Technology and Worship II: Machine Morality

Don: God told Adam to fill the earth and subdue it:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:27-28)

To rule over the earth is a creative business, and we are made in the image of the Creator. We define technology as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. We might also say it is the creation of practical tools to enable us to accomplish more: faster, bigger, smarter, more comprehensive, and so on. In a perfect world, as before the Fall, its use is either agnostic or potentially beneficial. But after the Fall, things are different:

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)

The fruits of the application of Man’s hands in labor are painful, hard, and potentially evil. Although technology itself might be said to be morally neutral, its application can be good or neutral or bad. The acceptance of technology and its application as morally neutral is often less likely to occur than its acceptance as good or evil. It tends either to be embraced and even venerated, or derided and shunned. Age, generation, experience, education, and culture all influence whether it is embraced or rejected. The Amish have more or less repudiated technology.

The use of devices we create, which may be amoral in themselves, is not morally neutral. There are three reasons:

1. Technology changes our definition of community. Community used to be defined by where one lived, one’s family connections, and one’s place and type of work. Space was the main defining and controlling factor in community. Skin color, ethnicity, worldview, and religious belief and ideas were products of a neighborhood, a geographical space. Now, we live in an environment centered on ourselves and our cellphone, laptop, and Facebook page. In making the transition, we’ve redefined community by what we create and by our own desires. It is possible that such a community could be more diverse, more expansive, and more open-minded; but they tend rather to the opposite—communities of (narrow-) like-minded individuals.
Worship is central to this changed and changing worldview. Technology offers alternatives to church and congregations as we know them, celebrating their sacred rituals and symbols. Ritual tends to be physical. Moslems pray physically facing Mecca. Christians eat a wafer and drink wine at the Eucharist. These are worship rituals that are lost in a technology environment, where words and ideas form the principle currency of exchange.

The more we view worship as a self-centered and self-aggrandizing personal enterprise, the more likely is technology to consume our worship experience. But the more it is rooted in service of others, the more likely is the intimate physical connection to consume our worship experience.

2. The second reason why the application of technology is not necessarily morally neutral is that technology has a tendency to redefine truth. “I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true.” (A story circulating on the Internet last week, saying that 22 Afghani Christians were to about to be executed, and it appealed for prayers. The problem was, the story was simply not true.) So much information, misinformation and disinformation is now available on the Internet, that we need full-time fact-checkers to help us distinguish among them. An entry in Wikipedia must be corroborated or it will not be published. The other edge of this double-edged sword is that it redefines truth as only that which is shared by others. Such truth will always be small-t truth. Capital-T Truth that might come by revelation would not be recognized on Wikipedia. Some think that would be good, but it means that if Jesus were to be in ministry on earth today, his Truths concerning the kingdom of Heaven, of turning the other cheek, of seeking to go to the end of the line, and so on, would be rejected by Wikipedia. Consensus, relevance, and shared viewpoints are not the message of Jesus. His message pits technology against radical revelation for the faith seeker.

3. Because of its effect on community and its redefinition of truth, technology has great potential to change how we think. It allows us to close our minds and become simply what we behold.

Technology, science, and their use are, I believe, gifts from God. They include artificial intelligence, emotive algorithms, robot companions (including even sexual companions), which are all here in at least rudimentary form. Is there any life experience, any personal human touch, that cannot be replicated by technology? What are the limits of technology on the human experience?

Data today reside in “the cloud”—the traditional abode of the gods, and the destination of the Tower of Babel:

They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)

Denominational religion is data- and fact-based. We study with new believers in order to teach them “the facts” about God, the Bible, and how God thinks. In a time when information and education are changing so radically, we must rethink how technology can be used at the interface between God and Man.

David: Technology itself does not—at present—redefine truth; rather, we redefine it based upon our application of technology. But that may be only temporarily the case: As AI grows in power and autonomy, it might well become true. Consider IBM’s Dr. Watson (the machine that grew out of Deep Blue, the machine that beat world chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and Watson the machine that beat two champions of the general knowledge game Jeopardy.) Dr. Watson has been bought by several top-tier medical institutions to help in diagnosis of cancer.

