|
A
peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 25(2)
– November 2015 |
The Advent
of Postmodern Robotic Technoreligiosity
James McBride
Liberal Studies,
New York University
Journal
of Evolution and Technology
- Vol. 25 Issue 2 – November 2015 - pgs 25-38
Abstract
In the future, human beings will welcome
robotic companions into their homes as caregivers of children. Parents will
undoubtedly want them to teach their offspring right from wrong, and, in doing
so, to reflect the ethical values derived from the parents’ respective
religious traditions. Accordingly, the
market will create a demand for religious robots. This article examines the
ways in which robots may be considered religious based upon a minimalist and
maximalist definition of religion derived from the field of religious studies.
A minimalist definition of religion rests upon the family resemblance of
attributes considered religious, particularly those characteristics that are
deemed prototypical, e.g. moral views derived from religious doctrine. A
maximalist definition of religion claims that the essential attribute of any
social phenomenon deemed religious would be the practitioner’s experience of
what Rudolf Otto called “the holy.” From a minimalist perspective, robots
programmed to function according to a religious ethos are arguably religious,
especially if they have the capacity to engage in moral reasoning derived from
prototypical religious beliefs. Consequently human societies will see the
marketing of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist robots among others, most
likely manufactured under a watchful clerical eye, and the rise of integrated
religious communities with both human and robotic members. In a distant future
when neuroscience acquires the capacity to replicate individual neural pathways
of the human connectome, religious groups may want manufacturers to copy
experiences of “the holy” into the “brains” of their robotic companions to
ensure orthodoxy. The article closes by posing questions about the reality of
simulated robotic religious experience.
Introduction
The
term “robotic religion” sounds so strange to the ear that some may mistake it
for a liberal jest about fundamentalism. On the other hand, given the radical
divergence between scientific and religious discourses, it may strike others as
an oxymoron or a figment of the imagination. “To the modern mind, which has
divided our culture into different domains, spirituality has little to do with
technology. Religion is spiritual, technology is material” (Coeckelbergh 2010,
958). However, robotic religion may not be as incongruous or as far-fetched as
it appears. In Isaac Asimov’s classic tale, “Reason” from his 1950 collection I, Robot, one humanoid robot mimes the
semiotics of an Islamic believer: “There is no Master but the Master and QT-1
is his prophet!” (Asimov 2008b, 54). Although the juxtaposition of robots and
religion smacks of caricature and science fiction to this day, there is more
here than meets the eye.
I do
not doubt that, in the not-too-distant future, a large segment of the
population will become convinced that they not only can, but must, program their
servant-robots according to their religious affiliations, e.g., Muslim robots,
Catholic robots, Mormon robots, and so on. Indeed, with technological
breakthroughs that allow humans to recapture forgotten past experiences and
advances in robotic “brains” that mimic human neurological structures, the
posthuman world will even witness the experimental transfer of human religious
experiences to robots. This technological revolution will pose significant
theological and philosophical questions. Are such “real” experiences of human
beings less real by virtue of their transfer to robotic hosts? Or is the
hyperreal fiction of robotic religious experience nonetheless an “authentic”
replica? Indeed, if robotic hosts have their own memories of these human
experiences whose origins are considered real, can a robot, in the words of
evangelical Christian discourse, “be saved,” even if the robot is not human? Will
the future see the advent of postmodern “born-again” robots? An answer to these
questions about the future existence of religious robots presumes that religion
itself is a stable theoretical category; however, it too is steeped in
controversy.
What is religion?
In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sociologists like Emile Durkheim
explored human ideas and behaviors to mark the boundaries of the phenomenon
known as religion. In his famous foundational work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, based on the study of
aboriginal practices, Durkheim concluded that,
A religion is a unified system of beliefs
and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and
forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral
community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element
which thus finds a place in our definition of religion is no less essential
than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from
that of the Church [or moral community], it makes it clear that religion should
be an eminently collective thing. (1965, 62–63)
As
a functionalist, Durkheim held that religion not only provided answers to
questions about the meaning of existence, but also served as the basis for
social solidarity, moral guidance, and social control. But perhaps more
importantly Durkheim theorized that religion was “nothing other than the
collective and anonymous force of the clan” (1965, 253). Dispatching the
traditional notion of God, Durkheim concluded that “[t]he god of the clan . . .
[,] personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of
the animal or vegetable [,] . . . serves them as a totem” (1965, 236).
