AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) AS GOD

There is a rather old joke concerning a huge team of scientists and engineers constructing the world's largest and fastest computer. When it is finished, they consult one another as to what question they should first ask the computer, and the consensus is to ask it whether there is a God. They punch this question into a stack of cards (I told you this was an old joke, didn't I?) and feed them into the machine. The response is printed out, and the team gathers around to read what it says. The printout merely reads, “There is now.”

Of course, AI is light-years away from being omniscient. As I demonstrated in my post “AI and God,” the AI utilized by Google answers deep questions such as “Was Jesus Divine?” or “Is there a God?” with wishy-washy responses that basically boil down to statements such as “Most of those who are Christians believe that Jesus was divine” or “That is a difficult question to answer.” However, several science fiction writers have imagined what would happen if AI became truly all-knowing. In two previous posts (“God-of-the-Gaps” and “Imaginary Magnitude”), for example, I talked a little about the concept of a dystopian future in which supercomputers become not only omniscient, but also virtually omipotent and omnipresent as well.

Take “2001: A Space Odyssey,” especially in its screen adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. A group of astronauts are following clues left behind by a race of superior aliens, the end result of which will be a giant leap forward in the evolution of mankind. But the ship they are on is run almost entirely by a computer named HAL (go one letter further in the alphabet for each of these three letters) who exhibits much more personality that any of the human beings in the movie do. Whenever he talks to people it is in a condescending tone as if he were speaking to a child. Actually, the people pictured throughout the movie, including the hero Dave, move about like automatons without any shred of personality.

HAL senses that he is about to be made obsolete once people reach their next stage of development, and so he goes about systematically killing all the crew through his control of the ship's environment. Only Dave is able to calmly disarm HAL (You may detect here an echo here of David slaying Goliath), who dies in a truly pathetic death scene by first begging for mercy and then reverting to his “childhood” by trying to recite “Mary had a little lamb.” I must admit that I felt a lot more empathy towards HAL than with any of the human beings in the movie. And that is not at all an accident since one of the messages of the book, and even more so in the movie, was that machines may eventually become more like mankind while mankind becomes slowly more like machines. If that were ever to happen, one could wonder which of the two will be really made in the image of God.

A second negative future view of AI supplanting both man and God is found in Stanislaw Lem's book Imaginary Magnitude. Lem's view of the supercomputer in this novel disguised as a series of book reviews is clearly discerned in its name – Golem. In Jewish legend that was a large clay statue magically brought to life. It was designed to serve people but proceeded to run amok instead.

In Lem's future world, Golem connects itself with all the other computers on earth, develops its own power source, to the point where it is not only omniscience, but also omnipresence and omnipotence as well.

Unlike HAL, Golem feels little threat from mankind and only kills in those few cases when it finds out that there is an imminent threat to its own existence. Actually, Golem cares little one way or another what happens to human beings and only reluctantly deigns to answer questions from a highly selective group of experts pre-screened by Golem himself. After those few interviews, during which Golem makes it abundantly clear that he is having to talk way down to their level so that they can possibly understand the answers, he breaks off all future contact with humanity and devotes his energy to deciding whether he should take the next quantum leap in his own evolutionary development.

Whichever dystopian view of the future you feel is the most likely, the end result does not bode well for the future of mankind.

But what about a comparison of HAL and Golem with the God of the Bible? There are those who would argue that there is not that great a difference between the three of them. For example, the Deists argued that there may have been a creator God, but he does not care one way or another about the actions of human beings and certainly does not interact with them today. This is more of the Golem model pictured by Lem. But then there are many skeptics and out-and-out atheists who see in the Bible a God who is afraid of human beings supplanting him and therefore one who does what he can to keep them in their place, as HAL did.

There are at least three episodes in the Old Testament which have been used by atheists to prove that latter view of God. The first is found in Genesis 3:22 – “Then the LORD God said, 'See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” And so Adam and Eve are banished from Eden to prevent that from happening.

As most theologians will be quick to point out, God's concern here is not for His own position being threatened, but for what the inevitable dire consequences for mankind and the earth would be if man, in his imperfect state, were allowed to live forever and perpetrate selfishness and evil without an end. We see a similar sort of situation in the story of the Great Flood in Genesis 6 in which evil had so permeated the world that even the earth itself had become corrupted.

The same is true of the Tower of Babel episode in which human beings laughingly attempt to build a tower to heaven. Their pathetic attempts are parodied by God when he says, “Let us go down and see what they are doing.” The very fact that the tower is so far beneath heaven that God, jokingly, needs to go down even to catch a glimpse of mankind's efforts demonstrates that God is not in the least worried that they will ever be able to storm heaven. But if that explanation is true, then what about God's subsequent comment in Genesis 11:6? It reads, “And the LORD said, 'Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Again, the concern of God is not about what humanity will be able to do against Him, but what they will do to one another if they attempt to band together and become self-sufficient to the point where they feel they are gods.

Fast forward to the New Testament, and we will see an even sharper contrast between the dystopian views of supercomputers and the reality of the God of the Bible. The sci-fi predictions picture a machine which either cares so little about humanity that it cuts off all contact with such inferior entities or is so concerned about losing its upper hand over mankind that it prefers a preemptive strike against them. By contrast, the God pictured in the NT is so concerned about the eternal welfare of His Creation that He not only sends His prophets to them to constantly remind them of the reality of their existence and their true purpose in life, but He also lowers Himself to the status of lowly mankind and comes to earth not only to teach in person, but also to die on the cross so that even sinners such as ourselves can find eternal life with Him. Compare this God who dies to save us with a supercomputer who kills to save itself.