Culture and Science

Here's something I ran across in which scientists think machines are becoming too close to human intelligence. And I'm publishing this on a Sunday, so I'll be brief.

I have two bizarre obsessions on this blog: global warming and the progress of robotic and computer science toward "lifelike" robots/machines. Here's why I am obsessed with these things: they are false religions which will ultimately hurt us more than help us as created beings made in the image of God. For example, it may be interesting or even cheaper or more efficient to have an answering machine that acts like a person. But if what we really want is to interact with people, we shoudl interact with the people God has made.

I realize that this has nothing to do with accounting or time management -- but those are not Gospel virtues. The Gospel virtues are to love God above all things, and your neighbor as yourself -- and to build a machine because you are philosophically a misanthropist and a committed worshipper of yourself violates both of those, no matter how you dress it up.

Think about this: the scientists are the ones here noticing that the trend is toward something which will cause social and societal upheaval. Why is it that they can say stuff like this, and care about stuff like this -- even in what is today a sort of back water of technological development -- but we Christians are somehow unable to get to the place where we can call me out of the rest of their sins with equal precision and clarity to the true solution to their culture?