The
totemic principle manifested itself in the “division of the world into two
domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane,”
which to Durkheim served as “the distinctive trait of religious thought” (1965,
52). Although a product of human community, the sacred manifested itself in
states of “collective effervescence,” when human beings experienced a “certain
delirium” as if transported to another world (Durkheim 1965, 258). Despite
bringing the divine down to earth, Durkheim nonetheless hypothesized that there
was indeed something “eternal” in religion in the form of each human
community’s periodic reaffirmation of “[its] collective sentiments and
collective ideas” (1965, 474–75).
In
contrast to Durkheim, the sociologist Max Weber had little interest in
identifying social forces which act as the collective meaning of religion. Weber
noted that the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment successively freed
the individual from the grip of religion, both in terms of its view of the
universe and its control over populations. In an age of Entzauberung or disenchantment of the world, the individual came
into his or her own, using rational processes and goals rather than traditional
beliefs, to find meaning in the modern world (Weber 1971, 270). Yet, religion
survived, side by side, with rationality, and to understand its longevity,
Weber examined both the behaviors and attitudes of individual actors. “The
external courses of religious behavior are so diverse that an understanding of
this behavior can only be achieved from the viewpoint of the subjective
experiences, ideas, and purposes of the individuals concerned – in short,
from the viewpoint of the religious behavior’s meaning (Sinn)” (1991, 1). In contrast to positivistic social science,
Weber’s so-called Verstehen
methodology suggested that the meaning of religion was not authored by social
scientists but rather by the practitioners themselves. To understand religion
was to understand their subjective point of view or motives for the act, which
was incumbent upon sociologists carefully to explain (erklarendes Verstehen)
(Weber 1946, 95).
In
one sense, Weber’s Verstehen
methodology set the stage for a momentous development in the twentieth-century
study of religion. Rudolf Otto’s 1917 work, The
Idea of the Holy, attempted to provide a phenomenological account of the
meaning of the sacred to practitioners across all cultures and all religions. “For
if there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with
something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is
that of the religious life” (1950, 4). For Otto, religion rested not merely on
a set of beliefs or behaviors but rather on what he regarded as a foundation
stone of universal human experience: the experience of a sacred dimension. “I
shall speak, then, of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely
‘numinous’ state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is
applied. This mental state is perfectly sui
generis and irreducible to any other”
(1950, 7). Otto theorized that every human being qua human had the capacity, “as an a priori category of mind” (Otto 1950, 175) to experience this numen. Here Otto stepped far beyond
Weber’s Verstehen methodology, for,
as a theologian, he not only empathetically hypothesized that individuals truly
believed in the holy, but that their belief showed that the holy was in fact
true.
Otto’s
book had a galvanizing effect on the study of religion, for whereas the quest
of Durkheim, Weber, and others tried to establish the study of religion on a
social scientific basis, Otto attempted to return this new field of study to a
theological source. For the last century, many religious studies scholars have
reiterated that the experience of the holy is the hallmark of religion. For
example, Charles Taylor has argued that religion ultimately means some sense of
what is beyond the human, which informs and transforms individuals and
communities with a sense of goodness (Taylor 2007). Likewise, Huston Smith, long
recognized as one of the leading popularizers of this homo religiosus, argued that the experience, deemed holy or sacred,
is the essence or “universal grammar” (Rosemont and Smith 2008) of religion,
which ultimately is impervious to rational human inquiry.
Otto’s
approach to the study of religion was not without resistance. Mircea Eliade,
the twentieth century’s dean of the history of religion scholars, noted that
[t]he growing interest in phenomenology
of religion has created a tension among students of Religionswissenschaft. The different historical and historicistic
schools have reacted strongly against the phenomenologists’ claim that they can
grasp the essence and structure of religious phenomena. For the historicists,
religion is exclusively a historical fact without any transhistorical meaning
or value, and to seek for “essences” is tantamount to falling back into the old
Platonic error. (1984, 35–36)
The
division between historical and historicistic (social scientific) lines, on the
one hand, and phenomenological approaches, on the other, in the study of
religion still persists to this day in the academy, particularly in the field’s
professional association, the American Academy of Religion (AAR).
