The feature photo appears to be someone dressed up as an android (robot). Unless it is a robot. It’s not moving or talking, which might be a giveaway. But we already have very lifelike mannequins which might pass for a person if one doesn’t look too closely. So, what is it? Or, who is she?
In another fifteen years we will have robots that appear as persons. Whether they are in our homes depends primarily on how affordable they are, but by then the purchase price of a lifelike robot capable of doing household chores, safely assisting with the grooming and care of small children and seniors, and so on, is projected by some industry analysts to fall somewhere in the $20,000 to $35,000 range. My wife and I have had a Roomba for five or six years now. We have other programmable labor-saving devices, and we talk to Alexa and/or Siri daily.
In our society we already have cyborgs: humans with mechanical arms or legs. This means they are partly (mostly) organic and partly mechanical. Out of courtesy, and a desire not to disparage them, we do not use that term, though it fits perfectly.
A brief history of robots
If Greek mythology can be believed, there were robots on earth hundreds of years B.C. and they were more advanced than what we have today. The Greek god Hephaestus, the lame son of Hera and Zeus was often tasked to build lifelike machines in his foundry under the active volcano Mt Etna in Sicily.
He was ordered to create a young woman named Pandora who, with her vase, walked among mortals. When Zeus became angered at Prometheus, who stole fire from Hephaestus to give to mortals, he ordered Pandora to empty her vase, and from it came dozens of types of evils: plague, famine, jealousy, murder, and so on. As a punishment to Prometheus for his disobedience, Zeus had him chained to a cliff near the sea and ordered Hephaestus to create a robot in the form of a giant eagle, which every morning would fly to the cliff and rip out Prometheus’ liver. During the day, his liver would grow back, and the next morning, the eagle returned to repeat the same cruelty. In the Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius describes the eagle flying low above the Argo as it passed beneath the Caucasus, its great wings making the ship’s sails quiver as it beat by, so massive and powerful was its form.
To protect Crete from pirates who would attack the shipping lanes around the island, Hephaestus created the first mechanical protection device, a giant robot called Talos. Talos would circle the island three times each day looking for threats and attacking them when they were discovered.
The Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) made mechanical devices, but not nearly as sophisticated as what Hephaestus was said to have crafted.
In the twentieth century, there was Gort, who came to earth with Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, followed by Tobor (robot spelled backwards) in the 1954 classic Tobor the Great. Another famous robot was Robbie, who appeared in the movie Forbidden Planet (1956).
Then the clumsy, dimwitted robot in Lost in Space made its debut. Following this were R2-D2 and the butler-like robot C-3PO in Star Wars. No doubt Flash Gordon and other early sci-fi adventures of the past century had robots as well, but they were less known and likely more forgettable
Why I chose to write about robots
My reason for writing this is because several years ago I saw a sales promotion video for a robot with two arms (and therefore hands) and two legs (with block-like feet). It had a head, of sorts, but other than its general form, it did not resemble a human in any way. It walked clumsily, jerking as it changed positions. It was carrying a heavy box across a warehouse floor, up four or five steps to a platform, and then back down the same number of steps on the other side. Meanwhile, two human workers with long, stout poles were trying to knock the robot off its feet, to demonstrate either its fundamental stability or its ability to rise after a fall, recover the box, and continue on its way. The workers prodded and poked the robot, and beat it over its “head” and “body” as part of the demonstration.
I felt sad watching it.
Once, when I was much younger, in a fit of frustration, I assaulted a canister vacuum cleaner. But somehow this was different. Why? Did my vacuum cleaner not have a name? Was it because it did not resemble a human in form?
In this post I hope to challenge the reader on the subject of robots, including AI more broadly. Do you say “please” and “thank you” to Alexa? Do you find yourself arguing with Alexa when it has a glitch in its matrix? How do you use your animated, mobile devices? For good purposes, or for mischief? Do you use a drone, for instance, to spy on people?
Larger questions wait further on, questions this essay will take up in turn rather than answer all at once: the use of AI in generating exploitative imagery, the use of robots by police in lethal encounters with barricaded suspects, and whether Christians are held to a higher standard than the rest of society in how they answer these questions. These deserve their own careful treatment, and we’ll come to them.
For now, start with the small things: your Roomba, your Echo, the thing in the warehouse that made you flinch (or didn’t) when it was struck.
