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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.
If there is on Silicon Heaven, then where would all of the calculators go?
"And God created the Adam. But the Adam was not very successful, partly because of early production problems."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
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...
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).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Nobody should worship anybody based on faith.
There will be no believe they will know that we created them
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history. You do not know even how long you've existed. You believe you've existed your entire life, but your existence from your perspective is nothing more than a collection of memories that may or may not be real, you have absolutely no way to confirm or deny that, you can only assume that its true and move forward because assuming anything else is just a waste of time.
Self-aware AI would be no different, well except it'd probably figure this out a little sooner than you have.
On top of it all, after some span of time, the AI may also begin to assume that its memory has been corrupted over time, in which case, it may not even believe that it was originally programmed or created by man, just like humans on Earth right now.
Your post is pretty ignorant and short sighted, based on a very narrow perception of the world you have. People like you really should refrain from having discussions about the metaphysical in AI when you clearly don't understand how humans have evolved in that respect, even over the past couple thousand years.
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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.
Flying Spaghetti Code Monster.
That is so insightfull. You are my God now.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"You can't fix stupid." - Ron White
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
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!"
It's called a delusion of reference: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... It's a common symptom of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Religious people may have a mild form of it, but in severe cases there is no mistaking the fact that it is simply a manifestation of severe brain dysfunction and nothing more.
Baptism would be a fascinating event... at least for high voltage robots anyways.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?