Life Beyond Screens: Thinking About An AI Apocalypse
(ANALYSIS) In the world of Bible basics, these words from the book of Exodus will be found in quite a few Top 10 lists: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
The Bible has lots of things to say about lying. You can look it up. It’s clear that lying is a sin.
This brings us to an increasingly relevant question: Can a computer lie? That leads directly to another hot-button question: Can a computer sin?
Well, a computer can be programmed — by sinful, fallen human beings — to twist facts or manipulate data to confuse or deceive people. But are these sins committed by the computers or the programmers?
This isn’t a new question. In your mind, if you are of a certain age, flash back to 1968 and remember the voice of the HAL 9000 computer saying, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
The ultimate question is whether, at some point, flaws in the programming will merge with some kind of super Artificial Intelligence and the computers will, you know, start working their way through the whole Ten Commandments.
I have never been a “Terminator” franchise fan who sees Skynet every time I ask my smartphone (or my car’s computer) to get me from Point A to Point B.
But I have done my share of thinking about the can-computers-sin equation ever after doing the case study that I included in the Rational Sheep post, “Asking AI gods: What does ‘Rational Sheep’ mean?”
To read the rest of Terry Mattingly’s post, visit his Substack page at Rational Sheep.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.