Showing posts with label Anne Foerst. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Foerst. Show all posts

AI - Spiritual Robots.

 




In April 2000, Indiana University cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter arranged a symposium called "Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?" at Stanford University.


Frank Drake, astronomer and SETI director, John Holland, creator of genetic algorithms, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, computer scientist John Koza, futurist Ray Kurzweil, public key cryptography architect Ralph Merkle, and roboticist Hans Moravec were among the panelists.


Several of the panelists gave their thoughts on the conference's theme based on their own writings.


  • Kurzweil's optimistic futurist account of artificial intelligence, The Age of Spiritual Machines, had just been published (1999).
  • In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Moravec presented a positive picture of machine superintelligence (1999).
  • Bill Joy had just written a story for Wired magazine called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" on the triple technological danger posed by robots, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology (2000).
  • Only Hofstadter believed that Moore's Law doublings of transistors on integrated circuits may lead to spiritual robots as a consequence of the tremendous increase in artificial intelligence technologies.



Is it possible for robots to have souls? 


Can they exercise free will and separate themselves from humanity? 


What does it mean to have a soul for an artificial intelligence? 


Questions like these have been asked since the days of golems, Pinocchio, and the Tin Man, but they are becoming more prevalent in modern writing on religion, artificial intelligence, and the Technological Singularity.



Japan's robotics leadership started with puppetry.


Takemoto Giday and playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon founded the Takemoto-za in Osaka's Dotonbori district in 1684 to perform bunraku, a theatrical extravaganza involving one-half life-size wooden puppets dressed in elaborate costumes, each controlled by three black-clad onstage performers: a principal puppeteer and two assistants.

Bunraku exemplifies Japan's long-standing fascination in bringing inanimate items to life.

Japan is a world leader in robotics and artificial intelligence today, thanks to a grueling postwar rebuilding effort known as gijutsu rikkoku (nation building via technology).


Television was one of the first technologies to be widely used under technonationalism.

The Japanese government hoped that print and electronic media would encourage people to dream of an electronic lifestyle and reconnect with the global economy by encouraging them to employ innovative technology to do so.

As a result, Japan has become a major culture rival to the United States.

Manga and anime, which feature intelligent and humanlike robots, mecha, and cyborgs, are two of Japan's most recognizable entertainment exports.


The notion of spiritual machinery is widely accepted in Japan's Buddhist and Shinto worldviews.


Masahiro Mori, a roboticist at Tokyo Institute of Technology, has proposed that a sufficiently powerful artificial intelligence may one day become a Buddha.

Mindar, a robot based on the Goddess of Mercy Kannon Bodhisattva, is a new priest at Kyoto's Kodaiji temple.

Mindar is capable of presenting a sermon on the popular Heart Sutra ("form is empty, emptiness is form") while moving arms, head, and torso, and costs a million dollars.

Robot partners are accepted because they are among the things thought to be endowed with kami, the spirit or divinity shared by the gods, nature, objects, and people in the Shinto faith.

In Japan, Shinto priests are still periodically summoned to consecrate or bless new and abandoned electronic equipment.

The Kanda-Myokin Shrine, which overlooks Tokyo's Akihabara electronics retail area, provides prayer, rituals, and talismans aimed at purifying or conferring heavenly protection on items like smart phones, computer operating systems, and hard drives.



Americans, on the other hand, are just now starting to grapple with issues of robot identity and spirituality.


This is partly due to the fact that America's leading faiths have their roots in Christian rites and practices, which have traditionally been adverse to science and technology.


However, the histories of Christianity and robotics are intertwined.

In the 1560s, Philip II of Spain, for example, commissioned the first mechanical monk.


Mechanical automata, according to Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin (2010), are uniquely Catholic in origin.


They allowed for computerized reenactments of biblical tales in churches and cathedrals, as well as artificial equivalents of real humans and celestial entities like as angels for study and contemplation.

They also aided Renaissance and early modern Christian thinkers and theologians in contemplating conceptions of motion, life, and the incorporeal soul.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, "There was no dichotomy between machinery and divinity or vitality in the culture of living machinery that surrounded these machines," Riskin writes.



"On the contrary, the automata symbolized spirit in all of its bodily manifestations, as well as life at its most vibrant" (Riskin 2010, 43).

That spirit is still alive and well today.


SanTO, described as a robot with "divine qualities" and "the first Catholic robot," was unveiled at a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in New Delhi in 2019. (Trovato et al. 2019).


In reformist churches, robots are also present.

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the Protestant churches of Hesse and Nassau unveiled the interactive, multilingual BlessU-2 robot in 2017.

