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?
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.
Nobody should worship anybody based on faith.
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.
Speaking only for the "religion" that I know the most able, you are living in a world and culture shaped by us. Hospitals, in western culture, are a result of religious people. Schools, colleges, and universities are the result of religious people. Religious people claim many good and wholesome actions as a result of communicating with their god.
They can claim all they like, but from what I can see, advances in medicine, physics, etc. happened despite of religion, and there is absolutely no indication that any of what happened within a religious context happened due to "communications with their god". And there are plenty of examples of religion setting us back and suppressing the truth - sometimes centuries. The ancient knowledge of the earth circling the sun, medical knowledge that thought and feelings originated in the brain, and the mathematical concept of zero were all suppressed. Was this too due to "communications with god"? Or is it only "proof" of communications with god when the result is in your favor?
One of the big fallacies of religion is the belief that everything good comes from good, thus because there is good, it proves god. This is absurd and false.