Over
the past twenty years, some scholars within the AAR have launched scathing
attacks on the phenomenological interpretation of religion, even arguing that
religion as a separate field of study does not, in fact, exist. Eliade
acknowledged that religious studies should not be subsumed by the
phenomenological impulse, for “there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ religious
fact. Such a fact is always also a
historical, sociological, cultural, and psychological fact, to name only the
most important contents” (1984, 19). However, in his controversial 1997 Manufacturing Religion, The Discourse on Sui
Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, the bête noire of the academy, Russell T. McCutcheon, charged that, in
studying world religions, Eliade himself was guilty of smuggling “The Myth of
Religious Uniqueness” (1997, 3) into the academic study of religion via the
backdoor.
[O]ne might conclude that Eliade was
firmly asserting that the study of religion relies on such historical methods
as linguistics and sociology. However, . . . the use of “phenomenon” suggests
that despite the fact that every religious manifestation is inevitably also a
human manifestation, behind such instances there is a form or essence that
rightly attracts scholarly curiosity (1997, 12).
Accordingly,
McCutcheon claims that this scholarly sleight-of-hand undermines the integrity
of the academy. “What is troubling is how the label ‘academic study of
religion’ comes to stand for uncritical and theoretically suspect research into
essences and realities” (1997, 123). To McCutcheon, such “discourse on sui generis religion” (1997, 30) is
disingenuous and only serves a darker, more unsettling purpose. For him,
religion is a creation of Western scholars (2004), whose purpose is “to develop
an autonomous social identity that contributes to their consolidation of social
position and power” (1997, 30–31). In short, the field of religious
studies is a ruse by scholars to create jobs for themselves.
It is
not surprising that McCutcheon’s criticisms have been unwelcome. Religious
studies scholars would hardly wish to commit academic suicide by abolishing the
field in which they earn their livelihood. And although some Western scholars
may want to abolish religion as a category, practitioners, East and West, North
and South, may not so readily agree. The question remains, if we are to
continue to use the category of religion, what are its attributes? Clearly, the
phenomenological approach drags theological presuppositions into its
definition. Practitioners may well divide the world between sacred and profane
as Durkheim suggested, but scholars need not advocate the reality of what
allegedly transcends the human to acknowledge its significance in the habitus of the devotee. Perhaps Weber’s Verstehen methodology, which recognizes
the importance of the experience, whether discursively or socially constructed,
to the individual, provides a path toward what we might call a minimalist
definition of religion.
This
minimalist definition of religion calls into question Otto’s experience of the
“holy” as an essential attribute of religion. What if practitioners of a
socially recognized religious tradition did not experience Otto’s “holy”? Would
they not be considered religious at all? Would, for example, a mainline
Protestant, whose faith rested on habit rather than heart, not be religious? I
would imagine that most people would regard her as being religious, even if her
belief did not have a mystical grounding. However, if the experience of the
holy is not the litmus test for religion, then what makes a phenomenon
religious?
Benson
Saler claims that scholars of religious studies can draw the boundaries of
religion if they adopt a family resemblance approach and “prototype” theory of
disciplinary identity.
I advocate that for scholarly purposes .
. . we formally conceive of religion in terms of a pool of elements that more
or less co-occur in what scholars generally regard as the clearest and least
problematical examples of what they call religion. Those elements – we could
conceive of them as a set of predicates – collectively define our
conceptual model. The instantiations of that model are what we call religions,
and they differentially participate in the pool. The instantiations are linked
by family resemblances; they need not all share some one element or some subset
of elements. (1999, 396, citing Fitzgerald 1996, 232–33)
Saler
gives examples of such elements: “theism, belief in souls, ritual, sacrifice,
sacred canon, eschatology, pilgrimage, etc.” (1999, 397). As will become clear
later, I would include among them an ethics that reflects the ideal conduct of
community members. According to Saler, no single element is essential. For
example, belief in a god or gods is not an essential attribute of religion. As
paradoxical as it may seem to many Christians, there are atheistic religions,
like Theravada Buddhist sects (Orrù and Wang 1992). Saler further suggests that
particular traditions have “prototype effects” that imply that the tradition is
a fuller instantiation of a particular “family resemblance” element than that
found in other traditions (1999, 399). Due to their theism, Christianity or
Islam, for example, may appear more religious than Taoism or Confucianism.
