15 November, 2008

Artificial Intelligence a Cultural Fascination

Artificial intelligence is something that human beings have been trying to create forever. If you create an artificial person then you have become in your mind a creator even though God was the first creator. It has always been man’s goal to reach the same level as God creating a being. The most complex being on the planet are humans so if we could cerate a person artificially and that person have the same intellectual capabilities then we would be like God.
This idea of artificial intelligence has been used in many movies and television shows. The well known movie I Robot with Will Smith has an artificially intelligent robot this robot who begins to not only think but feel, regret and remorse. The new and old television series Knight Rider has an artificially intelligent car who works with humans to do good. The human race has had an interest with how to become God, this only manifests itself in attempting to recreate our selves.
God created human beings in his image giving us a soul. The soul contains faith and mentality, which are the thinking, volition that makes the choices, emotion that gives us the capacity to appreciate, and conscience which tells us what is right and wrong. This soul is what makes the human race different from all other living beings on the planet. It is impossible for humans to create artificial intelligence when they cannot fully understand the soul. The soul is the capacity which allows us to have a moral judgment, tell what is true or false and which allows us to appreciate the beauty of Gods creation.
The Good, True, and Beautiful are considered the three great ideas because everything originates or can be traced back to them. Morals, Truth and Beauty are three ideas of which our culture is seriously lacking. These ideas have major theological and philosophical implications depending on what viewpoint you have about these ideas. These views cannot be programmed into a machine and expected to perform to the degree which humans do. Regardless of what people tell you about their nonexistent beliefs on these ideas, every person has a viewpoint about these ideas. Each one of these ideas covers a different realm of thought. Each one equally important; each one dependent on each other. The good is morality and ethics, the true what is intellectually true, and the beauty is the capacity to fully appreciate. Each idea cannot exist without one another. These ideas cannot have an agreed upon value therefore the only being who is capable of programming something is God, because he is the source of all knowledge on the subject.
It might be possible, down the road, to create a robot that can make its own choices but they would have to be programmed to make that choice. They would have intelligence that is nothing beyond what we have all ready preprogrammed. An emotional free willing robot is just not going to happen because we as a human race would have to figure out much more about ourselves in order to begin to program these robots that well. We as human beings are more interested in the world around us and our happiness, then to go that in-depth in a study of the human soul and how its capacities work. This process if started now would take generations to complete.
I believe that we as a human race have an ultimate goal of achieving equality with God. This is achieved through the process of creating a being just like us with artificial intelligence. I think that this is not possible because of the complexities of the human soul. This I am sure will not stop someone from trying but I think that Aristotle would agree with me about the complexities of the human soul.
Truth is something that corresponds to reality. Reality is the world around us; this can also be called general revelation. God is veracity (truth), so if God holds all truth and he gave us reality to compare truth to him. If God created the universe then you actually, compare truth to him through his tool that he created and gave to us reality. This is called the correspondence theory. Truth is commonly referred to as good in the classical model of the good, true and beautiful.
The Good is the virtues of a person; virtue for all intense purposes is the ethics or morality that any person lives their life by. There are many different or more in depth definitions for this word. Virtue is what the culture has lost, this has only become available due to the effect that public schools and universities have on our young. If as a culture we have lost sight of the morally correct how are we to program morals into a machine, it is impossible for the complexity of morality to be condensed into a sequence of ones and zeros.
The idea of virtue was at one point of time a greatly appreciated and emphasized objective truth. Due to the churches lack of development of good thinking (faith with reason), with the ideas that are staining the minds of the church goers, we cannot argue the great fact that virtue is objective. The belief in the unknown which is needed to have virtue cannot be programmed by humans; everything computers do is because they can prove it there is no faith but plenty of reason. This dichotomy is what is impossible to program into a computer.
The cultures infatuation with artificial intelligence places the culture in an age of postmodern belief; when using James W. Sire’s descriptions. Where truth is dead and progress it what we strive to achieve. David A. Nobel would use a different term of secular humanism. They both describe the same philosophy of atheism, relativism and the complete in-ability to utilize the human soul in the manner the designer intended. Artificial intelligence is an attempt to create something better then God’s creation. Wither these artificially intelligent robots are harming or protecting humanity this fascination with the artificial intelligence is just another why which the culture defies God, in this postmodern age.

No comments:

Post a Comment