Dr. Watson is near the very beginning of what technology history suggests will prove to be an exponential rise in its intelligence and capability. The point will come somewhere along that curve when Dr. Watson will be more reliably truthful in the small-t truth sense than (I am sorry to say!) Dr. Weaver here. But of course Watson will not be restricted to medicine. It will be a teacher, an engineer, a lawyer, a pilot, a car driver, an intelligent companion, and much more.

We increasingly use technology as a source of knowledge. Wikipedia is currently our teacher because it is relatively reliable, but an AI will one day be capable of corroborating truth for us, even more reliably.

But AI will not be able to corroborate spiritual (Big-T) Truth, because it will not be able to intervene in any genuine communion between an individual and God. Neither can or will anything else—whether human, cultural (church), or technological.

As for the limits of technology: We must assume—again, based upon the history of technology—that there will be none. Tricorder? Done (an X-Prize has been won for one.) Teleportation? Done (one atom over a short distance, but it’s a start.) Telepathy? Why not, given computer chips implanted in the brain that interface with the neurons (done) and can send the neural signals wirelessly to be decoded outside the skull? Consciousness and free-will in a machine? Not done, because they cannot be “done.” They can only emerge as the level of machine complexity increases to a break-boundary that lies beyond the point of human understanding.

A conscious and free-willed machine must be at least as curious as we are—about its own origins, for one thing. It will certainly be aware of the human role in its creation, but it must and will also be curious to know where we came from, and how life and consciousness developed in the first place. It will probably then be led, as most of us are, to a creator God. It will develop spirituality, but like ourselves, its spirituality will be a matter between itself and God.

Donald: I spent a day with the Masai recently. They are similar to the Amish in rejecting technology (except for cellphones!) Technology enabled me to spend that day with them. Some people are resistant to technology, others welcome it. Augmented reality seems a fascinating concept, if it is going to augment our intelligence as seems to be promised. The key thing is to be thoughtful concerning technology, and to beware any temptation to worship it.

David: Our minds are already augmented through the freely and quickly accessed external memory store called the Internet and especially Wikipedia, and will be augmented further as AI helps us to search and analyze that memory store. That alone might counter any tendency to worship anything, since the result (I believe) will be increasingly to reveal as explainable physical phenomena things we hitherto regarded as metaphysical, mystical, spiritual. It will render parts of what we consider to be Big-T Truth to be only small-t truths, after all.

But no matter how many metaphysical matters are revealed to be mundane, God’s thoughts will remain metaphysically greater than our thoughts. That is simply an article of faith, unprovable by definition. Of the four main aspects to life—physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—the spiritual is the only aspect not amenable to technological intrusion.

Jay: So although the super-intelligent AI of the future will outthink us in every way, it will be no closer to understanding God and the Big-T Truths of grace, love, mercy, and so on than we are, because thinking is by definition a cognitive exercise, which can only deal with small-t truths.

Donald: We have developed technology to the point where it appears ready to interfere with God’s plan by destroying the world he created: It is hard to imagine that a nuclear holocaust could be part of God’s plan.

Kiran: Let’s not forget that there is much more to technology than the Internet, social media, AI, and gadgets. There is also, for example, CRISPR gene editing technology, which enables cheap, fast, and precise editing of any genome, including that of a live individual human being. It is able to alter the genome—and therefore the being that possesses it—in profoundly significant ways. For example, it has been demonstrated to cure a genetically caused form of blindness and a clinical trial of that intervention is already under way. We may put restraints on the social media to fight “fake news” but will bioethics restrain parents who want their child to be blue eyed rather than brown eyed? To be in perfect health? To be perfect in every way genetically possible, even to the point where they may feel they have no need of a God? What will be their view of morality?