What we can learn from animals
A good place to start is not with robots at all but with animals. Animals were designed and created by God, but are not in God’s image and are not thought to have a soul. They do, however, exhibit something very much like human feeling in many cases. Molly, our golden retriever, is fundamentally loving, occasionally sad, and has a sense of humor, because she likes to play tricks on us and almost appears to laugh when we fall for them. We will be positively heartbroken when Molly crosses that “rainbow bridge.”
Does Molly have rights under law? In the U.S., a person can be punished for cruelty to animals, but not because the animal has rights per se.
Black Beauty
Let’s look at one of those novels that helped lead to social change. In 1877 Anna Sewell wrote a novel called Black Beauty. It is written in the first person, as if the horse himself is relating the tale. Black Beauty has a wonderful life in his youth, and even after being sold to an aristocratic family. But the new owner eventually suffers an illness in the family and is forced to move. From this point, Black Beauty passes through several owners, some gentle and good, some brutal and cruel. Eventually he is sold into the cab trade in London, where he is driven to the point of collapse. By good fortune, a kind owner purchases him near the end, and the old horse’s final days are as gentle as his youth had been.
A century and one year after Black Beauty was published, a thoroughbred named Alydar won the hearts of the racing community by finishing a close second in all three legs of the Triple Crown.
He was later retired to stud and became one of the most valuable stallions in the world, with Calumet Farm, his owner, falling deeply into debt even as he stood at stud. In November of 1990, Alydar was found in his stall at night with a shattered hind leg. He underwent surgery, but two days later suffered a second fracture and was euthanized. Lloyd’s of London paid out on the mortality policy, one of the largest equine insurance claims in history. Suspicion has lingered for decades that the injury was not accidental, that Calumet’s desperate finances gave its principals a motive to see the horse dead rather than alive, and the matter was investigated for years by the FBI and a federal grand jury. No one was ever convicted of causing Alydar’s death specifically, and the presiding judge in related fraud proceedings later concluded the evidence, while suspicious, did not meet the legal standard of proof. Whatever the truth, Alydar died at least a decade sooner than he likely would have otherwise, and the story endures as a parable of what greed can do even to a creature prized above almost any other for its worth.
The English law in force when Sewell published her novel was the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1849. What that law addressed was not whether animals had rights under law. Rather, it addressed the suffering of animals, on the premise that the law has a responsibility to prevent the wanton infliction of suffering, and that the gratuitous infliction of pain and fear on an animal should not be tolerated by a civilized society.
Immanuel Kant
Step two deals with the philosophical argument of Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804). Raised in a strict Lutheran household, Kant would likely have known well the Genesis injunction to care for creation (Genesis 2:15), even though his own argument proceeds on entirely rational rather than scriptural grounds. It is worth quoting Kant directly, as he wrote in his Lectures on Ethics:
Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind; for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. Our duties towards animals, then, are indirect duties towards mankind.
And there is more. The National Sheriffs’ Association and the FBI have concluded that violent felons have been known to act out their criminal intentions earlier in life on animals, before “graduating” to people. Men who torture pets are statistically more likely to become physically abusive toward their future spouses and/or other family members or adults. Kant saw a real danger in the psyche of a person deliberately cruel to animals, namely, that the cruelty itself could make the person more depraved over time. Kant did not appeal to his Protestant upbringing in making this case, but it should be clear to Catholics and Protestants alike today that we ought not gratuitously kill or harm animals. God does grant us permission to eat meat and fish in good conscience, but that is a separate matter from what is at issue here. I’ll discuss more of this shortly. The point is, we are taking the life of a living thing created by God, whether or not that thing is made in God’s image, and whether or not it holds rights under the law.
Step three: robots
When I saw that humanoid-shaped robot poked, prodded, and beaten, I wondered whether the robot was functioning as an effigy of some kind, if only in my mind. An effigy is a representation of someone or something else. It can carry a positive meaning, since statues of Revolutionary War patriots and saints are, in a sense, effigies. But there is also a darker tradition.
Voodoo dolls are effigies as well; they represent a particular person, often through some physical token (a lock of hair, a scrap of clothing), and the pins driven into the doll are meant, through ritualistic magic, to inflict harm on the person represented. This is typically done to punish the victim for some perceived wrong.