From
this scholarly debate over the disciplinary boundaries of religion, we can
garner two standards by which to judge the religiosity of our future robotic
world. The first is what we might call a “minimalist” definition of religion using
the family resemblance approach and prototype theory. If robots evince one or
more attributes common to the pool of elements in recognized religious
traditions, then robots might properly be called religious, particularly if
their programming and/or behaviors reflect prototypical religious traditions. On
the other hand, a “maximalist” definition of religion would call for the
discovery of the alleged essential attribute, as recognized by some historians
of religion, e.g., Eliade, and defined by Rudolf Otto as the “experience of the
holy.” This article argues that robots of the future will assuredly fulfill the
minimalist definition of religion and will likely in some distant time ahead
meet the requirements of a maximalist definition of religion with the advent of
postmodern hyperreal religious experience, e.g., “born-again” robots.
Robotic developments
In his
opening story to I, Robot, entitled
“Robbie” (Asimov 2008a), Asimov tells the tale of a robot in the far-off year
of 1998, who serves as a caregiver and playmate of a little girl named Gloria. Due
to human prejudice against robots, Gloria’s mother demands that her husband get
rid of her daughter’s metallic companion. Gloria is so distraught by the sudden
disappearance of her friend that her father devises a plan for her to be
reunited with Robbie. This charming story highlights what will certainly be the
entrée of robots into human everyday life. In our future, robots will be
welcomed into the home as playmates and teachers of young children.
Maja Matarić, a neuroscientist
and robotics expert at University of Southern California, has worked on
developing robots to serve children with special needs.
We
have demonstrated that child-sized humanoid robots can encourage some children
with autism to be more verbal and empathetic. The robots’ life-like appearance
and responsive behavior seem to stimulate children to play with them and
express empathy; when our robot didn’t obey a command, one child said, “Now I
know how my teacher feels.” (Social roboticist 2012,
280)
A New York Times article reported in 2014
that on YouTube “you can watch developmentally delayed children doing therapy
with a cute blue-and-yellow CosmoBot that also collects information about their
performance” (Aronson 2014).
The
demand for robots that interact with children is not limited to those with
special needs. Japanese companies stand in the forefront of the
manufacture of caretaker robots. Japan
is plagued by a dearth of childcare workers, where waiting lists for daycare
centers sometimes reach up to two years. Indeed, robot caregivers may enhance
the lethargic Japanese economy by allowing new mothers to return to work,
boosting household income, and increasing consumer spending (Robot nannies
2013). Introduced by NEC Corporation in 2003, PaPeRo (Partner-type Personal
Robot) uses facial- and speech-recognition technologies to initiate
conversations and play games with children, even singing to them (Childcare
robot 2015). In light of the demand, more sophisticated caregiver models like
the Aldebaran #PepperRobot are making their appearance (Kovac 2014).
Although
robotic nannies and tutors may, like Asimov’s Robbie, still appear as rather
clunky machines, plans are afoot to produce more humanoid robots. Researchers
at MIT, creators of the robot model named “Cog” in the 1990s, have already made
major strides toward fulfilling this goal. As Anne Foerst, a professor of
theology and computer science at St. Bonaventure University, has noted,
According to [the] philosophy [of
Embodied AI researchers], human intelligence can emerge only in a body that is as
humanlike as possible. For this reason any entity with humanlike intelligence
must have a body that is built in analogy to a human body. Because Cog is an
attempt to rebuild a humanlike creature, its shape is close to that of a human.
. . Its builders hope that its outward appearance will motivate people to
interact with Cog as with a human. (1998, 100–101)
The MIT
lab has also pioneered the effort to create a human-like robotic head named
Kismet with auditory, visual and proprioceptive properties that can simulate
emotional responses (Foerst 2015). The progress made in the creation of
humanoid robots at MIT is being enhanced by work on the development of haptic
communication in robotic models by Japanese researchers. “If a communication
robot equipped with tactile sensors over its entire body could have the same
capability of haptic interaction as humans do, we would feel greater
familiarity with the robot, thus shortening its communicative distance from
people” (Muyashita et al. 2007). Some researchers have focused on social
interaction and the perception of social cues that produce ties between human
beings by “adapting the conceptualization of ritual action to human-social
robot interaction (HRI)” (Linke 2013, 49). Undoubtedly, based on the robotic
capacities for verbal, auditory, and tactile communication, children will bond
with robotic caregivers, who, as Irish computer scientist Noel Sharkey
observed, “in most cases, prefer a robot to a teddy bear” (Sharkey 2008, 1800).
