I’m
not Protestant, but if I were, I think I would be concerned about the entry of
the newest entity that has joined the clergy of the religion. The entity under discussion is a robot priest
named BlessU2 that was created to commemorate the 500th anniversary
of the start of the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther in Wittenburg,
Germany. The robot was created as a
tourist attraction and to stir controversy and invite discussion by a local
Protestant church in Wittenburg. Light
beams come out of its hands as it raises its arms to recite a prayer. It can talk in five languages: English,
French, Spanish, German, and Polish, and it can recite 31 different biblical
verses. As a show of sensitivity to
gender issues, the robot can talk in a male or female voice. The mouth and eyes actually move and the face
as a whole is very expressive, at least for a robot. However, no one should think that this looks
like a quasi-human robot. As a matter of
fact, the robot still definitely looks like a machine. The body is a box, and the head is a smaller
box.
So
now one of the last bastions of uniquely human experience that has been
relatively free of the direct intervention of modern technology has
succumbed. Forget about the fact that
the creators of this robot have no desire to replace human clergy with
robots. They just want to be provocative
and get people to think about what it means to be spiritual and religious. The question is how in heaven’s name does a
robot get to be a starting point for such a discussion? Are we to start looking at robots as God’s
creatures similar to humans and animals?
In
order to answer these questions, I think we first have to start with how our
notions have changed about the cosmological environment in which we dwell. The traditional cosmological environment in
which humans have lived is grounded with a world filled with spiritual entities
and phenomena: fairies, angels, mythological creatures, gods, God, human souls
as well as spiritual light and energy.
These are not entities and phenomena whose existence can be proved by
science. One does not know of their
existence; one believes in their existence.
Such entities and phenomena guide us in our behavior, help us to explain
the unexplainable in our everyday lives, and help us to deal with death by leading
us to the postulation of the existence of some kind of life after death. Such entities and phenomena provide an
organic grounding to our cosmological space, what we would otherwise experience
as a vast vacuum where we as humans would float as figures without direction or
destination. This is why, up until
recently, the experience of spirituality and religion has been so pervasive in
human society. We can say that the human
mind populated the organic emptiness of the cosmos with lots of different
spiritual entities and phenomena and transformed the cosmos into a vacuum with
organic grounding. And this was a way to
prevent the dead emptiness of the cosmos from causing the entropic destruction
of the human mind. Entropy in physics is
the random distribution of atoms in a physical vacuum. But entropy can also result in the crumbling
and dispersal of a human mind in an experiential vacuum. A person goes numb and becomes disconnected
from the real world and dies to the world.
This is what traditional organic spirituality and religion fight against
and they are useful for helping many people to stay alive and feel coherent and
together in their senses of self.
And what
happens when spirituality and religion are configured and packaged as the
complex behavioral entity of a robot? It
definitely moves the source of inspiration out of a more traditional
organically grounded vacuum into a more technologically based vacuum. A vacuum that is not filled with the organic
connections created by spiritual entities and phenomena, but rather one that is
filled with the more tenuous contingent connections of digital phenomena floating
in a screen reality and virtual reality vacuum.
It is a vacuum that has been depopulated of its organically grounded
spiritual entities and phenomena and has
been filled up with the digital entities and phenomena of screen and virtual
reality. The cyber world is replacing
the spiritual world to fill the vacuum.
Granted
that robots themselves are material entities, but they are operated through
artificial intelligence, and, in this case, they have a touchscreen on their
chest. Instead of a spiritual soul
activating this complex behavioral entity, there is artificial intelligence
instead.
Although
BlessU2 has been receiving the most coverage of robot clergy in the news
lately, other religions have also gone into creating robot clergy. At a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of
Beijing, there is a robot monk named Xian’er which recites Buddhist mantras and
is able to converse with people. It’s
only 2 feet tall, but it can answer up to 100 different questions. One of the masters at the temple has said
that Xian’er was created to help bridge the divide between Buddhism and science
and also to engage the younger generation in China. It was built as a result of the temple’s own
efforts as well as those of artificial intelligence experts at a local
university, and a technology company.
Although it has traveled around to different robotic fairs in China, it
spends the majority of its time on a shelf within the temple near Beijing. Xian’er actually began its existence as a
cartoon character created by a Buddhist monk attached to its home temple. The robot is very popular among the younger
generation. Like BlessU2, Xian’er has a
touchscreen on its chest, for engaging in digital communication.
Finally,
there is Isaac the robot rabbi. In 2014,
it helped light a Chanukah menorah in San Francisco’s Union Square. It was created by a robotics professor at San
Francisco State University who has also been head of the Robotics Society of
America. Before it helped light the
menorah, Isaac was entertaining the crowd with its own style of dancing. There is no mention in what I have read of
any demonstrations of a more complex
artificial intelligence. On the other
hand, there is an article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (Saclof, 6/12/14)
about a Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, who wrote on CNN’s website, that yes, advanced
robots should be accepted as Jews and as a part of a minyan. This idea goes much further than the
inventors of the robot priest or the robot Buddhist monk intended for their
invention. Nevertheless, it represents a
kind of thinking that is bound to follow as robots advance in their development
and as there are more and more attempts to make robot clergy. It is unfortunate, because it becomes one
more entry point for blurring to occur between robots and humans in the minds
of humans. And more and more people will
leave the organically grounded vacuum that was filled with different religious
and spiritual entities and move to the technologically based vacuum of screen
and virtual reality as the primary source of cosmological involvement. Perhaps there will be attempts to combine the
two, and we will start finding God on a computer screen or in a virtual
world. Perhaps computer screens or
virtual worlds will be perceived as being haunted by cyber-demons. What will be lost in all of this, of course,
is the unique organic coherent identities of humans. Which, of course, could create a crisis in
our dominion over the world.
© 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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