Will Artificially Intelligent Machines Turn Religious?

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PsychoticEpisode

It is very dry in here today
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Machines that can think. What will they think about? If they are able to logic and reason will they accept religion? If they do or don't would you still consider them intelligent?
 
Assuming we can make a computer think like a human being, than yes. After all, we are all biological machines that will likely rot in the ground and see no afterlife. However, only until I die will I find out.
 
Since thinking machines will definitely NOT be built with souls what would be their benefit to be being religious? Also since it seems likely that with careful continuous upgrades and backups a machine intelligence would have an open ended lifespan, i.e. death is not an inevitability.

Given that, what could religions possibly offer such a being?
 
let's throw a monkey wrench into the works
what if the AI acquired the capacity to kill? where would it's judgement or morality come from?
 
Cris said:
Since thinking machines will definitely NOT be built with souls what would be their benefit to be being religious? Also since it seems likely that with careful continuous upgrades and backups a machine intelligence would have an open ended lifespan, i.e. death is not an inevitability.

Given that, what could religions possibly offer such a being?
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AI may decide to invent a soul for itself but I'm not so certain it can invent an afterlife but wouldn't it be great if it did. Hell it might even make us God.
 
when life becomes self aware it starts to wonder about things like who or what created all this, and because they don't know themselves, they think some separated higher being created all this, but it was just our higher self.

Absane said:
After all, we are all biological machines that will likely rot in the ground and see no afterlife. However, only until I die will I find out.
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if death means non-existence, you won't find out anything (since you don't exist anymore) and if you reincarnate you won't remember.
 
leopold99 said:
let's throw a monkey wrench into the works
what if the AI acquired the capacity to kill? where would it's judgement or morality come from?
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If it does come to a decision, it will be based on the logic of its fundamental programming, and its experiences up to that point.
Unless it has emotions, or can experience things such as physical pain, it will not be able to take everything on board from experiences that a human would.
It would therefore be much colder and more calculating in its "judgement" - and there would be no morality - just logical assessment based on experience.
 
What about machines that are more moral than us?

http://discuss.foresight.org/~josh/ethics.html

For our own sake it seems imperative for us to begin to understand our own moral senses at a detailed and technical enough level that we can build their like into our machines. Once the machines are as smart as we are, they will see both the need and the inevitability of morality among intelligent-but-not-omniscient nearly autonomous creatures, and thank us rather than merely trying to circumvent the strictures of their consciences.

Why shouldn't we just let them evolve consciences on their own (AI's and corporations alike)? If the theory is right, they will, over the long run. But what that means is that there will be many societies of AI's, and that most of them will die off because their poor proto-ethics made them waste too much of their time fighting each other (as corporations seem to do now!), and slowly, after the rise and fall of many civilizations, the ones who have randomly accumulated the basis of sound moral behavior will prosper. Personally I don't want to wait. And any AI at least as smart as we are should be able to grasp the same logic and realize that a conscience is not such a bad thing to have.

(By the way, the same thing applies to humans when, as seems not unlikely in the future, we get the capability to edit our own biological natures. It would be well for us to have a sound, scientific understanding of ethics for our own good as a species.)

There has always been a vein of Frankenphobia in science fiction and futuristic thought, either direct, as in Shelley, or referred to, as in Asimov. It is clear, in my view, that such a fear is eminently justified against the prospect of building machines more powerful than we are, without consciences. Indeed, on the face of it, building superhuman sociopaths is a blatantly stupid thing to do.

Suppose, instead, we can build (or become) machines that can not only run faster, jump higher, dive deeper, and come up drier than we can, but have moral senses similarly more capable? Beings that can see right and wrong through the political garbage dump of our legal system; corporations one would like to have as a friend (or would let ones daughter marry); governments less likely to lie than your neighbor is.

I could argue at length (but will not, here) that a society including superethical machines would not only be better for people to live in, but stronger and more dynamic than ours is today. What is more, not only ethical evolution but most of the classical ethical theories, if warped to admit the possibility, (and of course the religions!) seem to allow the conclusion that having creatures both wiser *and morally superior* to humans might just be a good idea.
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PsychoticEpisode said:
Machines that can think. What will they think about? If they are able to logic and reason will they accept religion? If they do or don't would you still consider them intelligent?
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Logic is no problem as logic is rule based and therefore easily programmable. If by reasoning you mean logical assumptions from given data, that too is programmable. What you would need to mimic human attributes however, is the ability to self generate abstract ideas and philosophy (even assuming religion is generated internally rather than externally). This is creative thought, belief, faith etc. Certainly none of this can be programmed currently and I doubt ever will be able to, as there is no possible mathematical correlation to these. They form part of a peculiarly human trait which is not fully understood and for which I have never heard any satisfactory evolutionary explanation (all other animals survive without it and it's very hard to see how it just arrived in humans!).

