The Creator
Talking about artificial intelligence and the place of intelligent robots in the not so far future of man, we often compare them with the slaves, who helped once the pharaohs to create the eternal pyramids or the English to colonize the new world. Those comparisons are not accidental, because firstly we create robots to improve our life and eliminate routine work, to serve us. But I’d like to remind about one more important comparison and raise the primary question: creating a life, does man become God?
It’s pretty difficult to give a simple answer to this question, because the ability to create life is the necessary but insufficient quality of God. According to the teachings of theistic and deistic religions, God creates and structures the world, gives a being, measure and value for everything. And engineer first of all "knocks out" on the chip the main three laws, defines the protocols and interaction interfaces, sends the machine to diagnostics and then lets his "child" meet the world. But to equate these two acts of creation, first we must answer the question about the intention. And if "God works in mysterious ways", but talking about man personally I doubt about unselfishness of his purposes in most cases. But why does the intention matter here? Because the relationship between creator and his creature depends on the intention of it’s creating. "You are monster" - exclaimed the main character of picture "Ex Machina", when he found out the truth about terrible experiments of programmer Nathan with his androids which already had initial signs of intelligence. In contradiction, God is the Father, the patron for his children.
And what does the creation look like? Genesis 1: "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them". And man creates machines in his own image too. But what is the difference? Long before the thought about artificial intelligent life, man had got the ability inherent only to him to give objects a soul. He gives objects a character, an individuality, makes them look like himself and even sometimes trust them his most intimate secrets. Anthropologists are convinced this ability to fantasize is very important for human evolution. It’s obviously here that the reason of a similar or completely identical to human image of the machine is the endeavor to a seamless transition from the society of people to the society of people and robots. After all a lot of people are not going to take into their house a machine which looks and behaves like an alien and won’t trust them.
Finally, God is the supreme, powerful and supernatural Being. Is man the same for the machines he creates? He puts the "gene" of adoring and worship him into their source code. But to be honest, is this not vanity, is this not the desire to control the instruments to achieve his goals, to be safe? After all, on the other hand man believes a priori that artificial intelligence is superior to his own and develops it now to solve the problems which man can’t cope with: his fragility and mortality, space exploration, alternative energy and much more. Thus, artificial intelligence for man is nothing more than a possible salvation. And the artificial mind is dealt in absolute in the end, not the human.
I wouldn’t like to summarize my short theses, since they are not completely finished and have a wide scope for thought. Instead, I’d like to ask one more question: does man have the right to interfere with the universe’ rules? The religions teach that only God has the right to handle a life: gift it and take back it. A lot of people are afraid of this and think it is wrong, unnatural. But personally I believe the artificial intelligence research like nothing else will help us answer the most important questions about our being, understand ourselves in the world. This is a reasonable risk.