While
an impressive technological achievement, the development of humanoid caregivers,
who will exercise a very strong influence over their charges, raises important
ethical questions. Should a robot caretaker admonish children when they do
wrong? If it should, as I imagine parents would want, how can a robot tell
right from wrong? Who will “teach” a robot to model ethical reasoning and
behavior? The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has recently provided a grant to researchers
at Tufts University, Brown University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to
develop morally competent robots. According to Bertram Malle of Brown’s
Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative, “If we build robots that interact with
humans and that have increasing decision capacity, . . . keeping robots amoral
would simply be unethical” (Stacey 2014). Gary Marcus, an NYU cognitive
scientist, has suggested that robotic “decisions will inevitably be guided by a
mixture of what is preprogrammed and what they learn through observation”
(2015). For parents, particularly those who identify with a particular
religious tradition, the lessons that a robotic caregiver teaches their
children will be of vital importance. Accordingly, they undoubtedly will want a
robot that reflects their own religiously-based moral viewpoint.
Researchers
are aware of this preference. The Tufts, Brown, and Rensselaer Polytechnic
study proposes that a morally competent robot must have the
knowledge of a system of norms appropriate
for the community one resides in; the ability to guide one’s behavior in light
of these norms; the ability to perceive and evaluate other people’s behavior when
it violates those norms; a “vocabulary” that allows one to communicate about
one’s own and others’ norm-violating behaviors – such as to justify a
behavior, or when appropriate, apologize for it. (Stacey 2014)
One of
the Tufts researchers in the study, Matthias Scheutz, notes, however, that
"[i]t’s almost impossible to devise a complex system of ‘if, then, else’
rules that cover all possible situations" (Jeffries 2014). Consequently,
the ONR-funded study is intent on developing a robotic capacity for moral
reasoning. The robot must be able to weigh varied, and sometimes even
competing, factors to arrive at moral decisions.
The minimalist definition of religion and
robots
I
imagine that parents would want a caregiver robot to be built with at least a
rudimentary program of ethical rules and, most likely in face of complicated
situations, have the capacity for moral reflection and decision-making. I do
not doubt that parents who are affiliated in some way with a religious
tradition would desire a robot whose decisions would mirror their own. Depending
on the religious group, a robot might urge its charge to refrain from, for
example, eating pork, swearing, or striking another child. Moreover, it is
likely parents who observe a particular religious tradition would want their
robot helper to do no less than teach the child morality. Since codes of conduct
are grounded in underlying ideas, religious codes of conduct are intertwined
with religious doctrines. Accordingly, caregiver robots in homes of parents
affiliated with particular religious traditions would need to be programmed
with software that reflected those beliefs and codes of conduct.
Such
robots would be arguably religious under the minimalist definition of religion,
which holds that a phenomenon is religious if, based upon the family
resemblance of various traditions, it shares at least one attribute in common
with a pool of elements in a recognized religious tradition, particularly if
that attribute is prototypical. Caregiver robots programmed with religious
codes of conducts and beliefs would share at least two such attributes and
likely would embody other attributes as well.
The
Associated Press has already reported the development of a robot designed by an
Iranian instructor to teach children how to pray (Iranian teacher builds robot
to teach prayer 2014). Named Veldan, meaning “Youth of Heaven,” this humanoid
robot was built using a Robotis Biolid kit from a South Korean tech firm. The
instructor re-engineered its configuration to allow for physical prostration. “‘As
you see the children’s reaction in their faces, you realize how interesting it
is to them to see how the science of robotics has been beautifully used for a
religious purpose and I am sure it will be greatly effective in teaching them
how to pray’” (Iranian teacher builds robot to teach prayer 2014). With its
anticipated mass production in Iran, Veldan will serve to model the proper
ritual of salat for Muslim children.
As this
example suggests, parents need to be assured that, as far as humanly possible,
the software used in the construction of such humanoid robots would meet the
criteria for religious orthodoxy. Secular manufacturers of humanoid caregivers
would be compelled to enlist advisers, be they imams, rabbis, priests,
ministers, monks, or theologians, who would oversee the production and
installation of software appropriate for their religious traditions. Perhaps
manufacturers would even assemble panels of clergy or theologians to
authenticate its orthodoxy. In any case, consumers would want robots that
conform to their religious traditions. Hence, companies would manufacture and
market Muslim robots (perhaps Shi’ite and Sunni models), Jewish robots
(perhaps, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed models), Buddhist robots
(perhaps, Pure Land, Nichiren, Theravada models, etc.) and the like: the list
may be as long as the number of different religious traditions in the world,
assuming that their adherents can afford the price of such robots.