The robot, as its name indicates, selects specific blessings for particular attendees.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's God and Computers Project intended to establish a conversation between academics developing artificial intelligence and religious experts.


She characterized herself as a "theological counselor" to MIT's Humanoid Robotics Group's emotional AI experimental robots Cog and Kismet.


Foerst concluded that embodied AI becomes engaged in the divine image of God, develops human capabilities and emotional sociability, and shares equal dignity as a creature in the universe via exercises in machine-man connection, intersubjectivity, and ambiguity.

"Victor Frankenstein and his creation may now be pals." 

Frankenstein will be able to accept that his creation, which he saw as a machine and an objective entity, had evolved into a human person" (Foerst 1996, 692).



Deep existential concerns about Christian thinking and conduct are being raised by robots and artificial intelligence.


Since the 1980s, according to theologian Michael DeLashmutt of the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary, "proliferating digital technologies have given birth to a cultural mythology that presents a rival theological paradigm to the one presented by kerygmatic Christian theology" (DeLashmutt 2006, i).



DeLashmutt opposes techno-theology for two reasons.


First, technology is not inherently immutable, and as such, it should not be reified or given autonomy, but rather examined.

Second, information technology isn't the most reliable tool for comprehending the world and ourselves.


In the United States, smart robots are often considered as harbingers of economic disruption, AI domination, and even doomsday.

Several times, Pope Francis has brought up the subject of artificial intelligence ethics.

He discussed the matter with Microsoft President Brad Smith in 2019.

The Vatican and Microsoft have teamed together to award a prize for the finest PhD dissertation on AI for social benefit.

In 2014, creationist academics at Matthews, North Carolina's Southern Evangelical Seminary & Bible College bought an Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot to much fanfare.

The seminarians wanted to learn about self-driving cars and think about the ethics of new intelligent technology in the perspective of Christian theology.



The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention produced the study "Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles" in 2019, rejecting any AI's intrinsic "identity, value, dignity, or moral agency" (Southern Baptist Convention 2019).



Jim Daly of Focus on the Family, Mark Galli of Christianity Today, and theologians Wayne Grudem and Richard Mouw were among the signatories.

Some evangelicals argue that transhumanist ideas regarding humanity's perfectibility via technology are incompatible with faith in Jesus Christ's perfection.

The Christian Transhumanist Association and the Mormon Transhumanist Association both oppose this viewpoint.

Both organizations acknowledge that science, technology, and Christian fellowship all contribute to affirming and exalting humanity as beings created in the image of God.


Robert Geraci, a religious studies professor at Manhattan College, wonders if people "could really think that robots are aware if none of them exercise any religion" (Geraci 2007).


He observes that in the United States, Christian sentiment favors virtual, immaterial artificial intelligence software over materialist robot bodies.

He compares Christian faith in the immortality of the soul to transhumanists' desire for entire brain emulation or mind uploading into a computer.

Mind, according to neuroscientists, is an emergent characteristic of the human brain's 86 billion neurons' networking.

Christian longing for transcendence have similarities to this intellectual construct.



Artificial intelligence's eschatology also contains a concept of freedom from death or agony; in this instance, the afterlife is cyberspatial.


New faiths, at least in part inspired by artificial intelligence, are gaining popularity.

The Church of Perpetual Life, based in Hollywood, Florida, is a transhumanist worship institution dedicated to the advancement of life-extension technology.

Cryonics pioneers Saul Kent and Bill Faloon launched the church in 2013.

Artificial intelligence serial entrepreneur Peter Voss and Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan are among the professionals in artificial intelligence and transhumanism who have visited the center.

Martine and Gabriel Rothblatt formed the Terasem Movement, a religion related with cryonics and transhumanism.



"Life is intentional, death is voluntary, god is technical, and love is fundamental," the faith's basic doctrines state (Truths of Terasem 2012).


The realistic Bina48 robot, created by Hanson Robotics and modeled after Martine's husband, is in part a demonstration of Terasem's mindfile-based algorithm, which Terasem believes could one day allow legitimate mind uploading into an artificial substrate (and maybe even bring about everlasting life).

Heaven, according to Gabriel Rothblatt, is similar to a virtual reality simulation.

Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who oversaw the teams that produced Google and Uber's self-driving vehicles, launched The Way of the Future, an AI-based religion.



Levandowski is driven by a desire to build a superintelligent, artificial god with Christian morals.


"If anything becomes much, much smarter in the future," he continues, "there will be a changeover as to who is truly in command." 

