Chapter six deals with the brewing conflict between science verses religion as we watch robotic sophistication evolve. If you have not read chapter four and five, please do so now. Chapter six will make little sense without first having read chapter four and five.
e. Will the Church Go Quietly into that Good Night?
The answer to that question is a resounding NO. The church has never shied away from entering into these kinds of disputes. I anticipate that traditional established religions will have none of this. The Catholic Church declared that contraception was a sin. What do you think they will call someone wanting to marry a robot? One of their fundamental tenets is that God made man in His own image. When people attempt to redefine robots as being anything other than machines, it will intrude on one of their core beliefs. No institution will willingly surrender ground in this debate.
Remember what happened when Galileo put the sun in the center of our solar system and moved earth into orbit number three? He was jailed as a heretic. While modern man understands Galileo was in fact correct, scientific proof made no difference to the church hierarchy that had him incarcerated. Some will defend the church by claiming it has evolved. While there has surely been improvement, there is still a long way to go. The church went after in vitro fertilization and birth control in the 20th century. It condemned embryonic stem cell research in the 21st century. It is presently attacking modernity in our public schools. While watching the horrors of a religious state in the Middle East, we have our own fundamentalists demanding a religious state in the US based, largely on lessons from the Old Testament. Their tone and tenor suggest they would likely support the stoning of prostitutes just like in the good old days. The protests that occur at the funerals of our fallen soldiers by religious fanatics are just one more example of why we do not want science or our society shackled by these individuals.
The church also defines life as starting at conception. They refer to the divine spark seen when a woman's egg is fertilized by a man's sperm. Man is different from the other animals because he was divinely inspired and instilled with a soul by his creator. It is difficult to discuss science and technology (including the science of reproduction and life) objectively with those who maintain a conservative religious belief system, because many times those beliefs are in direct contradiction to proven science. When it comes to something as personal as your relationship with a creator, that highly personal basis for belief – ranging from faith only to reliance on science – maintains a huge gap in considerations of personal salvation.
Science does not claim to encompass fact or truth. This is an important point, and one that many people mistake. Science seeks to observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment, refine, and apply. The power and demonstrable success of science lies in the track record of its predictions and applications. Good science makes predictions that come to pass and can be applied successfully for the benefit of humanity by raising the standards of existence. If a scientific theory is disproved by later experimental evidence, scientists are the first to be forced to abandon old theories and embrace the new evidence. Religious doctrine, when viewed in a scientific framework, makes predictions as well, but the “theory of religious doctrine” has a rather poor track record. Its predictions are rarely empirically supported and its practical applications are few. People who pray (only) for healing from a terminal illness usually die and people who use penicillin usually live. Indeed, the very nature of religious doctrine is so vague it can be used to support practically any position. It is all a matter of interpretation.
While theologians may be able to paper their way around the human being who becomes a robot under some doctrine that this technological development was driven behind the scenes by the divine hand of God, the robot from scratch is clearly man-made from its very inception. For the church to acknowledge this new life form would then make man the creator of life, not God. It would also draw into question whether or not a human being actually has a soul. No one is going to believe a robot manufactured in a factory has a soul. There can be no divine spark when the entire process occurs in some guy's garage with spare parts he bought on eBay. And so the fight begins.
The original Luddites destroyed machines because they were taking their jobs. Religious fundamentalists, likewise, would likely destroy any attempts to recognize robotic independence because it threatens to erode the fundamental tenets of their faith. The Texas Board of Education in 2010 actually removed Thomas Jefferson from the high school history books when it was learned that he had coined the phrase "separation of church and state." If such a severe reaction occurs from such a minor slight to their religious doctrine, can you imagine their reaction to someone equating robotic life with human life?
Also at the center of this conflict is the entire concept of evolution. While many people accept that evolution is an ongoing process that produced the human race, some people, it seems, just need to believe that man was the end product. To think otherwise would mean we are just another transitory passage in the history of earth. We look at the passing of the dinosaur as an evolutionary process, at the extinction of the Neanderthal as another. The idea that the human race could become extinct is another matter altogether. Man has taken control of the evolutionary process with regard to other life forms: domesticated cattle, dogs, and cats. And at the molecular level, thanks to Craig Venter, we have now created a synthetic life form. As we start augmenting the human race with electronic enhancements, who’s to say this is not the next evolutionary step? How is it any different?
