This is the question I’ll be examining in today’s episode: do artificially intelligent programs or entities have souls, in Louvois’ sense of the word? And furthermore, what does AI mean for our own souls?
Month: March 2021
Artificial Intelligence and Societies of Control
Artificial intelligence is not something that emerges into the world in a neutral way, or which affects the world in a neutral way. Artificial intelligence is something created by humans within the context of a particular society and period of history; that context determines the nature of the particular artificial intelligence that we create, as well as the environment in which it operates and the scope of its potential influence. This being the case, a proper understanding of how artificial intelligence influences human society and the possibilities for how it may do so in the future begins with a study of human society as it presently exists. This is a very broad topic and a full survey is well beyond the scope of the entire Satanist Reads the Bible project, but we can hone in on some key points that are particularly relevant to the subject of artificial intelligence.
A Survey of Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence
In the backstory of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe is an event called the Butlerian Jihad, a human revolt against “thinking machines.” Herbert himself provided few details of the Jihad in his books but the idea of a future without computers is foundational to many of the themes in his stories. The underlying philosophical justification for the Jihad, as later recorded in one of the Dune universe’s core religious texts, the Orange Catholic Bible, reads as follows: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” Though Herbert provided little other information in the six original Dune novels, it is clear that, in the universe of his stories, artificial intelligence had become a catastrophic problem for humanity. Now at the edge of advances in technology which have made artificial intelligence a reality, we have some questions to ask about what that means for us as humans.