The Theology of Robots

Extract

The initial reaction of nearly all theologians and religious people to the very idea that it is possible to talk about ‘the theological dimensions’ of the existence of robots would—today—be dismissive, and, more often than not, scornful. ‘It makes no sense,’ most theologians would say. Before beginning to argue that one day, on the contrary, it will make a lot of sense, something much more general must be said about robots, or, more specifically, about Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is usually abbreviated, is the study of computer models of intelligent behaviour. Some scientists are interested in using AI to understand human behaviour, others in designing intelligent mechanisms. As a discipline in its own right, it has existed since about 1950, with the pioneering work of John McArthy. It has two separate strands in its historical origin. Psychologists after the dark ages of behaviourism, which banished all talk of mental models as unscientific, started to study cognition (commonly called thought), which formed the subject of cognitive psychology. In devising models of mental processes they naturally turned to computers for an appropriate language of description; thus were born information processing models of human cognition. In order to formulate precise and testable theories of mental processes computer models were found to be indispensible. Models have been developed for memory, understanding natural language, vision, learning and, more recently, emotion.

Computer science has probably had a longer historical interest in AI, although one could argue that cogwheel and pneumatic models were an early attempt by psychologists to understand the mechanics of the mind.