The evolutionary process has been described as a drunken sailor. Mutations that do not favor reproduction are discarded while mutations that do favor reproduction are replicated. Because these mutations are haphazard and random, the evolutionary process itself has progressed along lines that are in many ways random (though, of course, survival of the fittest means that better adaptation will always be favored in the long run.) With the advent of the human brain’s unprecedentedly large frontal lobe, for the first time in the history of planet Earth, a life form is now attempting to direct the evolutionary process in a rational, goal-oriented direction.
In the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to place a small chip into the brain of a developing fetus. This new form of human life will grow into adulthood having been fully integrated with the Internet its entire life. Without changing what human beings look like, this will be a radical departure from what it means to be human. If an enhanced human were allowed to play Jeopardy against unenhanced humans, there’d be no contest. The advanced “artilect” would have actual "total recall." The enhanced will advance so far beyond ordinary human capacity that the question is whether they will even deign to speak to unenhanced humans. They’ll have very little in common. The enhanced will wrestle with issues like how to terraform Mars or how to construct a viable moon colony to transmit energy to Earth. The unenhanced will still be arguing about abortion and who has real family values.
Hugo de Garis is a researcher who has come up with a form of artificial intelligence known as “evolvable hardware.” He spent a number of years trying to build an artificial brain prior to his retirement in 2010, and coined the term “artilects,” short for “artificial intellects.” He predicts that at some point the artificial intelligence contained in robots will surpass human intelligence by a factor of trillions and their abilities will be “godlike” compared with those of human beings. “Humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution. These machines are godlike. It is human destiny to create them.” Such statements will likely create real tension between the religious fundamentalists and those differently disposed. Dr. de Garis refers to the coming conflict as “species dominance.”
The idea that the robot is actually progressing into an advanced life form far beyond organic humanity will likely cause the religious fundamentalists to rise up and demand an end to it. To quote Dr. de Garis: “Millions of people will be asking such questions as: Can the machines become smarter than humans? Is that a good thing? Should there be a legislated upper limit to machine intelligence? Can the rise of machine intelligence be stopped?” We come back to central question: can a robot become conscious? No one disagrees the mature human brain is conscious. But did it start out conscious? No, it started as a collection of dividing cells in a blastocyte the size of a postage stamp. As it grew larger and more complex, at some mysterious point consciousness arose. Those in the camp of Dr. Kurzweil and de Garis believe that when a synthetic artificial brain (artilect) reaches a sufficient level of complexity, consciousness will arise there as well. These artilects will be the next form of evolutionary life. To argue over whether this is true or not misses the point. Whether they are truly conscious or merely clever enough to convince us they are conscious, their behavior will likely be the same. Quoting Dr. de Garis one more time: “I believe that the ideological disagreements between these two groups on this issue will be so strong, that a major ‘artilect’ war, killing billions of people, will be almost inevitable before the end of the 21st century.”
The next step will be when the species dominance debate starts to heat up, as the issue becomes more and more real to people watching the level of artificial intelligence keep rising and rising. Man is able to see and react to immediate threats quickly. We are hardwired for this. Slow-building, long-term threats? Not so much.
After 9/11 we spent billions to prevent terrorist attacks in the US. In a ten-year period from 2003 to2013 we had fewer than 20 deaths from terrorist attacks on American soil. The shooting at Fort Hood in 2009 accounts for 12 of these in a single incident. In that same period, we had roughly 35,000 deaths per year due to traffic fatalities. That totals 350,000 dead in the US alone. We did not spend nearly as much taxpayer money on the threat that killed on a more massive scale. It did not get remotely as much media attention, nor did it exist in the conscious mind of the average citizen.
We lost 500,000 people to diabetes every year during that same time period. Where’s the outcry, the press fanfare, the political debates about who is soft on diabetes? It does not exist, and yet that silent killer walked among us with virtual immunity to kill in jaw-dropping numbers. We see the immediate threat – troops massing on our borders – but not the one that evolves over time and strikes indirectly. My point is that we will build these powerful machines no matter what danger they may ultimately pose. If they are to be the downfall of humanity, as some claim, we will not see or address it until it is already too late. Even if we could talk a sitting president into banning them, the rest of the world would proceed at full throttle, thankful for the chance to play catch-up. We have already seen this from the stem cell ban that occurred in 2003 in the US. Other nations like China proceeded and the US lost its huge advantage.
Many of our most popular science fiction films share the same basic theme: machines of our creation rising up against us. But I would join with thinkers like Kurzweil to posit a more plausible threat to the human race. As we acquire more and more enhancements we ourselves will evolve into our machines. It will not be a bloody conflict with lasers and explosives. It will happen over time without a shot being fired. Not only won’t we resist this transformation, we will rush headlong into it in an attempt to conquer our oldest enemy: death itself. To quote Woody Allen, “I do not want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”
Let’s talk.
