The Robot Will See You Now

Artificial Intelligence and the Christian Faith

John Wyatt, Stephen N. Williams

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780281084357
• eBook ISBN: 9780281084364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics

The last decade has seen dramatic advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology, raising tough questions that need to be addressed. The Robot Will See You Now considers how Christians can respond to these issues - and flourish - in the years ahead.Contributions from a number of international experts, including editors John Wyatt and Stephen Williams, explore a range of social and ethical issues raised by recent advances in AI and robotics. Considering the role of artificial intelligence in areas such as medicine, employment and security, the book looks at how AI is perceived as well as its actual impact on human interactions and relationships.Alongside are theological responses from an orthodox Christian perspective. Looking at how artificial intelligence and robotics may be considered in the light of Christian doctrine, The Robot Will See You Now offers a measured, thoughtful view on how Christians can understand and prepare for the challenges posted by the development of AI.This is a book for anyone who is interested in learning more about how AI and robots have advanced in recent years, and anyone who has wondered how Christian teaching relates to artificial intelligence. Whatever your level of technical knowledge, The Robot Will See You Now will give you a thorough understanding of AI and equip you to respond to the challenges it poses with confidence and faith.

Part 1

WHAT IS GOING ON? CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

1

Science fiction, AI and our descent into insignificance

CHRISTINA BIEBER LAKE

Although it was written just over 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is as relevant today as ever. At the very least, it set the trajectory for the genre that it arguably birthed: science fiction, referred to in academic circles as SF. Indeed, Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’ includes the replication and proliferation within SF of one of the novel’s main concerns: the loss of control of our creations. As the Industrial Revolution was building up steam in England, the prescient 19-year-old was asking readers to consider whether it was possible to go too far with the desire to create a race of beings – whether humanoid or robotic – to serve as the final chapter of our triumphant control over nature.

In spite of her warnings (and those of generations of SF novelists to follow), many contemporary theorists and practitioners think that such control is the evolutionary destiny of the human race. Ray Kurzweil may be the most prominent of these. He celebrates what he calls ‘the age of spiritual machines’, and eagerly awaits the year 2043, his predicted date for the Singularity: when machines exceed human intelligence and we ‘gain power over our fates’, including our mortality.1

That the utopian desire for such control, and concerns about it, are as pertinent now as they were explains the continuing popularity of SF novels and films in technologically advanced nations. But it would be a mistake to assume that the fear of the loss of control of our creations is still SF’s primary concern. Indeed, a close look at the range of SF as it developed through the mid twentieth and into the twenty-first century reveals that as our technology has advanced, our primary fears have changed. Where once we worried that we were overreaching the God-given limits of human existence, we now worry that there is no God and there are no limits. What we had experienced as exhilarating terror now devolves into numbing despair, for if there is no God, there is also nothing special about human existence. The fear that artificial intelligence will take our jobs is just the tip of the iceberg. Our real worry is not that AI will render us obsolete and insignificant, but that it will prove that we never were significant to begin with.

The purpose of this chapter is to trace that transition through some exemplary SF texts to illustrate how our race towards the Singularity is changing our view of human nature, and to highlight the theological perspectives that the Church needs to reassert in response.

The three orders of simulacra

The theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote his most significant work in the 1980s, just as Apple had planted its seeds of dominance and well before the word ‘Internet’ came into household use. First published in French in 1981, Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation reads today like an eerie premonition of my recent struggle to elbow past a teenager with a selfie stick, who was standing with her back turned towards the Mona Lisa. Using the USA (especially California) as his exemplary case, Baudrillard argues that we are living in the ‘simulacra of simulation’, a world of images that are themselves copies of copies. The real has been replaced by simulated images; ‘signs of the real’ have been substituted for the real. The substitution is total: the simulacrum serves only to reveal that the real never actually existed. Baudrillard argues that this is what iconoclasts actually feared: ‘That deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum – from this came their urge to destroy the images’.2 But we are far past iconoclasm, says Baudrillard. It’s the end of metaphysics. We are no longer even looking for the really real. Our backs are turned towards the Mona Lisa, and we do not experience this as loss.

When Baudrillard turns his attention to SF, he argues that its development can be mapped on to what he calls the three orders of simulacra, with the ‘simulacra of simulation’ being the final order. They are so densely constructed that I will parse them a bit.