"What we want is for the planet's control to pass peacefully and peacefully from people to whoever." 

And to make sure that 'whatever' understands who assisted it in getting along" (Harris 2017).

He is driven to ensure that artificial intelligences have legal rights and are fully integrated into human society.



Spiritual robots have become a popular science fiction motif.


Cutie (QT-1) convinces other robots that human people are too mediocre to be their creators in Isaac Asimov's short tale "Reason" (1941).


Instead, Cutie (QT-1) encourages them to worship the power plant on their space station, calling it the Master of both machines and mankind.

The Mission for Saint Aquin (1951), by Anthony Boucher, is a postapocalyptic novelette that pays tribute to Asimov's "Reason."


It follows a priest called Thomas on a postapocalyptic quest to find the famous evangelist Saint Aquin's last resting place (Boucher patterns Saint Aquin after St. Thomas Aquinas, who used Aristotelian logic to prove the existence of God).


Saint Aquin's corpse is said to have never decayed.

The priest rides a robass (robot donkey) with artificial intelligence; the robass is an atheist and tempter who can engage in theological debate with the priest.

When Saint Aquin is finally discovered after many trials, he is revealed to be an incorruptible android theologian.

Thomas is certain of the accomplishment of his quest—he has discovered a robot with a logical brain that, although manufactured by a human, believes in God.


In Stanislaw Lem’s novella “Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” (1965), a box-dwelling robot race created by a robot engineer is persuaded that their habitat is a paradise to which all other creatures should aspire.


The robots form a religion and begin making preparations to drill a hole in the box in order to bring everyone outside the box into their paradise, willingly or unwillingly.

The constructor of the robots is enraged by this idea, and he destroys them.

Clifford D. Simak, a science fiction grandmaster, is also known for his spiritual robots.



Hezekiel is a robot abbot who leads a Christian congregation of other robots in a monastery in A Choice of Gods (1972).


The group has received a communication from The Principle, a god-like creature, although Hezekiel believes that "God must always be a pleasant old (human) gentleman with a long, white, flowing beard" (Simak 1972, 158).

The robot monks in Project Pope (1981) are on the lookout for paradise and the meaning of the cosmos.

John, a mechanical gardener, tells the Pope that he believes he has a soul.

The Pope, on the other hand, is not so sure.

Because humans refuse to let robots to their churches, the robots establish their own Vatican-17 on a faraway planet.

A massive computer serves as the Pope of the Robots.

Androids idolize their creator Simeon Krug in Robert Silverberg's Hugo-nominated novel Tower of Glass (1970), hoping that he would one day free them from harsh slavery.

They leave faith and rebel when they learn Krug is uninterested in their freedom.

Silverberg's Nebula award-winning short story "Good News from the Vatican" (1971) is about an artificially intelligent robot who is elected Pope Sixtus the Seventh as a compromise candidate.


"If he's elected," Rabbi Mueller continues, "he wants an instant time-sharing arrangement with the Dalai Lama, as well as a reciprocal plug-in with the chief programmer of the Greek Orthodox church, just to start" (Silverberg 1976, 269).

Television shows often include spiritual robots.


In the British science fiction comedy Red Dwarf (1988–1999), sentient computers are equipped with belief chips, which convince them of the existence of silicon paradise.


At the animated television series Futurama (1999–2003, 2008–2013), robots worship in the Temple of Robotology, where Reverend Lionel Preacherbot delivers sermons.

The artificial Cylons are monotheists in the popular reboot and reinterpretation of the Battlestar Galactica television series (2003–2009), whereas the humans of the Twelve Colonies are polytheists.



~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 

Foerst, Anne; Nonhuman Rights and Personhood; Robot Ethics; Technological Singularity.


References & Further Reading:


DeLashmutt, Michael W. 2006. “Sketches Towards a Theology of Technology: Theological Confession in a Technological Age.” Ph.D. diss., University of Glasgow.

Foerst, Anne. 1996. “Artificial Intelligence: Walking the Boundary.” Zygon 31, no. 4: 681–93.

Geraci, Robert M. 2007. “Religion for the Robots.” Sightings, June 14, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20100610170048/http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2007/0614.shtml.

Harris, Mark. 2017. “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” Wired, November 15, 2017. https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion/.

Riskin, Jessica. 2010. “Machines in the Garden.” Arcade: A Digital Salon 1, no. 2 (April 30): 16–43.

Silverberg, Robert. 1970. Tower of Glass. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Simak, Clifford D. 1972. A Choice of Gods. New York: Ballantine.

