Theology has an ungodly image. Neither science, art nor philosophy, it would seem to stand alone in human thought as the systemised application of logic to the illogical. What knowledge can there be of God when no god has ever been observed by two people in the same way?
That’s a secular take which is both unfair and justified. The proper study of man is man, and people and gods have been inescapably intermingled since the creation of Creation. Among the candidates for differentiating us from other creatures, religion has as strong a case as any. It deserves careful, deep examination. An atheist may look at the universe and say “Бога нет”, but if they look at humanity, they’ll see thousands.
Yet traditional theology is resolutely incapable of convergence - actual, non-metaphorical wars are fought over the smallest points of theological difference, and without the possibility of disproof, no point can ever be considered settled. At its deepest point, science has the same caveat, but pragmatically you can build a bridge or a transistor with science that anyone, believer or skeptic, can use with equal efficacy. Theology’s syntheses are largely incompatible with each other, theologians can decorate cathedrals but it's engineering that keeps the rain off.
It would be facile to make the same argument about AI, even though its early years have seen much theology and little effective engineering. That’s not my case. Rather, I think that when both AI and theology do as science has done and escape the black hole at the heart of their respective galaxies, they will find much of practical - even beautiful - use.
Cosmologists now think that supermassive black holes are at the heart of nearly every galaxy, and thus must in some way be entirely central to galactic formation and development. Quite a role for objects most famed for complete obliteration. Science’s black hole is logic which, per Gödel, destroys certainty. Yet science, and the intellectual apacetime of mathematics which forms its framework, assumes that certainty may be approached and much good will come by taking the journey even if the destination is unreachable. Theology’s black hole is God; AI’s is intelligence. Galaxies of bright, fertile ideas can form around them, even as those supermassive central singularities remain an inadvisable or impossible destinations to actually visit.
Leaving God and intelligence to one side, then [1], what can theology and AI see in each other? Theology’s great spiral arms are formed of such stuff as the relations between the creator and the created, the rights and obligations one to the other, paths to transcendence and the proper order of life among ourselves in a world that contains other semtience besides ourselves. These are no small matters. AI contains many of the same concerns, but with us as the creators. Assuming, as I do, that regardless of the internal nature of intelligence we shall one day create entities capable of unexpected insight and reasoned discourse around those insights, of synthesising new abstractions and building on them, then they will have a certain power and ability to change our world and our thoughts. What is the proper way of dealing with that? What of us do we want in them, and what do we want them not to be? How will they interact among themselves - what rules can we set, and how should they be enforced, if they can at all? What will they think of us, and what heed will we be paid? What journey do we wish to take with them, or for them to take without us?
There is a growing and exciting field of ethics in AI. It is largely led by engineers in the service of those who have grown very rich and powerful through data; the headline “AI”s (the quotes are necessary) are fed on advertising and business technology dollars. Experience tells use that tech companies are no more prone to exhibiting ethics as emergent behaviour than any other large authoritarian regime; in my opinion, although I don’t doubt the bona fides of those who work in developing AI ethics within companies or with their money, the motivation of such companies in supporting this work is at least partially informed by the perceived necessity of heading off regulation or legal minefields in the future. If regulators or legislators may be headed off more efficiently through other means, then ethical AI will not be prioritised over quarterly profits. Nothing ever is.
There is much admirable work outside the walls of Google and IBM; departments and centres of excellence within academia are springing up, albeit with strong tropisms for industry involvement. But actual ethicists are outnumbered by technologists; if this is to be the unformed void from which the creator appears, what attributes will its creations absorb?
But if you want to find a field where ethics talks to humans in the round, then theology is it. Religion remains a huge component of society and politics, however distorted, and it always claims an ethical underpinning - again, as unethical as others may consider the tenets. A theological approach to AI will bring many more angles to society’s appreciation of the tasks ahead, many, doubtless, as fiery and unwholesome as their godly precedents. Those angles will, however, be valuable, for as long as we will have to coexist en masse with a cohort of independent, puissant, created beings. You can write a best-selling book called ‘The Soul Of A New Machine’, and everyone instantly grasps the concept regardless of what, if any, agreement exists about soul nature. Theology has the language we need and already know.
A theological approach, then, can tap into a vast pre-programmed set of ethical tools with which everyone on the planet is equipped [3]. In return - and this is a more personal wish - theologians of questing mind will find AI provides what theology has badly lacked, a laboratory in which different ideas and theologies can be tested on communities of intelligent creatures designed for the task … if that in itself is ethical, a question full of paradox just begging for debate. But if AI progresses, then it will be a class of question that theologians cannot ignore [2] .
AI needs to be informed by theology because that is the only field of human intellect to consistently examine the relationship between the creator and the created when both are aware of the other. Theology needs to be informed by AI because it is the only field of engineering where awareness of abstracts and their relation to reality will exist outside ourselves; it objectifies intellect and free will, whatever they may be, and renders them open to new, pragmatic study and insights that thousands of years of debate have strived to achieve with indifferent results. Each is the other's telescope.
For both fields, a new journey towards the unachievable is on offer.
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[1] - The idea of a secular theology would seem to be a paradox; however, I would argue that since there is no agreement as to the nature of God among theologians across faiths, and that God is either extremely abstract, overtly metaphoric, or entirely absent in some otherwise very religious traditions, viz the more rarefied Buddhist traditions and mid-church Anglicanism, it’s not much of a stretch.
[2] - They can and will, of course. One of the curses of theology is outlawing the awkward question. Bona fide theologians, however, feel guilty on this point.
[3] - It can be argued that this is merely the application of existing fields, such as the philosophy or anthropology of religion. There is some truth in that. But applied and theoretical science and maths are often very different beasts, and ‘applied theology’ is already claimed by religion, so I feel that this chimera deserves a hearing at least before being stuffed into a pigeonhole already equipped with its own monstrous bird.