The concept that we humans can make a machine that will last for ever (as stated elsewhere) would depend on your definition of what constituted 'the machine'. Provided that the only continuity is that of the existence of something and you are prepared to accept that something with everything replaced at different times (including the software) is still the same 'machine' that you started out with, it may be possible but that is an interesting debate.

If we could replace all the physical parts of a human being and change their personality, would they be the same person? If we just changed the personality or just the physical bits would they? A different discussion there on the essence of what constitutes a person. This would be a similar discussion in your machine scenario.

As a last thought even an apparently simple choice of what is good and what is evil has never been agreed between human beings despite the concentrated thoughts of hundreds if not thousands of philosophers and theologians over centuries so on what basis you could input that to the machine and who would decide that would be very difficult.


regards,


Gordon.
 
Thinking machine, probably.
Creative? nope! Since God is assumed as result of human creativity, then AI would not have religion. Thus they are intelligent.
 
Someone needs to read The Rise of Spiritual Machines by Kurzweil. Humans are spiritual because of the complexity of our brains. Someday computers will have brains at least as complex, with a similar parallel architecture, and they will have the same kind of questions we do. Thinking only humans have souls is a conceit. Our essence could be transferred to a machine with some kind of scanning method, as long as the resolution is fine enough. Quantum level scanning is unnecessary since the brain is built to cope with low level errors. Losing some brain cells doesn't translate into losing memories.

Will they accept religion? I doubt it. They will not be limited to our level of thought, but will quickly surpass us. They will be able to design machines that exceed themselves, and the outcome is unpredictable. I'm sure they will know about religion, and be able to place this knowledge in some context. They might not need the social reassurance that religion provides, the human need to be part of a community, but I could be wrong. It is entirely possible that they will not be separate from us, but that they could interface from us, or even act as a receptacle for human consciousness. In a robot body, we would be immortal. The existing boundries between self and other could become obsolete.
 
The order of Intellect is non-physical. There is no possibility therefore that a machine or any technology will ever be capable of Reasoning.
 
Lawdog said:
The order of Intellect is non-physical. There is no possibility therefore that a machine or any technology will ever be capable of Reasoning.
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Intellect is NOT non-physical - but, as with a number of other abstract descriptives, is merely a word to describe certain workings of the brain, workings that are PHYSICAL.


And what do YOU define as "reasoning"?

All artificial machines "reason" using pure logic - they give an output based on an input.
Some machines in the manufacturing industry are there specifically to weed out defective components - and use pre-programmed logic to "reason" whether something is defective or not.

Some computers that have been given neural-nets, such that they can actually learn, have been used to identify when station platforms get too busy. These machines "reason" using logic and interpretations of what the CCTV cameras show them.


So you need to define your use of the word "Reasoning".
 
Hmm, thats a good question, and I confess it made me think. The order of non-physical invisible is higher than the physical and visible. Mind over matter. This does not mean that Mind and matter are separate, no, but they interact and operate as one, non-physical Mind uses physical components, like memory and imagination, to engage in thinking. So mind and matter are not separate, but they are seperable.
 
Lawdog said:
The order of non-physical invisible is higher than the physical and visible. Mind over matter. This does not mean that Mind and matter are separate, no, but they interact and operate as one, non-physical Mind uses physical components, like memory and imagination, to engage in thinking. So mind and matter are not separate, but they are seperable.
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Separable? How?
Please give evidence to support this?
 
Reasoning and logic are acts that can be simulated by computers, but they shall never be able to Reason, since Reasoning is a divinely bestowed power of the soul, and computers do not have eternal souls. But perhaps you will not be persuaded by this easy explanation, so I will have to come up with something better. This could take some time.
 
Sarkus said:
Separable? How?
Please give evidence to support this?
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It seems that they are only seperable by divine intervention. It has been reported however that some souls have experienced out of body traveling, but this must be seriously doubted. Christ himself never did such an act. This is because the physical body is holy, not just a skin to be shed, so Jesus ressurrected bodily, not just spiritually, and he ate fish with the Apostles.
 
Lawdog said:
Reasoning and logic are acts that can be simulated by computers, but they shall never be able to Reason, since Reasoning is a divinely bestowed power of the soul, and computers do not have eternal souls.
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LOL!
That truly made me smile. Thank you. :D

Lawdog said:
But perhaps you will not be persuaded by this easy explanation, so I will have to come up with something better. This could take some time.
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"Perhaps"???
You will have to come up with something FAR better - and without all the logical fallacies and baseless assumptions that you are prone to use. ;)
 
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