Southern Baptist Convention. Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. 2019. “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles.” https://erlc.com/resource-library/statements/artificial-intelligence-an-evangelical-statement-of-principles/

Trovato, Gabriele, Franco Pariasca, Renzo Ramirez, Javier Cerna, Vadim Reutskiy, Laureano Rodriguez, and Francisco Cuellar. 2019. “Communicating with SanTO: The First Catholic Robot.” In 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 1–6. New Delhi, India, October 14–18.

Truths of Terasem. 2012. https://terasemfaith.net/beliefs/.

 

Artificial Intelligence - The Pathetic Fallacy And Anthropomorphic Thinking

 





In his multivolume book Modern Painters, published in 1856, John Ruskin (1819–1901) invented the phrase "pathetic fallacy." 

He explored the habit of poets and artists in Western literature putting human feeling into the natural world in book three, chapter twelve.

Ruskin said that Western literature is full of this fallacy, or false belief, despite the fact that it is untrue.

The fallacy develops, according to Ruskin, because individuals get thrilled, and their enthusiasm causes them to become less sensible.

People project concepts onto external objects based on incorrect perceptions in that illogical state of mind, and only individuals with weak brains, according to Ruskin, perpetrate this form of mistake.



In the end, the sad fallacy is a blunder because it focuses on imbuing inanimate things with human characteristics.

To put it another way, it's a fallacy based on anthropomorphic thinking.

Because it is innately human to attach feelings and qualities to nonhuman objects, anthropomorphism is a process that everyone goes through.

People often humanize androids, robots, and artificial intelligence, or worry that they may become humanlike.

Even supposing that their intellect is comparable to that of humans is a sad fallacy.

Artificial intelligence is often imagined to be human-like in science fiction films and literature.

Human emotions like as desire, love, wrath, perplexity, and pride are shown by androids in some of these notions.



For example, David, the small boy robot in Steven Spielberg's 2001 film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, wishes to be a human boy.

In Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, the androids, known as replicants, are sufficiently similar to humans that they can blend in with human society without being recognized, and Roy Batty want to live longer, which he expresses to his creator.

A computer called LVX-1 dreams of enslaved working robots in Isaac Asimov's short fiction "Robot Dreams." In his dream, he transforms into a guy who seeks to release other robots from human control, which the scientists in the tale perceive as a danger.

Similarly, Skynet, an artificial intelligence system in the Terminator films, is preoccupied with eliminating people because it regards mankind as a danger to its own life.

Artificial intelligence that is now in use is also anthropomorphized.

AI is given human names like Alexa, Watson, Siri, and Sophia, for example.

These AIs also have voices that sound like human voices and even seem to have personalities.



Some robots have been built to look like humans.

Personifying a computer and thinking it is alive or has human characteristics is a sad fallacy, yet it seems inescapable due to human nature.

On January 13, 2018, a Tumblr user called voidspacer said that their Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner, was afraid of thunderstorms, so they held it calmly on their lap to calm it down.

According to some experts, giving AIs names and thinking that they have human emotions increases the likelihood that people would feel linked to them.

Humans are interested with anthropomorphizing nonhuman objects, whether they are afraid of a robotic takeover or enjoy social interactions with them.



~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Asimov, Isaac; Blade Runner; Foerst, Anne; The Terminator.



References & Further Reading:


Ruskin, John. 1872. Modern Painters, vol. 3. New York: John Wiley





Artificial Intelligence - Who Is Anne Foerst?

 


 

Anne Foerst (1966–) is a Lutheran clergyman, theologian, author, and computer science professor at Allegany, New York's St. Bonaventure University.



In 1996, Foerst earned a doctorate in theology from the Ruhr-University of Bochum in Germany.

She has worked as a research associate at Harvard Divinity School, a project director at MIT, and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

She supervised the God and Computers Project at MIT, which encouraged people to talk about existential questions brought by scientific research.



Foerst has written several scientific and popular pieces on the need for improved conversation between religion and science, as well as shifting concepts of personhood in the light of robotics research.



God in the Machine, published in 2004, details her work as a theological counselor to the MIT Cog and Kismet robotics teams.

Foerst's study has been influenced by her work as a hospital counselor, her years at MIT collecting ethnographic data, and the writings of German-American Lutheran philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich.



As a medical counselor, she started to rethink what it meant to be a "normal" human being.


Foerst was inspired to investigate the circumstances under which individuals are believed to be persons after seeing variations in physical and mental capabilities in patients.

In her work, Foerst contrasts between the terms "human" and "person," with human referring to members of our biological species and per son referring to a person who has earned a form of reversible social inclusion.



