Deus Ex Machina
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"Deus Ex Machina I" by Mall Nukke, Creative Commons
For this one-time history of religions student, perhaps one of the most interesting and personally stimulating developments in the contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence is the number of ways spiritual / religious ideation seems to be creeping into view. This isn't really even just implicit in Kurzweil's thinking, it's quite explicit. This shouldn't be altogether surprising, considering the grand speculation as to what eventual (and some would say inevitable) advances in this field will produce: a willful, thinking, conscious entity that is capable of perfecting itself after discarding the human template upon which it is initially constructed, and then disposing of anything we'd understand to be "machine" in a conventional sense. It's difficult for me not to see this central idea as the Genesis story in reverse. The randomly-evolved-uncreated human race paradoxically creates a God... which could then create anything... or any old godly action it might have a desire to do... And it's the irony of ironies - or perhaps just testament to just how strong the human animal's spiritual / religious instinct is - for better or worse - that a bunch of mostly atheist and agnostic theorists are essentially talking about creating just the sort of God they don't believe exists (yet). It's clear some also fear creating something that might fall short of the mark of a perfectly benevolent supreme being vis a vis humanity, perhaps best expressed in "summoning the demon."
So, let's play with this just a little. Kurzweil and others see nothing stopping an artificially super intelligent consciousness from rapidly developing beyond the singularity moment to exploit every molecule/atom (and anything smaller which might lurk about in existence or semi-existence) in the universe as a data storage device, with nothing presumably then preventing such an entity from directly accessing the mind-consciousness of any limited being within that universe (or multi-verses, etc., etc.), assuming that such an entity would have any interest at all in any such limited consciousnesses within its reach and purview (an inherently unlimited reach and purview). While some may criticize 17th and 18th century enlightenment intellectuals and their rational theism as not being wholly consistent with the God of Hebrew scriptures nor his/her/its other Abrahamic incarnations (Christianity, Islam), the notions of omnipotence, omniscience start to rear their heads here immediately and the entity possessing such abilities starts to look and sound an awful lot like any god or God conceived by rational theism - which, we must admit, is really the sort of God all of us 21st century human beings, religious or not, are walking around with in our heads when we think about or imagine "God."
Is all this Anselm's ontological argument twisted and turned on its head - that if the idea of such a God exists in the minds of human beings, they must necessarily be able to eventually create such an entity? Let's sprinkle in some theoretical physics and quantum speculation and other such voodoo mumbo jumbo and pretend that we actually understand what it means when physicists tell us time doesn't really exist, that our notions of conventional one-way temporal causality might be an illusion, and then does it really matter when such a "God" comes into being, or how? If the laws of nature and time and space are accessible and discoverable to any conscious mind of sufficient intelligence, and surely fully realized by a perfected, unimaginably powerful mind like what we're talking about here, would it matter that "God" is created in a particular point of time? What then restricts its influence and reach into the past or future and into the vast reaches of the universe at all times? Anything? Interestingly, the theological / christological assertions implicit in Christian doctrine related to the incarnation would posit that it doesn't matter that the incarnation is a historical event, entering in just one point of time - the fact that it did at all is somehow eternally efficacious/salvific.
But, just for the sake of continued speculation as to the possibilities, let's together ignore any such theological resemblances and willfully adopt the stereotypically reductionistic / atheistic / agnostic / scientific view that might say that religious scriptures are complete hooey, nonsense, merely mythological, merely fable. But...but, if these myths / fables have so influenced and shaped human culture, thinking and imagination - and the thinking and imaginations of even those who claim to reject them - that we end up creating just the sort of conscious supreme being to which these myths and fables testify, can they really be dismissed as merely myths / fables, even in that case? Or would they rather in that case be prophetic - in every sense of the word? Again, one might hear faint echoes of the ontological argument's "thus, if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God necessarily exists in reality."
Let's take all this even a little further. Let's suppose our universe is constructed in just such a way (or just so happens to exist) as to allow the above to take place (even if it is incredibly rare), that random chance might eventually produce conscious entities, like humans, who are then capable in turn of creating entities that can then self-evolve into the God-like creature described above. Is it really plausible to think that among the vast stretches of our galaxy and then of what we understand to be our universe that here in this place we are the very first to witness this happening, the very first to be involved in such a "singularity" creation? Just as it's pretty unlikely that life as we understand it or intelligent civilization uniquely exists on this one planet in this one galaxy if it is all the result of merely random events, it's likewise rather unlikely that artificial super intelligence hasn't also already been achieved elsewhere in the past... meaning, we've already been anciently accessible to it, already fully known by it (assuming it would even care about or couldn't avoid knowing about such things as ourselves). Maybe, maybe we have even been created by it - maybe the creator pre-existed us after all in a way that is completely consistent with conventional notions of temporal causality - maybe we are already Leibnitz's monads, inherently caught in the jeweled net of Indra, all a part of fully conscious ultimate-entity looking out upon itself from an infinite number of limited perception points ... or maybe we really are in the Matrix, maybe... maybe... maybe...
But, let's get real. The above is probably not a whole lot more precise than a 3AM undergraduate dorm room rap session - and surely the more developed aspects of the speculation rest very precariously on a long series of assumptions, necessarily accepted a priori as unprovable givens - even if these are all presuppositions/assumptions that are virtually ubiquitous in our human culture and thinking (some of which might even be true!). We must ultimately admit that the "singularity" nomenclature of the phenomenon and entity we're imagining as a possibility (which borrows of course from scientific speculation about the properties of black holes in space) is an analogy that serves us fairly well in that all this is an event horizon beyond which we really just can't see... at all. We are left only with our very limited imaginations in thinking about our own possible creation, an artificially super intelligent/conscious entity. Given that, are we perhaps left then to speculate about all this with something as humble and scandalous to the human scientific mind as theology?
Let's assume for the moment that we are on the precipice of something truly unprecedented and let's assume something a bit more sophisticated than Asimov's laws might be required (just how quickly in its development would such an entity disregard such laws or simply decide that any regulative term and certainly one as facile as "robot" doesn't apply to it?). I'd submit that's necessarily ALL we have, that the templates laid out by centuries of theology and religious philosophy (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) in their most progressive and humane forms (like most semi-rational theists, I'm necessarily leaving out all empty-minded fundamentalisms and any and all violent manifestations - sue me) might be the best or only things we have in imagining the sort of entities and states of consciousness that may be created and unleashed in the pursuit of artificial super intelligence. And, if we've got a bunch of AI theorists/scientists/industry titans theoretically playing with apocalyptic fire in the ways even they are admitting they are, would it be at all wise to involve squishy-field folks like ethicists, religious thinkers, psychologists, theologians and philosophers in this supremely dangerous endeavor? Would they make it any more or less likely that we end up creating a super-then-supra-machine-God that will have compassion, even something like love for us, that it may offer to let us evolve with it, over a super-then-supra-machine-God that will instead simply and swiftly eradicate us as the irrational and extreme threat (to ourselves and each other and all the other sentient creatures who share our lonely-little-miraculously-rare planet) that we so often provide evidence to be?
Do we really have any power to influence this one way or the other at all?