How Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Affect Religion


A person who bills himself as an authority of such things recently published a dramatic essay warning Catholics that AI represents a threat to their faith. Readers who want to open the link and read his essay may have a different take than I do or may know a lot more about AI than I do. The link seems to fall back on the faith's old saw, believers are people with good motives and a broad understanding of humans, society and the life of the unseen and invisible while others, like operatives in the field of AI, are "materialistic" and harmful and ignorant of sin and the afterlife.

The link sort of maneuvers around the great big threat AI poses for Christianity and most religions in the world. It is that when scientific data, like the minerals and chemistry of sand and rock, is plugged into programs that can simulate the creation of life from objects that were not "life" and then design actual experiments that do this over and over again, religion is dead. The link asks are we to believe that life and later humans happened by random events? You got it, pardna? When millions of years are replicated by AI a lot of "mysteries" will no longer be mysteries.  

I have been told Artificial Intelligence (AI) is simply taking repetitive events and their probabilities and using them to predict. I've never done this but, as I understand it, if I wanted to see a good example of a term paper for a college junior on the topic, "War of 1812", 500 words, I could have one in a few seconds. It is not difficult to figure out how this was done. A college professor has ways to identify the cheating in this case. 

For the Vatican to poke holes in an AI creation of humans, the Vatican would need to know a lot more than it does about science and probability. On this blog I've had self appointed "experts" say neither  nor evolution life could not have come from natural events in hundreds of millions of years because "there wasn't enough time." Such skeptics will have their opportunities to build their own AI. Will they be successful? We haven't seen any evidence yet they will prevail.

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