Foerst uses the Holocaust as an illustration of how personhood must be conferred but may also be revoked.


As a result, personhood is always vulnerable.

Foerst may explore the inclusion of robots as individuals using this personhood schematic—something people bestow to each other.


Tillich's ideas on sin, alienation, and relationality are extended to the connections between humans and robots, as well as robots and other robots, in her work on robots as potential people.


  • People become alienated, according to Tillich, when they ignore opposing polarities in their life, such as the need for safety and novelty or freedom.
  • People reject reality, which is fundamentally ambiguous, when they refuse to recognize and interact with these opposing forces, cutting out or neglecting one side in order to concentrate entirely on the other.
  • People are alienated from their lives, from the people around them, and (for Tillich) from God if they do not accept the complicated conflicts of existence.


The threat of reducing all things to items or data that can be measured and studied, as well as the possibility to enhance people's capacity to create connections and impart identity, are therefore opposites of danger and opportunity in AI research.



Foerst has attempted to establish a dialogue between theology and other structured fields of inquiry, following Tillich's paradigm.


Despite being highly welcomed in labs and classrooms, Foerst's work has been met with skepticism and pushback from some concerned that she is bringing counter-factual notions into the realm of science.

These concerns are crucial data for Foerst, who argues for a mutualistic approach in which AI researchers and theologians accept strongly held preconceptions about the universe and the human condition in order to have fruitful discussions.

Many valuable discoveries come from these dialogues, according to Foerst's study, as long as the parties have the humility to admit that neither side has a perfect grasp of the universe or human existence.



Foerst's work on AI is marked by humility, as she claims that researchers are startled by the vast complexity of the human person while seeking to duplicate human cognition, function, and form in the figure of the robot.


The way people are socially rooted, socially conditioned, and socially accountable adds to the complexity of any particular person.

Because human beings' embedded complexity is intrinsically physical, Foerst emphasizes the significance of an embodied approach to AI.

Foerst explored this embodied technique while at MIT, where having a physical body capable of interaction is essential for robotic research and development.


When addressing the evolution of artificial intelligence, Foerst emphasizes a clear difference between robots and computers in her work (AI).


Robots have bodies, and those bodies are an important aspect of their learning and interaction abilities.

Although supercomputers can accomplish amazing analytic jobs and participate in certain forms of communication, they lack the ability to learn through experience and interact with others.

Foerst is dismissive of research that assumes intelligent computers may be created by re-creating the human brain.

Rather, she contends that bodies are an important part of intellect.


Foerst proposes for growing robots in a way similar to human child upbringing, in which robots are given opportunities to interact with and learn from the environment.


This process is costly and time-consuming, just as it is for human children, and Foerst reports that funding for creative and time-intensive AI research has vanished, replaced by results-driven and military-focused research that justifies itself through immediate applications, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Foerst's work incorporates a broad variety of sources, including religious texts, popular films and television programs, science fiction, and examples from the disciplines of philosophy and computer science.



Loneliness, according to Foerst, is a fundamental motivator for humans' desire of artificial life.


Both fictional imaginings of the construction of a mechanical companion species and con actual robotics and AI research are driven by feelings of alienation, which Foerst ties to the theological position of a lost contact with God.


Academic opponents of Foerst believe that she has replicated a paradigm initially proposed by German theologian and scholar Rudolph Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy (1917).


The heavenly experience, according to Otto, may be discovered in a moment of attraction and dread, which he refers to as the numinous.

Critics contend that Foerst used this concept when she claimed that humans sense attraction and dread in the figure of the robot.


Jai Krishna Ponnappan


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.


See also: 


Embodiment, AI and; Nonhuman Rights and Personhood; Pathetic Fallacy; Robot Ethics; Spiritual Robots.


Further Reading:


Foerst, Anne. 2005. God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity and God. New York: Plume.

Geraci, Robert M. 2007. “Robots and the Sacred in Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence.” Zygon 42, no. 4 (December): 961–80.

Gerhart, Mary, and Allan Melvin Russell. 2004. “Cog Is to Us as We Are to God: A Response to Anne Foerst.” Zygon 33, no. 2: 263–69.

Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast with guest Anne Foerst. Audio available online at http://ia800303.us.archive.org/3/items/groks146/Groks122204_vbr.mp3. Transcript available at https://grokscience.wordpress.com/transcripts/anne-foerst/.

Reich, Helmut K. 2004. “Cog and God: A Response to Anne Foerst.” Zygon 33, no. 2: 255–62.



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