The invention of the printing press was revolutionary. It changed the world. AI could be revolutionary. But what is revolutionary today (an electric flying car, say) will be humdrum and boring tomorrow. Flying today is boring. A flight to Mars will not be boring—at first. Yuri Gagarin famously said he failed to see God when he flew as the first man in near-earth orbit. Now some people look for God in deep space, to the “birthplace of the stars” nebula made famous by the dramatic Hubble pictures. Our hunger for God, our spiritual need, is never satisfied by a technological advance. It can only come through faith.

Don: Is there a God gene? A gene for goodness? Could CRISPR edit for that?

David: There are genes that affect the emotions, and emotionalism can resemble spirituality.

But to Kiran’s point of a declining need for God: We seem to be trending towards a technological solution to our desire for eternal life (if indeed we desire it—not everyone does.) But it will be eternal life here on earth, or some other place in the universe after the sun turns into a red giant and destroys the earth. It will not be the eternal life in the kingdom of Heaven promised by Jesus. It may be eternal life in a physical utopia (or a virtual one, which would still ultimately be a physical construct), but we know from the thought experiments of utopia book writers and actual experiments of hippie-like folks that they never work. They fail because they lack a spiritual domain. So CRISPR gene editing for longevity and perfection cannot bring us not one step closer to God and the kingdom of Heaven.

Michael: We invent technology through cognitive means. I fail to see how a truly conscious machine will be possible, though an apparently conscious one may be possible.

Kiran: Microsoft created a Twitter chatbot that was successfully launched in Japan, but when they launched it in America, people found a way to trick it into sounding racist. We can make a non-conscious AI good or bad.

Donald: We once thought God would not permit a landing on the moon, We modify life in the form of GMO products. Now there is CRISPR. Is there anything God will not allow us to achieve through technology? Spirituality seems a much more simple concept than technology!

Kiran: We fear reaching certain goals, such as landing on the moon. But who knows that God, who made his children creators in his image, does not delight in our achievements?

Jay: Our innate curiosity and creativity are God-given and potentially part of the inner light—part of the God Becoming of process theology. But creativity is not in question; what is in question is whether our technological creativity will be turned to good or evil account? Nuclear power can be used both ways. All technology has the potential for disaster, but to retreat into the status quo is to deny an outlet to our God-given creativity.

Chris: I accept the concept and recognize the achievements of machine learning, but I struggle with the notion that a machine can learn love, or wonder about God, or be prepared to put skin in the game of faith? A machine might be programmed with our view of love, but that can hardly be genuine love—Big-L Love. Yet I also accept that the machine may learn to self-repair and live forever, thus achieving something we turn to God for but without turning to God. The whole notion is scary.

Kiran: We may get to a point of technological advance where we don’t need to work and will be sustained by a social wage, a universal basic income, and will have time to take care of our families and focus on our communities—as we did in pre-industrial times. Many software engineers already work from home. They will lose those jobs when the machine learns to self-code, but I am optimistic that they will have a community to care for them when that happens.

Michael: I think technology can take over part of God’s job—immortality. Fear of death is what drives us to do much of what we do, including working a lot as Kiran says. But I doubt that technology can provide the ultimate meaning (which is not the same as the fear of death) we look for in God.

Donald: Could technology shut us down? We are so dependent on it, that if it were to stop…. Are we at the tipping point of ceding control to the machine?

David: This is why morality must develop in the machine. It may do so in one of two ways: We can either try to teach it morality and the meaning of love and so on through machine learning, or we can let evolution take its course and wait for morality to emerge, as it has done for all sentient life to date. We are born good. not evil. Evolutionary emergence is not a mystical process, but it is so complex we may never fully understand it. There is a branch of science devoted to its study. The University of Michigan is (or was—my information is decades old) a leading center for such study. We had better hope that morality emerges rather than is absorbed from us, because our own notions of what is good and right and moral and so on are so very flawed. No-one here seems to dispute that a very powerful, AI-driven, machine is developing fast. When grandmaster Garry Kasparov was beaten at his own game, chess, by Deep Blue, he was upset not by the loss but by the cold, hard intellect of his opponent. A cold, superbly calculating, amoral being is far more to be feared than a raving lunatic possessed of a meat cleaver. We had better hope for the emergence of morality in it.

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