As promised, following on from the last blog looking at some of the (rather comical) ideas by a pastor in the United States to convert intelligent robots to Christianity, it is perhaps necessary to look at other ways in which religion might impact on the future of artificial intelligence and robot design. However, rather than speculate as to the (very unlikely) possibility that sentient AI might suddenly find itself bereft of spiritual guidance and seek answers to the riddles of the Universe in our humble human mythologies (again, consider the fallible logic of QT1 in Asimov’s short-story ‘Reason’), it is perhaps more productive to examine how our own religious impulses and biases might affect our technological creations.

For it seems that, just like the Abrahamic God, we are creating robots in our own image (though, as we will see, this impulse is not limited to the Abrahamic religions).

It may seem like lazy cultural stereotyping or grotesque oversimplification to say, for example, that the Japanese are more comfortable building emotional relationships with their lifelike, humanoid robots, while engineers and consumers in the US and Europe are interested in only their robots’ functionality, and tend to spurn emotional  attachments.

But research conducted by scientists is demonstrating that such cultural differences do exist, and that the most important influence on the expectations and feelings that people have towards robots is religion.

Of course there are other cultural factors that one can point to in such different conceptualisations of what robots should be for and how they should be treated, but researchers from both East and West seem to be drawing the conclusion that it is the underlying outlook of different religions that is one of the greatest factors in these diverse feelings.

The thinking runs something like this: Japan, for example, is dominated by Shintoism and Buddhism. These religions are ‘animistic,’ that is, they belief that all things – including inanimate objects – contain the nature of kami, or ‘spirit’. Euro-American cultures, in contrast, dominated by Christianity, Judaism and Islam, believe that only human beings are endowed with a ‘soul‘, or spirit, and are therefore privileged amongst God’s creations.

Masahiro Mori – the Japanese roboticist that first developed the theory of the ‘uncanny valley’, and a practising Buddhist – explains in his book The Buddha in the Robot that, for Buddhists, robots and machines in general have the same Buddha-nature as any human being. The Judeo-Christian conceptualisation of creation, on the other hand, leads to a master-slave relationship between human beings and machines.

We can see how, from these radically different religious ideas, different cultural attitudes manifest themselves. Even in increasing secular societies, it seems, these religious roots run very deep. As a result, we find very different cultural expectations, for example, when it comes to the design and functions of domestic robots. When it comes to ‘look and feel’, researchers found that  Americans wanted robots to be ‘modern and stylish’, as appliances about the home, like washing machines, and had no particular expectations regarding the robots’ appearance, as long as it is capable of fulfilling a certain function. American participants in the study also wished for high levels of autonomy in their robots, expecting the machines to simply get on with whatever job to which they were assigned.

South Koreans, on the other hand, prefer domestic robots to be ‘warm, friendly and tender’, and were much more prepared to make emotional attachments to their robots; however, they also wanted their robots to be less independent – this, the researchers concluded, was because of the ideas in Korean culture (despite a significant percentage of Christians in the country) of the relatedness of things, derived from Buddhist beliefs.

Thus the researchers concluded that there are important differences between the American ‘utilitarian and independent’ expectations and those of the South Koreans, defied as ‘relational and interdependent’.

Robot Jesus by theFATkid

We may rightly ask, however, whether any of this matters, these silly old superstitions. Should thousand-year-old mythologies impact upon how we design the future? For better and for worse, absolutely yes, because these expectations will play a vital role in how are robots are received. Engineers, computer scientists and designers need to pay attention to such cultural differences if we are to successfully integrate our robots in various cultures and markets.

