Here is a wonderful essay entitled “Nerd Theology” by Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine. Kelly is a fascinating man. I first encountered the story behind the man behind the magazine on a recast of This American Life’s First Episode, “Shoulda Been Dead”wherein Kelly tells the story about how he came to faith in Jesus Christ while traveling the world as a freelance photographer, and subsequently became convinced that he was going to die exactly one year later. How he responds to this conviction is really great, and well worth listening to (as any T.A.L. episode is. Oh, and check out the T.V. show).
At any rate, this essay deals with some of the implications that our developing theological prowess has for our understanding of theology. Essentially, he says that as our tech-knowledge (my cleverness) increases, our theological engagement with the new perspective on reality that it offers must also increase.
Indeed the mission of A1 is not to make a human mind but to explore the “space” of possible intelligences. Each kind of newly created intelligence will see the world, including the spiritual world, in a new way. The conversations we will have with these other minds will shift our understanding of the spiritual realm. We could say that as we make other minds, these minds will change our mind about God.
On this you may also want to check out the flagship chapter of Robert Jenson’s mighty little book, On Thinking the Human.
Where Kelly begins making us nervous, and thus, hopefully, think, is when he puts the A.I. twist on the classic Christian notion of creatio ex something that already exists. This twist is that our A.I. creations are themselves capable of creation (something, admittedly, not entirely foreign to older notions of creativity, especially in some literary theorists’ notions of indeterminacy and textual boundlessness. But in reading the essay it is clear that what Kelly is talking about is quite different), which creation may actually exceed our present horizons of perception. This is all sounding quite Hegelian, or Tower of Babel-ish, I know, but to be an impetus for human growth and maturation is not what Kelly envisions as the centerpiece of the process of technology, but only a possible biproduct. Kelly is quite magnanimous as he seems to imply that humans should pursue new technology and A.I. simply for the goodness (good?) of that which is created. Kelly forsees potential dangers, and addresses them:
The natural assumption is that this tower of creations becomes more inferior the more distant each level becomes. Perhaps like Dante’s trip, each generation is a descending level of hell and artificiality, and that each recursion of god/something is more tenuous, more brittle, more simplified and unreal than the cycle before it. So by the time our robots create robots who also create their robots – by this time, we think, whatever reality this third order creation enjoys must be pretty thin.However, it is possible to imagine a world where we create creations more intelligent and powerful then ourselves, who in turn create an order of creations more powerful then they. We might be able to create creatures who enjoy a richer sense of reality than ourselves! Why not?
An excellent question. One that Christians must by no means avoid asking. Kelly’s essay, I think, provides a good model of how this question ought to be asked in good faith, which means beginning not with the dangers, but with the possibilities inherent in the issue itself.
