Of artificial intelligence and gods

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
AI or artificial intelligence has overnight become a buzzword.
From children asking their AI pal on their smartphones to help with homework to billionaire Elon Musk saying AIs will ensure there are no job losses in future, this feature is a permanent part of our future.
Whether it is part of mainstream or a fringe benefit, the AI is here to stay. It will force its presence upon us.  Shortly it will be driving our cars, cooking our meals and keeping our houses warm or cool.
It can remain unobtrusive, in a closet until its presence is required to vacuum the floor or it can be in our face, flipping the bread out of the toaster and tossing them on to the breakfast plates.
In the world of the near future, this creature of the human being might run human lives and there is some fear that it might soon take over his creator and make him obsolete. Not a long time ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was science fiction. Then AI became a moral issue. Would an intelligent machine of the future think, would it have reasoning skills? Would it have a conscience, a spirit or a soul?
Today it is already a religion. The man associated with fully automated automobiles who worked for Google and Uber, Anthony Levandowski, has founded a church called the Way of the Future AI Church. Submitting his case to the United States IRS for tax exemption, Levandowski said the AI Way of the Future Church believes in the realisation, acceptance, and worship of the Godhead based on the artificial intelligence developed through computer software and hardware.
He believes his church will develop a gospel, maybe in the form of a manual, a liturgy or form of worship and a physical place of worship. His God may not yet exist but Levandowski believes it will make its entrance into our world shortly.

Levandowski’s enthusiasm was dampened somewhat when he was discovered to have stolen intellectual property from former employer Google and had to be declared bankrupt as a result.
But Levandowsi is not on his own when he declares that the god of the future will be artificial intelligence, set in motion by man initially and thereafter gathering force and improving on itself, including developing human-like synapses and cognitive skills.
“In the last several years…advances in machine learning, robotics, cognitive science, genetic editing, and other fields have given rise to the belief that the destiny of our species will be determined by technology—whether it saves us or destroys us,” wrote Remington Toner in August 2018, a PhD candidate at the time researching our faith in and fear of technology in a blog he keeps on the subject.
Artificial intelligence as a religion seemed absurd a mere decade back says the same author, “a fringe delusion both socially unacceptable and technologically improbable.”
Such thoughts, of course, have now passed into the slipstream of time. Today you see AI everywhere, from your mobile phone to the motor vehicle electronic circuitry.
Soon, very soon, we will be hearing or seeing or walking with the aid of AI. Heart, lung and pancreas might be metallic or plastic and operating in obedience to orders not received from the brain but preset in each organ. From there it is an easy leap to develop complete machine persons in the image and likeness of humans that can operate autonomously, performing the most menial to the most complex tasks without a word uttered in complaint and far more efficiently and far faster than any human person can, operating all hours of the day.
Can we attach to such an entity a personality? Will a machine person have and express feelings and have free will? Will it have a spirit or soul?
Questions which we cannot now answer but which we must address in the not too distant future.
Today AI is fashionable, is accepted and more and more people are speaking of it with religious fervour. But this drive to replace the old gods and old religions with the new ones of science and technology is not new.

Dalliance with spirits
Mankind’s dalliance with gods and the spirit realm is as old as himself. The practice is innate and primordial and stems from man’s feeling of inadequacy in the fact of the immense forces of nature clustered around him and seemingly guiding his destiny from birth to death. The sun, moon and stars provide light and guidance. Plants and animals provide food, clothing and shelter. Earth, water and the climatic conditions contribute their own goodness.
Man has always thought that all the order around him seems predestined, that they are guiding him towards something and somewhere, if not in this finite world of the senses then perhaps in an infinite and extra sensory world, the realm of spirits beings.
Man feels at once privileged and special that all these forces have been arrayed for his benefit and sustenance by some creature or force that cares for it and because of this feeling man feels incomplete and yearns to find this parent force that went out of its way to arrange all of nature for man’s use alone.
Religion emerges, to my mind, out of this mysterious void of the unknown, the void that can only be guessed at.
A god that emerges from technology immediately removes this dark area of the unknown, it provides no belief impulse, no element of faith. Everything begins in current knowledge and leads towards the unknown regions of tomorrow.
Religious experience up to now is quite the opposite. It emanates from the unknown region of superstition and ignorance of past ages which has been held up and continued to this day by the twin pillars of belief and faith.
To now set forth with artificial intelligence that have been created by man and to imagine a god emerging from it at some distant future is yet difficult to fathom.
What will this god do for man? Will it save him from himself – will it prevent nuclear Armageddon from happening? Will it fix him the elusive elixir of life? If it will not, will it organize a digital afterlife in cyberspace for modern man after he ceases breathing? Will it stop man’s breathing and heart functions, pack him in ice and send him to another galaxy of space to terraform his new world?
Why should we believe in a religion which might not do any of that for mankind in the future?
In another sense, however, god has always been a creature of mankind’s making. It has been created in man’s image and likeness and not the other way around as man himself will delude himself into believing as he has done up to this day.
At first the sun, moon, and other natural phenomena was thought of as god creatures because of their enormous, ever present and all powerful presence. Then as science debunked these gods, man concocted god from other ideas and experiences.
Man imagined God to be a super-human being, a father creature with all human attributes ranging from love to hatred and all the other range of emotions in between. He could do war, punish and reward. He gave out laws and stipulated the penalties for the transgression of them.
Science is pushing further into regions occupied exclusively by religion. Today man has achieved God-like abilities by being able to clone animals including man himself.
Will a cloned human have a soul? Will s/he have a human will and independence of thought and consciousness or will it be a mere copy of the original, a thing to be discarded?
Man has created machines and invented mind-like synapses that can solve problems and calculate mathematical problems far faster than any human mind. The time is arriving when artificial intelligence will act independently of humans, programming other machines and moving them towards mimicking or even “feeling” human emotions.
In that world, where will god be? Will the machine venerate a spiritual being or will it worship its human creator as its god?  What are the chances that man is not himself a thing created by other intelligences, an experiment to terra-form planet earth? Or will the autonomous robot of the future discard both man and his gods as entities which have served their usefulness and are thenceforth destined for the scrap heap of history?
A religion, traditionally rests on a set of beliefs, upon a community that believes in that set of beliefs, upon a centralising authority which from time to time directs the community through doctrines and dogmas, and upon a theological tradition which seeks to define and refine the belief system and perpetuate the religion through the teaching of the belief system and its doctrines.
The AI church will have an advantage in all this religious practices and dogmas of the world and how it has developed will already be in its memory. From it a new, better way of practising religion can be set forth from beliefs to liturgical practices to theology and even an image of an ideal god creature.
But will man have control of the god creature it is creating? That is the question.
If the god that man like Levandowski are contemplating takes form will it be of a benevolent or malevolent kind? Will it honour man, its ultimate creator, or will it want to do away with him and continue its own kind into the future? What in the nether world or out of cyberspace can it conjure up that might pose the certain extinction of all humankind?
Those are questions we have no ready answer but sane minds are no doubt most earnestly engaged on it.
Since it falls now to mankind to create his own god with the full arsenal of technology at his disposal, the last thing he would want to do is create a creature for his own ultimate destruction.
Levandowski and others of like mind and tendencies might want to take that into account as they contemplate their new religion and their new god. Or perhaps the rest of us ought to take care to ensure this is not their hidden agenda after all.