The advent of super intelligent robots endowed by their creators with artificial intelligence (AI) is much closer than we think and perhaps more dangerous than we suspect.
So say the wizards of technology, including the likes of Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX, and Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple. Musk has publicly stated that AI presents a “profound risk to society and humanity,” and must be regulated for the common good.
Already our computers can handily beat the great masters of chess and go, write music, prose, and poetry that is getting better by the minute, and solve complicated math and physics problems in the blink of an eye.
Robots don’t have eyes, you might argue.
But in fact they do. Equipped with optical sensors and machine vision, robots can in some dimensions see better than humans.
“But AI is not ensouled,” says my friend Don Willard. “No matter how clever it gets, it’s only synthesizing, processing, and outputting data that it was given and that was created by someone else.”
Hear, hear!
To Don’s point, I might add that robots can’t feel pleasure or pain, experience love or fear, or the joy of overcoming fear, or a thousand other emotions that God uniquely gave to humans.
Believe it or not, I was thinking about this yesterday while Betty and I were picking strawberries, wondering if a robot might be designed to move gingerly among the rows, spot the best-looking strawberries by their size and color, test the individual fruit for firmness, and nimbly pick the berry and place it in a basket.
Maybe so. Watch the video here.
But the bot would miss the better part of the experience, unable to smell or taste the fruit, unable to feel the sunshine on its cheek, unable to crack jokes with the folks who are picking in the next row over, and finally, unable to thank God for the pleasure.
All those feelings tend to slow us down, don’t they? Make us less efficient?
Absolutely. But it is those things precisely – things that cannot be digitized or imitated by a machine – that make us uniquely human.
Or as Don might say, ensouled.
𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐓: What say you, my friends? What does it mean to be human?