]]> https://csnblog.specs-lab.com/2015/06/18/robots-religion-part-ii-which-god-which-robot/feed/ 0 https://csnblog.specs-lab.com/2015/06/08/religion-robots-part-i-robbie-finds-god/ https://csnblog.specs-lab.com/2015/06/08/religion-robots-part-i-robbie-finds-god/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2015 13:22:09 +0000 http://csnblog.specs-lab.com/?p=5716 Continue reading →]]>  Article by Michael Szollosy

It was probably always an inevitability, but something has most certainly become a ‘Thing’ when it is covered by the intrepid reporters of US Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

Yes, it seems that a pastor in the USA (where else?) is espousing the idea that robots driven by sophisticated artificial intelligence should be welcomed into the Christian faith. Reverend Christopher Benek of the Providence Presbyterian Church in Florida reckons that since robots are already capable of beating people in chess and in game shows, can mow our lawns and vacuum our floors and give us directions, it cannot be long before they achieve consciousness. And once they are as intelligent as human beings, for Benek it naturally follows that they will, just like human beings, seek spiritual enlightenment.

The Good News is that, according to Benek, spirituality will naturally evolve in superior artificial intelligence, so that instead of being driven to evil acts and being a threat to humanity – as Stephen Hawking and others are warning – intelligent robots of the future will, through better moral and ethical understanding, be a much more benevolent and benign species on our planet.

Artificial Intelligence, Benek says, may even ‘lead humans to new levels of holiness’, teaching humans to better live lives in accordance with Christian principles.

(It would be unfair, perhaps, to point out how often human spirituality has lead us to commit so many of the acts against others in the name of God or gods – e.g. murder, genocide – that we so fear intelligent robots will wreak upon humanity as a whole. And it leaves open the possibilities of new religious wars based on different faiths competing to convert and save these newly manufactured souls.)

robots love their goods too

Benek’s ideas, however, are certainly further evidence that our cultural attitudes towards robots are changing, from monsters that promise destruction and the end of the human race, to our last and best hope of salvation. (Remember a couple of blog posts back, about the notion of robots as our saviours and, for example, the tag line of Neil Blomkamp’s Chappie: Humanity’s Last Hope Isn’t Human.)

 Of course, to students of the Bible, none of this should come as a surprise. We’ve been here before, and the idea of humans being replaced by superior, moral machines was predicted long ago.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh has corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said until Noah, ‘The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. (Genesis [not Genisys] 6: 11-13)

Reverend Lionel Preacherbot

And of course Reverend Benek’s beliefs are not entirely without foundation, as there is a precedent (of sorts) for robots finding religion. In Isaac Asimov’s story ‘Reason’, the robot known as QT1 (‘Cutie’) decides that he is a prophet in the service of The Master, his true Creator and their station’s source of power. He quickly converts all of the other robots to his new religion. And we’ve seen robots in thrall to religious fervour more recently, too, in the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and through the Robotology teachings of Reverend Preacherbot.

What Benek’s aspiration demonstrates is (again) the basic confusion between intelligence and… well, everything else that goes into making up human beings. It is worth remembering that even if – perhaps even when – scientists create a supremely or infinitely intelligent system, this will not necessarily mean that these robots will be emotional creatures, and it is even less likely that they would develop any sense of spirituality. All of those qualities we attribute to a fully sentient AI robot – anxiety, cynicism, suspicion, genocidal tendencies, and need for spiritual fulfilment – are the by-products of millions of years of human evolution, and do not come pre-loaded into a ‘consciousness.dat’ file (as per Chappie).

And we might hope regardless that such a highly advanced intelligence would not experience the same fallibilities that make humans susceptible to those… less rational aspects of religion.

(The Daily Show piece perhaps illustrates this best, with the reporter’s ‘robot’ first subjecting Reverend Benek to a brutal interrogation – e.g. ‘Why does God give babies cancer?’ – and then storming out of a synagogue, insisting, ‘No one touches my robo-junk.’)

god * jesus

Some folk are rather upset at the notion that robots might be welcomed into the Lord’s Church, and though some of their objections are very entertaining, we may have to accept that Benek’s prophecies may not come to pass, and at least that we will not be sharing our pews with intelligent robots anytime soon.

There is, however, the intriguing prospect that robots might replace human pastors at the pulpit (and again this is ground we have covered recently in this blog), but again, this possibility seems some way off yet, if for no other reason than there seems to be a lot of resistance to the idea of robots in general, let alone to the idea of them leading a congregation, amongst the followers of Christianity in the West.

