Abstract
In the not-too-distant future, robots will populate the walks of everyday life, from the manufacturing floor to corporate offices, and from battlefields to the home. While most work on the social implications of robotics focuses on such moral issues as the economic impact on human workers or the ethics of lethal machines, scant attention is paid to the effect of the advent of the robotic age on religion. Robots will likely become commonplace in the home by the end of the twenty-first century as nannies and caretakers, particularly for young children. As a consequence, parents will want to be assured that robots will instruct their children in their values, based upon the moral teachings of their religious tradition. Consequently, parents will need robots programmed with appropriate religious software, installed by corporations but approved by their religious communities, e.g., Catholic robots, Muslim robots, and Lutheran robots. If, as expected, robots will acquire the capacity to engage in independent reasoning, believers will want to incorporate their robots within their religious communities to influence the evolution of robotic religious views. The Robotic Age will therefore present basic theological challenges. If robots simulate human personalities, desires, and fears, can religious communities tailor their doctrine, rituals, and institutions to accommodate these new “converts”? In short, can religion generate “soulless” theologies for the non-human? The Robotic Age promises a challenge unlike any other in the history of religious traditions. Biofundamentalists will undoubtedly resist revolutionary changes in theology, but for many people of faith, it will be difficult to resist appealing to those who appear and act strikingly like human beings. This paper poses questions and entertains speculation about those theological challenges, particularly in Christianity, which believers will face, e.g., concepts of the soul, blood sacrifice and redemption, marriage, and death.
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Notes
For a video of Nadine, see “Singapore: Meet Nadine, the chatty robot that can remember past conversations (2015).” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvbJGZf-raY (accessed September 13, 2016).
See, e.g., Leonard Borman, Our Jewish Robot Future: A Novel about the Garden of Eden and the Cyborgian Transformation of the Human Race, in which a Jewish robot from future, parodying the Terminator, travels back in time to urge specific Jews to reproduce because their descendants will create robots who preserve Judaism (2010).
“When something looks human and acts human, to the point that I think it might be human, then halachah might consider the threshold to have been crossed... Even with the Turing test officially passed, we are quite far from the situation of having a robot capable of walking among us unsuspected. But I do think that Jewish thinkers should start tossing around the questions because we’re probably 30, not 100, years away” (Soclof).
The work on robotic learning of various institutes is available through the IEEE (originally the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an international organization which now includes, inter alia, engineers, computer scientists, physicists, software developers, information technology professionals, and medical doctors) (History of IEEE 2016). “The primary goal of the Technical Committee on Robot Learning is to act as a focus point for wide distribution of technically rigorous results in the shared areas of interest around robot learning. Without being exclusive, such areas of research interest include: learning models of robots, tasks or environments[;] learning deep hierarchies or levels of representations, from sensor and motor representations to task abstractions[;]
learning of plans and control policies by imitation and reinforcement learning[;] integrating learning with control architectures[;] methods for probabilistic inference from multi-modal sensory information (e.g., proprioceptive, tactile, vison)[;] structured spatio-temporal representations designed for robot learning such as low-dimensional embedding of movements[;] developmental robotics and evolutionary-based learning approaches” (Kormushev 2016).
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McBride, J. Robotic Bodies and the Kairos of Humanoid Theologies. SOPHIA 58, 663–676 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0628-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0628-3