The first order of simulacra are simulacra that are ‘natural’ and which exist as a hopeful, inherently conservative effort to restore ‘nature as made in God’s image’.3 In this pre-modern order, simulations (models, works of art and so on) represent the dream of utopia as somewhere else, such as a return to Eden. They represent an imaginary vision that seems hopelessly separated from the world as we know it. This is utopia as transcendence.

The second order of simulacra are those that are meant to be productive of a new industrial order. They are utopian and share with a progressive society the ‘Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion’.4 Second-order simulacra are more materialistic; they are the product of a society committed to progress, production and the dream of control. They project an alternative real world that we believe we can actually build. These simulacra support the idea that robots should rise to power because they would necessarily create a better society than flawed humans.5 Only this second order corresponds with SF proper, and most classical SF celebrates this dream of robotic control (as we will see).

Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra is ‘the simulacra of simulation’, in which any image is a copy of a copy of a copy, as I mentioned above. Baudrillard calls this total substitution of the simulated for the real ‘hyperreality’.6 In an information economy, the value of images has almost completely replaced the value of things. The simulated world has not only replaced the real one; it has also erased any trace of origins. Hyperreality seems like an extreme concept only until we ponder the dizzying number of contemporary manifestations, many appearing well after Baudrillard’s time: Instagram celebrities, Internet pornography, fake news, Deepfake videos, ‘Zoom University’ and the increasing use of virtual reality interfaces. The third order of simulacra consists of digital images that are completely abstracted from the real. It is ‘stuff’ become information – the world translated into zeroes and ones, and then manipulated. The model for this type, argues Baudrillard, is the ‘cybernetic game’ or virtual reality as game.7 If you have seen the films The Matrix or Ready Player One, you have seen hyperreality in action.

For the rest of this chapter, I will both show how SF illustrates how we moved from a society characterized by second-order simulacra to one characterized by third-order simulacra, and help us to ponder the implications of that move.

I, Robot

I am introducing these concepts to provide structure for the huge change in SF. But we should not think (to disagree somewhat with Baudrillard) that issues pertaining to second-order simulacra, or the dream of robot control, have somehow disappeared. In contemporary SF, we often get a mix of second- and third-order simulated images. The best example of this that I can think of is HBO’s Westworld. Whereas the original Westworld (a camp 1973 film, created after Michael Crichton’s novel) was concerned primarily with the classic SF issue of robots going on a vengeful rampage, the Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy version takes a leap into the world of hyperreality, in which everything is a copy of something that never existed to begin with. Indeed, the robots don’t even start taking over and killing guests until the end of season two. Season one is exemplified by the conversation between one of the guests (the people who go to Westworld to be entertained by humanoid robots) and one of the hosts (the humanoid robots of the amusement park). When the guest asks the host, ‘Are you one of them or are you real?’, the apparent host replies, ‘If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?’

Before SF became hyperreal (third-order simulacra), it was interested in exploring the ramifications of robot control (second-order simulacra). As I intimated above, many SF writers fall on the utopian side of that projection, and some on the dystopian side, but the theological issues it raises are largely the same.

Let’s start with the dystopian side because it is a lot more fun. Since the Frankenstein die was cast, SF has been in love with its murderous robots. It is important to note that writers must anthropomorphize the robots to make them want to seek revenge. It has become commonplace for viewers and readers to accept that an AI that becomes self-aware would want to destroy its creators completely. So, we end up with HAL, the creepy computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the Terminator film franchise, because, of course, self-aware machines would want to obliterate humanity; Battlestar Galactica and its successful twenty-first-century reboot; and pretty much any Michael Crichton novel. Prey may be the most interesting of these because, instead of individuated positronic robot brains, it imagines what experts call ‘distributed cognition’ that enlivens a swarm of nanobots. Killer nanobots, of course.

But most classic or early SF writers do not share this dystopian view of the robot or AI. The most exemplary of the utopian novels is Isaac Asimov’s I, Ro...

Table of contents

• Introduction: a computer technology perspective
• Part 1: WHAT IS GOING ON? CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
• Part 2: THEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS AND RESPONSES
• Part 3: ETHICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES
• Conclusion
• Further reading
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