Undoubtedly
the designation of such robots as religious will be met with objections. Could
a robot be any more religious than a program on a computer that offered
instruction in religious beliefs, ethics, or rituals? People would hardly call
such computers religious. However, humanoid robots don’t look like laptops,
particularly if they have visual, auditory, oral, and haptic functions, and if
they have the capabilities to learn, communicate with one another, and
particularly engage in moral reasoning, people paradoxically might find it more
natural to attribute religion to their technological helpmates. I believe that
this “robotic turn” in society over the next century will have significant
implications and challenges for religion itself.
If
robots became capable of moral reasoning, then it would logically ensue that
robots could make wrong choices as well as right ones. In the discourse of
Western religious traditions, for example, robots would therefore have the
capacity to sin. As absurd as this conclusion might seem to some, a sinning
robot who assumed the role of caregiver or teacher might appear to be quite a serious
problem to religious parents. Such robots would seem to be like those of us who
struggle with the question of moral behavior. This similarity is underlined by
the recent concern expressed by ethicists that robots may be subjected in the
future to sexual coercion and abuse. David Levy has argued that this
development in the relationship between robots and humans is inevitable (2008).
As one
group of Islamic writers has claimed, “the question of marriage with a sexbot
can’t be underestimated” (Amuda and Tijani 2012, 21). If sex is inevitable
between humans and robots, and robots are capable of moral reasoning, it would
seem that religious traditions will have to consider the proper regulation of
robotic sexual behavior. Sadly, these Muslim authors fear to take the next step;
they refuse to consider such regulation. Instead, they conclude that sex with a
robot is tantamount to bestiality, holding that an Islamic marriage can only
exist between a male and a female human being. However, what if robots were not
only capable of having sex but also of making choices about their sexual
partners? Could not a robot be guilty of the sin of fornication? If so, perhaps
human beings in religious groups should marry robots, rather than risk their
robotic partners falling into sin. Or will there come resistance from some
religious communities to the very idea of marriage between a human and a robot,
analogous to the traditional belief (shared by the Catholic Church and
Protestant Fundamentalists, for example) that marriage is only between a man
and a woman? Will some bio-fundamentalists argue – motivated by
robophobia – that marriage can exist only between humans?
I
believe that, rather than remaining outside religious communities, robots of
the future will be brought inside to ensure that their moral reasoning and
behavior are shaped by the religious group. Of course, the boundaries of the
religious community are governed by religious ritual. In Christianity, for
example, entrance into the community is signified by baptism. Will such robots
be baptized at the factory or will they undergo baptism at a church? Religious groups
may have to change the way in which the ritual is performed. Aspersion may
work, but affusion will pose hazards to robotic hardware, and Baptists will
certainly have to abandon full-body immersion for robotic initiates. Robotic
baptism will not only force changes in ritual but also in Christian theology
itself.
Traditionally,
Christian doctrine holds that human beings are inherently sinful and deserve
death for the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. Consequently,
Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, dies pro
nobis, in place of all human beings. In the Catholic tradition, as
articulated in the fifth century by Saint Augustine in Book XIII of the City of God (2004, 512), original sin is
passed in the sexual act and transmitted to the fetus. However, although robots
may be capable of sexual activity, they are not born. Therefore, robotic
members of the religious community would not be saved from original sin since they
never would have had it. Nonetheless, they would be capable of making wrong
moral choices or sinning.
The
inclusion of robots within a Christian community would require revisions in
soteriology. In both Catholic and Protestant traditions that hold that sinners
share in Christ’s redemptive act through the ingestion of bread and wine,
embodying or symbolizing the body and blood of Jesus, robots would be excluded
from a central ritual act by virtue of the fact that they neither eat nor drink.
This development would be less of a problem among those Protestant traditions
which place an emphasis on hearing the Word rather than on the ritual of
communion, but it would be an issue for Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian
churches, among others. There would have to be some way in which the central
sacrifice could be signified without the requirement of physical ingestion.
Once
inside the religious community that shapes the moral reasoning of a robot
programmed with doctrinal and ethical software, robots will become a voice for
their religious worldview. With a capacity to communicate with other robots as
well as humans, robots will likely proselytize for what they believe to be true
or right. Robots may therefore engage in missionary activity, ancillary to their
primary tasks, be they caregivers, teachers, domestic workers, etc.
