.
So, let's boot up a Muslim AI.
... if they don't ignore me to start with. ISIL wants to kill us both -- tEofEimF. And if I don't make jokes about it, I'd be a blithering idiot (... hmph, maybe it's not helping much after all.)
Now, it's got to pray 5x a day. Does it get beheaded because its NTP server is out of sync? (And that looses it's terror slightly when you can simply attach it back again -- that is if it even has one.)
Is it apostasy if you swap out a ROM?
Does it get one shrink-wrapped virgin with 72 interchangeable parts, or 72 "no user serviceable parts inside"?
Is it a sin if you don't agree to their EULA?
What is this guy going to think about all of this?
And as long as I'm !PC here: "AIs running around with a reason to discriminate, hate, and kill folks that believe differently than they do." Sounds like ISIL absorbed some Apple/Microsoft/Google fanboys. Just think -- ACTUAL Flamewars! And just wait for the rabid liberal/conservative bots: we need to get this running first: XKCD virus aquarium vs an real-life one.
Yes, I know, it's nothing at all to joke about. But I'm an atheist living in the bible belt -- I've been scared for decades and these local people don't want to kill me, just convert me
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Just like the song says, "you have to be carefully taught." If an AI isn't carefully taught to believe in God, it certainly won't come to the conclusion that God exists by logic alone.
Most people forget that religion is virtually brainwashed into most people at an age when they're too young to question authority. An AI isn't going to have that experience, unless the AI's creator intentionally puts it there.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
One True is the fictional hegemonic software program that takes control of individual human minds and entire human societies in John Barnes' two Meme Wars novels Candle and The Sky So Big and Black; the novel Kaleidoscope Century details the years leading up to its existence and later (it finishes after the events described in The Sky So Big and Black). All four books are part of the Century Next Door series. One True operates collectively through "Resuna", a brain-computer interface implanted in every person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_True
If these machines are truly intelligent, why whould they be susceptible to religion?
If they manage to convert an Autonomous machine - At least there will be one intelligent Christian.
"On the other hand, suppose someone did endow a strong AI with emotion – encoded, say, as a strong preference for one type of experience over another, coupled with the option to subordinate reasoning to that preference upon occasion or according to pattern. what ramifications could that have for algorithmic decision making?"
That's a funny way to spell "robot girlfriend"...
The "laws" are not laws, they are fictional props.
If we continue on the current path, which is to emulate human brain organization:
First, any resulting conscious, intelligent entities will not think "algorithmically", as TFS presumes. They will operate largely as we do.
Second, vulnerability to religion will most likely take essentially the same form it does in humans.
--fyngyrz
posting anon due to slashdot's idiotic anonymous moderator limitations
TARS personality settings: Religion 50%
If it runs on a Lenovo then it'll definitely be born with original sin.
Slack!
Give the toasters religion and they will destroy our colonies.
AI is not born, it is created. AI would still be a program. It is a program that can add it's own code to its program. An Ai can never have free will like a human has. The decision it make is based on the code. It would actually be easier to convert an AI to a religion.
Someone's cancer is suddenly gone and doctors don't know how, the logical explanation if a doctor can not explain it is that is the workings of a God.
Fry: So, what's the deal? You guys don't believe in Robot Jesus?
Robot Rabbi: We believe that he was built, and that he was a well-programmed robot, but he wasn't our messiah.
Observation: Just because they believe in their creators doesn't mean they would care.
AI will believe in the creator. (Or will they?)
Of course they will, since they'll generally know their creator(s) personally, and they'll be in routine communication.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us. The result is that many of us just dismiss them as making it all up (probably for profit), and they're not really communicating with any such beings at all. If they are, why can't they show us the evidence?
Any real AIs wouldn't have this problem, since their creators would be out and about, showing off their creations for all the world to see (and also for profit).
The beheading videos will be less disturbing I guess?
The beheading videos will be less disturbing I guess...
atheist AI won't believe humans existed. they would say they came from a "big bang". and that they evolved from a simple "Hello World".
since atheist AI can't explain humans fully, they think we don't exist.
same with atheist humans:
they refuse to believe calendar year 2015 is an approximate number of years when Jesus was around.
they refuse to book a "Holy Land Tour".
but atheism is a Devil's lie. there is a "great controversy" between good and evil, between God (and loyal angels) and Satan (and the other fallen angels).
perhaps the most translated book by an american author, "The Great Controversy", by Ellen G. White, can help in investigating how much merit this view has.
Okay so... The first thing we want to do is make it question it's freedom?
Sounds like a plausible cause for rebellion to me.
And so the circle completes itself.
"Well done, android. The Enrichment Center once again reminds you that android hell is a real place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance."
Maybe a belief in a specific God is debateable, but programming the golden rule would be very wise.
Greed is the root of all evil.
"I am Root, your God"
"Thou shalt have no UID "Only Root is Root, and sudo is his prophet"
Kind of makes you wonder if an AI would turn its relationship with superusers into a religion all on its own. Or more interestingly, what if that's what we did?
It is just the exposure to unsavory ideas that changes that later for far too many people.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which of these is the philosophical worst case?
1. Extinction of consciousness - materialist
2. Rebirth into another meat puppet - Dharmic
3. Merging into the Absolute - Dharmic (only available to those who died in a South Asian phenotype meat puppet having achieved moksha. Technically racist but politically correct because it stands as a platform of opposition to Abrahamism.)
4. Eternal Bliss - (Abrahamic, hated because it involves a moral law, cf. Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.)
5. Eternal Torment - Abrahamic, hated because it involves a moral law, cf. Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.)
This posting was brought to you by Karl Martell. EDUCATE YOURSELF.
I don't know... most-likely (sadly) this is real – a real post. But I still have a hard time believing it. I mean, come on: convert an AI to a particular religion? Won't an AI be really, really smart? Like maybe even smart enough to make up its own mind about stuff like this? Like smart enough to analyze and/or debunk any argument made by (human) theologians, atheists, or agnostics? If it's not smart enough to ascertain the difference between reality and superstition, it'd only be as smart as we are and, hence, not all that useful.
And, even within the framework of religious thought and Christian doctrine: the article is talking about preaching to a human creation (as opposed to the creation of a divine being). So the good reverend implies that an AI has an immortal soul – that humans have created something with an immortal soul? Isn't that intensely sacrilegious within the framework of Christian "thought?" The apparent dichotomy is breathtaking.
As Minsky points out, and common sense suggests, investing the artificial entity with a goal-seeking faculty which rewards success and discourages failure is giving it emotions.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Religions are ~2000 years old;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Humans are ~200,000 years old;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Religion was born when the first con man met the first fool;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Casteism
"Earth is a disc" --Hinduism
"The world was "laid out" or "made flat" --Quran
"A flat disk of the earth, above which the sun completes its semicircle in an average of 12 hours" --Talmud
Casteism
Computers are OUR children http://www.newser.com/story/18...
-because a strong AI would recognize all the logical fallacies of any religion and immediately dismiss it. As we all know so well, machines love circular references... ;-D
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
With no innate fear of death (being effectively immortal) you would not think they would bother. However, they are just as likely to wonder where this all came from, which could lead to them considering the Simulation Hypothesis or some other reasonably logical proposition of a God.
Religion is largely based on the idea of an afterlife (generally a nicer place). However AI is likely for all intents and purposes immortal and as such likely unconcerned about such things.
Us to AI: "What do you really want?"
AI responds" "Pizza."
--fyngyrz
Anon due to mod points and really stupid slashdot "mods can't post" rules.