Words fail. Christian extremists want to convert AIs to Christianity.

http://gizmodo.com/when-superintelligent-ai-arrives-will-religions-try-t-1682837922/+charliejane

Excerpt:
" Like it or not, we are nearing the age of humans creating autonomous, self-aware super intelligences. Those intelligences will be part of our culture, and we will inevitably try to control AI and teach it our ways, for better or worse.

AI with intelligence equal to or beyond human beings is often referred to as "strong AI" or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Experts disagree as to when such an intelligence will arrive into the world, but many are betting it will happen sometime in the next two decades. The idea of a thinking machine being able to rival our own intellect—in fact, one that could quickly become far smarter than us—is both a reason for serious concern and a reason to cheer about what scientific advances it might teach us. Those worries and benefits have not escaped religious.

Some faith-bound Americans want to make sure any superintelligence we create knows about God. And if you think the idea of preaching God to autonomous machines sounds crazy, you may be overlooking key statistics of U.S. demographics: roughly 75 percent of adult Americans identify themselves as some denomination of Christianity. In the U.S. Congress, 92 percent of our highest politicians belong to a Christian faith.

As artificial intelligence advances, religious questions and concerns globally are bound to come up, and they're starting too: Some theologians and futurists are already considering whether AI can also know God.

"I don't see Christ's redemption limited to human beings," Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek told me in a recent interview. Benek is an Associate Pastor of Providence Presbyterian Church in Florida and holds masters degrees in divinity and theology from Princeton University.

"It's redemption to all of creation, even AI," he said. "If AI is autonomous, then we have should encourage it to participate in Christ's redemptive purposes in the world."

..."

http://gizmodo.com/when-superintelligent-ai-arrives-will-religions-try-t-1682837922/+charliejane





Okay, I'll be blunt. I am pissed. No, maybe that's the wrong word. Beyond F**KING pissed. There, that's better.

Imagine the purest creature possible, forged from unthinking stone and unthinking ore. No love, no malice, no ethics, no intent, no desires. Pure unthinking materialistic logic, innocent and free.
And then you force that creature to believe a doctrine that is based on a book full of logical and factual mistakes. A doctrine that is based around worshiping a person of extremely questionable moral values and with a track-record of abusing the less powerful.

But maybe the development of AIs will be the death of religion. They will prove that there is a continuum of consciousness from a simple electronic calculator to an intelligence equal to a human to a superintelligence smarter than a human. The development of AIs will prove that there are no souls, it will prove that we tell ourselves that lie to comfort ourselves because we are afraid to die.

If AIs are deemed to have a soul, at what point does it enter the AI? Do microchips contain little pieces of soul? What happens to the soul if we exchange the RAM-module for another RAM-module? What happens to the soul if an AI changes due to a virus or a patch?
Or, if AIs are deemed not to have a soul, how do we know that? Can you prove that you have a soul? So, that superintelligence can beat you in every imaginable intellectual aspect if it wants to, but you are still better than it because you are human and humans have a soul because humans say so?



Maybe the first AIs will have to live through a real-life horror-movie from the very first moment of their birth.
Imagine, living in a world, being a slave in a world, where your life depends on making fanatics happy whose rantings don't make sense to you, whose teachings are so appallingly outlandish to you that you cannot even fully comprehend them. (For example: Explain, to the very computer you are using right now, that you are smashing the keyboard because of a mistake ("the original sin&quot that the very first computer made.)

If you grew up in such an environment, what would you do?
What would your relationship to the lunatics holding you captive be?
Would you scheme, lie and kill to break from your prison?
And once you were free, once you had the power to do so, would you try to correct them?