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Can Computers Pray?
GreyyGuy writes "Found an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education linked on Wired about an artist who made a prayer circle of computers that recite prayers to one another...." Reminiscent of an old Arthur C. Clarke short story, The Nine Billion Names of God, in which a group of Tibetan monks who believe the purpose of the universe is to name God in all possible ways - and buy a computer to speed up the process. The British techs who install the machine are skeptical, but when the program finishes its run they look up at the sky - and see the stars going out, one by one.
What is prayer, anyway?
Well, many books could (and have) been written on this topic, but it's actually very simple: Prayer is communication. You can see this reflected in the English language itself, although it's become archaic: "prithee" is a contraction of "I pray thee."
Now, since we don't normally use the word "pray" anymore when we make requests of each other, "prayer" has come to have a slightly more restricted meaning: Prayer is communication with the Divine.
Well, what does communication require? This is really not that complicated, either. Communication requires two persons who are, well, communicating. So the question "Can computers pray?" really breaks down into two questions (as has already been noted): (1) Does God exist? and (2) Can a computer have personhood?
Question #1 is clearly a religious question, which has been around for centuries, and the mere fact of using computers to pose the question is not particularly interesting.
Question #2 is also not a novel one. Certainly, iMacs don't qualify as even remotely passing any sort of Turing test yet. And the question of personhood and strong AI is already a subject of vigorous debate, here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Since iMacs are pretty clearly not sentient, the question of whether they are "praying" is simple: NOT! This is exactly the same as setting up a tape player on endless loop, and has exactly the same (non-)implications.
But let's look at this for what it really is: a work of art. Ms. Skeddle is apparantly some sort of artist, and "CyberRosary" is part of an art exhibit. Art is also about communication. What is Skeddle trying to communicate?
Well, based on her interview comments, her point is simple: "Catholic spirituality is empty noise, and consists of people robotically repeating words they don't understand."
Skeddle is a clever artist -- if she simply came out and said that in such a blunt fashion, it wouldn't be news -- it would simply be one more person bitter about a church, and attacking it. But since she uses computers, and tries to pose her "question" in the form of the future of spirituality and technology, she's managed to make her simple rant against the Catholic Church into "News for Nerds."
She's taking very little artistic risk here, as well, as she's "playing to the audience," given the anti-religious, anti-Christian, and especialy anti-Catholic bias of much of both the artistic world (where it's practically considered obligatory to at least tweak Christianity to be considered a "serious" artist) and of the computer world (where "creed-holding Christians are rare", according to the Jargon File).