Finally,
religious institutions will have to face the question of what to do when a
robot who is a member of the group becomes antiquated or obsolete. Should
robots be programmed to self-terminate? To the human members of a religious
community, that may seem insensitive and even inhuman. Although some of their
“owners” may wish to terminate them, I would imagine that there would be
significant opposition in the religious community, especially among those who
use robots as spouses, caregivers, or teachers of their children. Perhaps obsolete
robots should be placed in community-supported facilities like old-age homes. Of
course, the problem is that robots don’t die – and it would be impractical
to provide for robots ad infinitum. Instead,
I would imagine the termination of its “life” would have to be a robot’s own
choice. The question raised will be analogous to euthanasia and assisted
suicide. The increasing appearance of jurisdictions that permit euthanasia and
assisted suicide suggests that legal regimes in the future could authorize such
actions for robots. If and when a robot “dies,” a religious community would
have to face the question of how to handle the “body” of the robot. Should it be
disassembled? junked? recycled? Humans in the religious community might oppose
such a callous disposal of entities that worshipped alongside them, raised
their children, or perhaps even became their spouses. I believe that religious groups
will demand that terminated robots be treated with respect and dignity and will
permit their burial alongside their human families in cemeteries.
The maximalist definition of religion and
robots
As much
as adherents of various traditions might acknowledge that robots could be
religious, sharing the community’s beliefs, rituals, ethos, and so on, even
they might hesitate to believe that robots could directly have an experience of
the holy, as Otto put it. Some things may seem impossible even for God. However,
with faith and perhaps more importantly technology, all things are possible.
The
visionary work of Thomas Berger, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern
California, suggests that it may be possible to record the code of long-term
memories in the hippocampus (Cohen 2013; Cook 2015, 28). If, as he argues,
memory is a series of impulses generated by neurons in the brain, then it is
possible to insert electrodes that can record those impulses. The impulses constitute
a coded message, generated by cells of the hippocampus, which creates a unique
memory. If it were possible to duplicate the neurological patterns of a human
brain, it might well be possible to reproduce human experiences by implanting
the code, copied by electrodes in the human brain, in its robotic doppelganger.
However, if simple experiences, such as the memory of the image of another
human being, involve 500,000 cells of the hippocampus, the odds against
transferring human memories into machines may seem impossibly high. The
transfer of human experiences to robotic brains would require the replication
of over 100 billion neural connections. Before any such duplication could take
place, neuroscientists would have to map the human brain.
Inspired
by the success of the government-backed Human Genome Project, the Obama
Administration has launched the “BRAIN [Brain Research through Advancing
Innovative Neurotechnologies] Initiative,” a research project to do just that. As
the White House announced,
[t]he initiative will accelerate the
development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to
produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and
complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought. These technologies
will open new doors to explore how the brain records, processes, uses, stores,
and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light on the complex
links between brain function and behavior. (White House n.d.)
One of
the neuroscientists supported by the BRAIN Initiative is Sebastian Seung, a
professor at MIT. Dr. Seung argues in a 2013 book that it may be possible someday
to map the connectome (2013, xii), or 100 billion neural connections, of the
human brain despite its incredible complexity. To put that project in
perspective, neuroscientists have identified the complete neural wiring of a
simple one millimeter worm, C. elegans,
but that involved only 302 neurons and took a team of neuroscientists 12 years
(Cook 2015, 28). How possibly could researchers map the human connectome? Seung
is piloting a preliminary project called Eyewire
that seeks to map the neural connections of a mouse’s eye by enlisting the aid
of thousands of volunteers. He has designed a computer game that displays
slices of a mouse’s eye and asks players to mark its neural pathways on a
three-dimensional image. Over 165,000 worldwide have signed up, in effect
democratizing and massifying scientific research (Cook 2015, 28).
If, as
Berger and Seung claim, it will be possible to map the human brain and to identify
the coding of specific human memories, could neuroscientists working in
robotics one day duplicate the human brain, analogous to what Asimov called the
“positronic brain” in I, Robot? “Whole
brain emulation,” or what Calvin Mercer has called “uploading,” transcends
traditional artificial intelligence since it is the replication of the entire
connectome (2015, 176). As Matthew Zaro Fisher, a theological commentator,
acknowledges, “[in] the end, uploading may be impossible” (2015, 28). However, Seung
argues, “[y]our body and brain are not fundamentally different from the
artificial machines manufactured by humans, only much more complex” (2013,
270). These are technical problems which may be solved. Fifty years ago the
microchip was merely science fiction.
