A Religion For Robots
This address by Christian cognitive scientist Edmund Furse is a totally straight-faced explanation of how robots, in his opinion, will be able to do things like sin, or communicate with God. An excerpt:
..."give us this day our daily bread" might have to be replaced by "give us our regular electric feed".
...It seems to me that Christ died for all persons, male, female, human and robot. A second argument might be that a robot is unlikely to be an icon of Christ at the altar, but I suppose that priestly robots could grow long hair and a beard if desired.
A noble sentiment indeed. Followed later by this:
Could a robot steadfastly set its face against the will of God. Could a robot continuously know what is the right thing to do, and yet choose to go against it. Could a robot ultimately choose to reject God and all goodness, and desire to be cut off from God and his grace for all eternity? Surely a robot being so knowledgeable would choose a path of goodness. But we have to allow for the possibility of free choice, and in allowing the robot this possibility, we also have to allow for it to ultimately to go to Hell.
I can hardly blame you for chuckling, but since I'm the kind of guy who thinks death and taxes are engineering problems, my own views of the future would be met with a similar chuckle. I'm convinced there are going to be other species in this solar system, created by us. I don't agree with Furse's metaphysical claims, but since I expect machine intelligences to disagree with each other just like we do, I honestly see no reason so far why religion would be less appealing to some of them than it is to us. On the other hand, the invention of artificial intelligence would prove that the conscious mind is not a magical object. So you'd think a robot couldn't fail to notice that.
I'm happy to have discovered Furse, because this is the first time I've found that rare collectable who I've been looking for to include in my collection of belief systems: the serious traditional religionist who simultaneously takes seriously radical future change in what it means to be human. There are plenty of luddites claiming it's immoral to upgrade ourselves, but you don't hear them trying to come up with sociological frameworks for having to deal with other species once they're here. As long as somebody's going to be in one of these religions and not abandon it, they are eventually going to adapt to the issues that Furse describes. His future counterpart has been depicted in many science fiction novels baptizing aliens and robots. That prediction come true in him, and Furse will not be the last.
Note to self: Robot religion comes off as funny at first because it mixes two mythologies. It wouldn't seem so jarring if instead of Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, we imagine Haley Joel Osment as David from Spielberg/Kubrick's A.I. Are artificial intelligence and memeplexes a transhumanist's analogy of angels and demons, in the same way that the Singularity is equivalent to "techno-rapture"?
..."give us this day our daily bread" might have to be replaced by "give us our regular electric feed".
...It seems to me that Christ died for all persons, male, female, human and robot. A second argument might be that a robot is unlikely to be an icon of Christ at the altar, but I suppose that priestly robots could grow long hair and a beard if desired.
A noble sentiment indeed. Followed later by this:
Could a robot steadfastly set its face against the will of God. Could a robot continuously know what is the right thing to do, and yet choose to go against it. Could a robot ultimately choose to reject God and all goodness, and desire to be cut off from God and his grace for all eternity? Surely a robot being so knowledgeable would choose a path of goodness. But we have to allow for the possibility of free choice, and in allowing the robot this possibility, we also have to allow for it to ultimately to go to Hell.
I can hardly blame you for chuckling, but since I'm the kind of guy who thinks death and taxes are engineering problems, my own views of the future would be met with a similar chuckle. I'm convinced there are going to be other species in this solar system, created by us. I don't agree with Furse's metaphysical claims, but since I expect machine intelligences to disagree with each other just like we do, I honestly see no reason so far why religion would be less appealing to some of them than it is to us. On the other hand, the invention of artificial intelligence would prove that the conscious mind is not a magical object. So you'd think a robot couldn't fail to notice that.
I'm happy to have discovered Furse, because this is the first time I've found that rare collectable who I've been looking for to include in my collection of belief systems: the serious traditional religionist who simultaneously takes seriously radical future change in what it means to be human. There are plenty of luddites claiming it's immoral to upgrade ourselves, but you don't hear them trying to come up with sociological frameworks for having to deal with other species once they're here. As long as somebody's going to be in one of these religions and not abandon it, they are eventually going to adapt to the issues that Furse describes. His future counterpart has been depicted in many science fiction novels baptizing aliens and robots. That prediction come true in him, and Furse will not be the last.
Note to self: Robot religion comes off as funny at first because it mixes two mythologies. It wouldn't seem so jarring if instead of Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, we imagine Haley Joel Osment as David from Spielberg/Kubrick's A.I. Are artificial intelligence and memeplexes a transhumanist's analogy of angels and demons, in the same way that the Singularity is equivalent to "techno-rapture"?