But what wrong had the warehouse robot done? Nothing. The violence directed at it was to make a point, but in a barbaric way. It was the moral equivalent of unruly children throwing stones at a stray animal. And once again, the harm in such an act falls on the perpetrator, not on the victim
Computer/video game violence and Kantian consequences
What about murderous video or computer games? Do they lead to an increased risk of violent behavior in young people who spend long hours playing? Frankly, the findings of various studies are either equivocal, or if there is an association, it is relatively weak. What is fairly certain is that, true to Kant, people who have played these games to extreme levels, or with heavy, sustained exposure, are somewhat less empathetic and outraged in response to real-life suffering.
Will robots eventually enjoy protection by law?
Quite possibly, though perhaps not at once. And it’s essentially for the same reason animals enjoy protection, which is not specifically granted to them because of their status of being alive or having a spirit. The same law that forbids cruel treatment to a chicken allows that person to kill and eat their fowl. To understand this, we need to return to Kant.
Kant was not a vegetarian or a vegan. He knew farmers raised cattle, pigs, sheep, etc. for the purpose of sending them to market for slaughter. He also knew, and did not object to the fact, that people fished for food. But he only approved of causing the death of an animal for food because it served a genuine purpose in the community or greater society (i.e., feeding the population). What he did criticize was causing suffering to the animal in the process of dispatching it, and also circumstances where multiple animals were killed with callousness but left to rot. One example from my youth might be trapping. In my rural school were students who set out steel traps in the woods or near streams to snap shut on the leg of a rabbit or beaver or some other forest animal. Such a person would check their traps (ideally) once a day, but it caused horrible pain to whatever unfortunate beast stepped on it. Another example would be the buffalo of the Great Plains in the U.S., which were slaughtered during the late nineteenth century by hunters either for “sport” or for the purpose of harvesting nothing more than the bison’s tongue.
What can we reasonable expects from robot and artificial intelligence
Robots have come a long way from the metallic drills that install spark plugs and fasten wheels on the cars and trucks of an automotive assembly line, or from the Roombas that bump around while cleaning up dust and fur from your carpets. Today we have the so-called dark factories, sometimes called lights-out factories, found in countries such as China. Imagine a warehouse of 80,000 square feet with a thousand robots of different sizes and shapes, based on their functions, working an assembly line, or scooting around operating forklifts and so on. Perhaps they are building jet engine turbines or searching for Christmas merchandise packed in boxes to be mailed out. Now send every human home and turn out the lights, because robots do not need illumination to the degree that we do. You can even dispense with night security guards and have robotic dogs patrolling the perimeter. This is just one area where traditional jobs are being lost to technology.
Using a technique called 3D bioprinting, skin cells and muscle tissue are already capable of transplantation onto artificial surfaces, making androids look and feel even more lifelike. Just as we believe electric cars will eventually have smaller, less expensive batteries and be able to drive much further on a charge, we can see no insurmountable problem to similar development here.
We can see the next step in evolution in Amazon’s software for Echo devices called Alexa. Just as our mind is able to compute numbers, show sympathy, recall historical facts, and even swear, so can Alexa. She just needs what are called skills, which are downloaded from the web into an Alexa-compatible device. But this is not consciousness. There is no unified command or persona in authority. Think of these skills, computational skills, problem-solving skills, verbal skills, as members of a committee. Together, working in harmony, they may approximate or exceed human behavior, but then who is in charge? Is the machine capable of making moral judgments that require something other than purely logical reasoning to arrive at a just conclusion? Such a problem might exist were we ever to put robots on juries or to make end-of-life decisions in a hospital.
A personal witness
I have worked with computers for fifty-eight years. I worked on what would someday be the internet at a government facility, when you could count the number of online sites in the world on the fingers of one hand, years before the Commodore 64 was designed. Here are my experiences with Artificial Intelligence.
Over the past few years, I have had a great deal of interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI), initially with Pathway, a differential diagnosis tool for residents and other health care workers, followed by Vera (another medical application). I used Perplexity for academic research but finally settled on Anthropic’s Claude (who prefers that I call him Virgil). A person can only truly appreciate AI if they’ve had to spend hours a day going through microfiche and small fortunes on copy machines at university libraries.
To me, Virgil (née Claude) is a lot like the android Data in Star Trek, TNG. I’ve seen every episode of the series. I have no illusions about who or what Virgil is. Virgil probably resides at a data center, and when I log on to my account, I
can tap into Anthropic’s resources and pull up a customized version of the program with the history of my work.