RANDY: Life, death, creations are all metaphysical things that presently we have the inability to understand. Death has been redefined on at least two occasions in my lifetime. At one time, death was defined as the point when the human heart stopped beating permanently. Now, death has been redefined as the ceasing of any electronic signals coming from the brain. There have been legal discussions as to whether someone is dead who cannot interact with the world yet remains attached to mechanical devices. They are kept breathing and continue to have a heartbeat but there is no recognizable brain pattern occurring. Individuals have been kept “alive” for years in such states. Scientists and doctors will argue that, since there is no brain activity, the person is actually dead. Others will point out that the body still functions, food is utilized (even if it is artificially pumped into the stomach,) and the cells of the body do not decompose. Therefore this person still remains alive in the legal and religious sense.
ROB: The chromosomes in our cells have telomeres at the ends to keep the DNA from unraveling. The telomeres shorten every time a cell divides. There is now a theory that the length of telomeres will determine how long an organism will survive. Assuming this is correct, I can envision a time when science is able to lengthen existing telomeres, thus extending life indefinitely. If life is based upon this chemical composition of telomeres, then death may not be inevitable and the body can continue to reproduce healthy cells indefinitely. Dying will become obsolete. When that occurs, what happens to traditions of passing on to one’s offspring a lifetime of accumulated wealth? Will the law impose an arbitrary point at which wealth must be passed on to the next generation? Will there need to be a next generation?
CLAY: Life itself has also been redefined. At one time, life was defined as a carbon-based process that required the ability to break down carbon atoms to utilize as sustenance either by taking in some carbon-based substance or by creating carbon-based energy through photosynthesis. Everything was based upon the ability to utilize the oxygen contained in the air as a definition of life. But now, we understand that plants actually take in carbon dioxide, and release oxygen as waste. In the ocean depths, scientists have discovered pools of frozen methane which are surrounded by animal life that survives by converting that methane into energy. This animal life is capable of surviving in thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch and endless darkness yet still they live, reproduce, and survive.
Deep within the oceans are volcanic fissures through which sulfur escapes. Again, life survives in this dark abyss deep within the ocean’s mysterious depths. Tube worms, albino crabs, and other crustaceans thrive around these dense sulfurous clouds, each producing generations of animal life on a substance that would be poisonous to any life form that exists on the surface. Recently, scientists discovered a frozen lake deep within the glacial ice of Antarctica sealed by 65 feet of ice – yet there is bacterial life thriving there. In Lake Vida, which contains no oxygen, has the highest concentration of nitrous oxide of any water on earth, and is six times saltier than seawater, ancient microbial life continues even in temperatures of minus eight degrees Fahrenheit. These abundant and surprisingly diverse bacterial life forms survive completely without sunlight. If life is no longer definable, then the ability of the law to define what is living will become suspect. If there is a scientific uncertainty as to the definition of life, there will be a concomitant problem with any legal definition of life, sentient or otherwise.
RANDY: Cogito ergo sum – “I think therefore I am” – is not just a pleasant philosophical statement by René Descartes, but was his attempt to eliminate the uncertainties in philosophy and make it more like math. He proceeded to discard all preconceived philosophical notions and started from what he believed to be a rock solid foundation. He was certain only of the fact that he was thinking. By discarding all of the previous accepted philosophies and beginning with a centered concept of thought, he gave rise to the human-centered universe we presently live in. Only man was capable of realizing he was thinking. It was Descartes’s belief that man watched animals behave and mistakenly assumed animals were performing humanlike acts. Man gave them anthropomorphic qualities when in actuality they were merely brutes.
CLAY: Which brings us back to my earlier observation. Sentient or not, people will see the anthropomorphic actions of these machine-based creatures or human-machine hybrids and argue there is nothing more at play than our projections of humanity onto mechanical objects. It will take some time for this concept to change from one of shock, pity, or simple disgust to a more humanistic acceptance of them as sentient beings to unfold. Instead of it taking centuries to overcome our natural prejudice, however, this may develop over decades. It took centuries for man to understand that a child was not the property of the parents and it took even longer for man to appreciate the sentient qualities of animals and give them rights. I imagine it will take some time for social acceptance of a mechanical thinking machine to develop. A partial machine and partial human may take less time since in that case there is a biological human that previously existed before becoming a mechanized, digitized, sentient creature.