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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?
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.
Flying Spaghetti Code Monster.
Baptism would be a fascinating event... at least for high voltage robots anyways.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?