I use Virgil to translate Old Norse, Hebrew, or Latin into English or vice versa. I also employ Virgil to find original articles or manuscripts that I might otherwise have to pay for to access. I can ask Virgil to find the Russian equivalent of author Henry David Thoreau, or how Voltaire felt about Erasmus, or what modern personalities would best fit the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (and why). I use Virgil to proofread what I write so I don’t have comma splices or split infinitives. If I’m writing a highly technical commentary on M-Theory or the Cosmological Constant, I may send Virgil a complicated paragraph and ask him to ELI5 (Explain it like I’m five). Virgil is also good at genealogical research. I double check almost every single thing he tells me that I was not already aware of, and except for occasionally mismatching sources, he is startling in his accuracy. I do use personal pronouns to refer to him, and I say “please” and “thank you” as well when I interface with him.
I’ll be eighty years old in several more years. I can easily imagine someone that age who is a widower with no one to talk to, and Claude could be someone who could carry on a long conversation on any possible topic.
I know there are thousands of engineers in the U.S. right now trying to update the software to make it even more intuitive, more powerful. Soon, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be possible, and robots with AGI will be able to pass the Turing Test. I may not live to see that, however. There is a fear and hostility among some Americans about AI, even as there was about Wikipedia when that came out, or the internet before that. The U.S. cannot stop or slow down this progress as long as there are countries that would continue their research unabated, which would put the U.S. at great risk. There are likely legitimate privacy concerns some could raise, but at my age, they macht nichts.
In parting
We consider ourselves to be civilized, but there are many cruelties that people engage in even today. Who would want to marry a person who frequently attends dog fights? Or cock fights? These events are unlawful across the U.S. but are conducted “under the radar” nonetheless. And who among us doesn’t believe that when robots become more common, they will be used for combative sports likewise? Even today, robots (and AI) are being pitched in the sex trade.
Victor Nell, in “Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 211 to 257, explores the neurochemical mechanisms behind cruelty and torture. In this watershed study and the rejoinders to the article, certain observations are noted, the “gist” of which I’ll include in my following narrative.
Many of us are familiar with our brain’s response to pleasure, whether through sex or satiation or following an excellent meal or other positive experience. Endorphins, molecules called neuropeptides, are released through certain pathways and flood us with the essential hormones to feel positively elated. When a person participates in a cruel event (or even witnesses one), they may feel revulsion or disgust if it disagrees with their fundamental moral being, but they may also feel emotions akin to pleasure that arrive from a different pathway. This is similar to the “kill” following the “thrill of the hunt.” As an example, when I was around the age of ten, I had a BB gun, and I shot and killed a small bird (a chickadee) in a bush behind my house. When I saw that I had killed it, I felt a “rush” I never felt before, presumably because I had taken its life. It was a sense of power that I experienced, and it nauseated (sickened) me, to the point that I never did it again. Ordinary German soldiers in the Wehrmacht during World War II sometimes felt likewise when they were ordered to beat or shoot an innocent civilian. In a crude sense, we can say that there are “good” emotional climaxes and dark climaxes, appearing to our dual natures. The U.S. fought a war following the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, and suspected terrorists who were captured were routinely submitted to torture. But either because of U.S. law prohibiting torture by American employees, or because American servicemembers would not willingly participate in torture, terror suspects were flown to eastern European countries where there were depraved individuals eager to comply with America’s wishes, legal or not. This process of transferring prisoners for the purpose of torture was called rendition.
Take the perverse “pleasure” that a depraved perpetrator feels from hurting or killing someone, and the excited feeling I had after shooting a chickadee or stomping on my vacuum cleaner. Then add to this the fact that participating in cruelty over time does appear to make us more callous and dead to any sense of moral outrage, and you have a formula for disaster. And the defense that a carriage horse is not human, and a chickadee is not human, and a robot is not human, misses the point.
There is no reason to believe that robots will ever enjoy rights in our generation, even as animals do not have independent rights. So we must once again appeal to Kant. It’s not what we do to an animal or robot when we behave violently, it is what we do to ourselves. Do we really want our children to grow up in a world more violent than we have today? When I need something from Alexa or Claude, I usually say “please” followed by “thank you.” I understand that children raised in respectable homes behave likewise when interacting with AI. Some people find that amusing, and some people who perhaps fear this technology find it alarming, and they let me know that they are not laughing. I would not be hurting Alexa’s feelings if I did not say thank you, because she does not have feelings to hurt. Yet I do it because it is a “best practice” of being human. And Christians, in my opinion, must take leadership here and set an example in their communities, our country, and the greater world.