Still there
are some difficult questions to face even if scientists surmount the
technological challenge of copying 100 billion neural connections. Each
individual human brain is unique. As Seung claims, “you are your connectome”
(2013, xv). In effect, replicating a human brain would be replicating a human
individual. “As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our
computational technology,” as Robert Kurzweil admitted in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, “our
identity will be based on our evolving mind file” (1999, 128–29). Following
earlier commentators such as Vernor Vinge, Kurzweil has identified this
supposedly inevitable scientific breakthrough as the point of “Singularity” at
which biology and technology will merge (2005, 9). Some theologians read this
historical moment as a transhumanist eschatology, in which human beings will be
guaranteed “cybernetic immortality” (Peters 2015, 131). Among some theologians,
transhumanism’s goal of eternal life raises significant issues of human hubris.
On the other hand, Anders Sandberg has dismissed the comparison of
transhumanism to religion because “transhumanism in general may lack key parts of a belief system,”
failing to offer any answer to the meaning of life (Sandberg 2015, 5).
Although
intellectually provocative, this academic debate over whole brain emulation is
not relevant to the transfer of a discrete human religious experience to a
robotic host. As Kurzweil suggests, “we don’t need to understand all of it; we
need only to literally copy it, connection by connection, synapse by synapse,
neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter. It requires us to understand local brain processes, but not
necessarily the brain’s global organization, at least not in full” (Kurzweil
1999, 124–25). Implanting a unique human religious experience differs
significantly from the issue raised by many theologians about whole brain
emulation. Neuroscientists need not upload the entire connectome. Instead, they
would have to identify only certain neural tracts. Once researchers determine
the coding of neural connections for specific occurrences, it would become
possible to replicate discrete human memories in simulated neural pathways. Yet,
even if human beings were to accept the existence of these robots who could
share their identical experiences, which human memories would their “owners” allow
to be implanted in robotic brains?
I would
suggest that individuals who seek robots with worldviews consonant with their
own religious convictions might want to implant memories of religious
experiences, either of their own or of those who epitomize the faith of their
community. The replicated memory would ensure the certainty of a robot’s loyalty
and dedication to the faith. I imagine that these communities would select the
memory of a religious experience of a venerated member, which would serve as a
prototypical model for the manufacture of thousands of robots to serve
sectarian households.
Yet, such
transfers do pose significant questions about the “reality” of these memories. Are
they “authentic” replicas of “original” religious experiences? Or are they less
real than their originals? Is the so-called divine presence lost in translation
between human and robot? I am sure that religious communities and theologians
will struggle with these questions. If an individual has a “born-again”
experience in the Evangelical tradition, are robots, whose neural tracts mimic those
of a particular human brain and are implanted with the code of that experience,
truly “born-again,” even though paradoxically they were never “born” at all? If
the “born-again” experience bears witness to God, is God less real because the
code of his presence appears in a synthetic duplicate of human neural pathways?
Is the power of God limited to humans? Are robotic companions of human beings unredeemable,
even though they are capable of “sin”? Or is robotic religious experience of an
altogether different order of the real?
The existence
of synthetic, yet simultaneously identical, copies of religious encounters in robotic
hosts threatens to shatter how we think about what many human beings consider
their most intimate experiences. I am reminded of Jean Baudrillard, whose
prescient work describes the hyperreality of simulacra in our postmodern world.
His reflections seem to speak to the problematic “reality” of simulated human
religious experiences in robotic doppelgangers:
In this passage to a space whose
curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation
thus begins with the liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their
artificial resurrection in systems of signs . . . It is no longer a question of
imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of
substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to
deter any real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic,
perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and
short-circuits all its vicissitudes. (1988, 167)
In this
Baudrillardian world of hyperreality, robots will take on the signs of
religiosity, its rituals, ethics, soteriologies, in a way that is meaningful both
to themselves and human beings. The code or signifier will generate a new
signified: a post-human, robotic community bound together by a reconfigured
experience of the holy, one grounded in the religious experience of, if not
God, then the image of God.
I expect
that religious communities in the future will become obsessed with the problem
of postmodern robotic technoreligiosity and there will develop threads of
theology, some very divisive, which will challenge the unity of extant religious
traditions. Yet, I also believe that some religious communities will come to
embrace the validity of robotic religious experience, even though its “reality” is of a very different nature.
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