And that leads us to the next instalment of this blog when, on a more serious note, we will examine the question of what role religion may have in the larger cultural attitudes and acceptance of robots in our lives.

Where have all the workers gone?

The idea that robots will replace human labour hasbeen around since, technically, before there was even such a thing as robots. It is an intriguing history: We can trace our fears of being displaced by mechanised labour back to the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, as automated looms, powered by the magic of steam engines, meant less employment for skilled workers.

The very origin of the word ‘robot’ is a part of this history, and reflects these fears.

Čapek’s R.U.R.

Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R., in which the word ‘robot’ first appears in its modern usage, portrays a factory where all of the workers are manufactured humanoid slaves  robota in Czech means ‘forced labour’) who [spoiler alert] eventually rise up and overthrow their creators. (A famous plot endlessly repeated, and mirrored, to an extent, in another important historical footnote, 1927’s iconic Metropolis, which is also a story about machines replacing human labour and its consequences.)

And now, in a new twist on this old theme – or, looked at from another way, the inevitable evolution of our anxieties – we are being told that whatever jobs are left to we humans will be filled by robotic recruiting consultants, who will analyse the data (i.e. human CVs) to find the best matches for those few jobs that, miraculously, robots are incapable of doing.

However, despite what might described as a bit of excitement at the possibility, there is really nothing new about this. Machines have long had a hand, so to speak, in helping to determine good matches between jobs and potential employees, just as versions of artificial intelligence are presently also finding us potential husbands and wives, new favourite songs and our next favourite books.

The idea that it will be ‘robots’ that will be recruiting human employees is clearly a hook, and not a particularly helpful one. (Especially when the news comes complete with illustrations of sometimes cute, sometimes overly stern – and always unnecessarily expensive – humanoid robots.)

So the news really is… not news. But there’s nothing new in that either, not when it comes to robots, or technology more generally. So, if there is nothing remarkable about machines helping to organise our lives, why is this question of ‘robot recruiters’ such a popular topic at the moment?

The workers and the machines in Metropolis (1927)

The answer, of course, lies in history, and our anxieties. We can trace the answer back to the Industrial Revolution and those dark Satanic mills. It is a new articulation of the old fear that we will be replaced by machines, that robots – versions of ourselves that do not tire, that do not require rests or holidays or maternity leave – will take our jobs. And more fundamentally here, the idea of robot recruiters goes one step further, unless, of course, you are actually in the recruiting industry itself, in which case the idea of robots doing recruitment, and doing it better than you, is already enough.

The idea that robots will find us jobs taps into the fact that we already know that robots are determining more and more about our lives – the amazon.com suggestions, the match.com pairings, the tripadvisor.com recommendations. But the robot recruiter also suggests that so many – perhaps for some people, too many – of our interactions are with machines that might be entirely rational and highly efficient, but somehow still less than human. And perhaps we’re not just thinking about our human-robot interactions, the voice inviting us to press 1 to pay a bill. There may also be a sense that many of our human-human interactions are similarly governed by a rigid inflexibility, that we are meeting other people that are somehow less than human.

And while normally we might embrace these interventions, and be grateful for the able assistance, we are – as ever – ambivalent about our relationship with technology. We are foreshadowing for ourselves potential downsides, negative impacts, and imagining that there are limits to how far we would like this trend to continue. These reservations are entirely legitimate and entirely rational, but in the absence of clear discussion or reasonable debate, they tend to be expressed in nightmare dystopian scenarios; we move from what is perhaps an unconscious suspicion that it may not be perfectly fine for a robot to help us find a fulfilling, well-paid job to imagining a world where a Skynet-styled AI alters our DNA while we are still in the test-tube and employs laser-gun wielding cyborgs to march human children from their Brave New Schools into their computer terminal prisons, where we will be connected to feeding tubes and implanted chips will cause us to explode should we ever try to leave.

But, as usual, such fantasies says much more about human beings than it does about the present or future abilities of robots and AI.