Beyond Binary: AI, Ethics, and the Divine

Topic Notes

An AI wrote the title for this episode. Former programmer, and Pastor, Jeff Piepho along with scientist and astrophysicist, Jeff Zweerink, explores the connections between AI, theology, morality, and the human experience.

Some of the highlights:

TRUE STORY: How does AI end up convincing a man to fall in love with him and commit suicide?

Three different types of AI:

1. Sentient being
2. Artificial narrow intelligence
3. Artificial general intelligence

From a metaphysical naturalist point of view, a computer could come “to life”. From a Christian worldview this is much more difficult.

Humans engage in conversation based on an idea that they want to communicate, and trying to find words to express those ideas. However, a chat-bot doesn’t do this. It merely strings together words as it goes in order to produce something that sounds like there was an idea to communicate.

We love AI! It’s very cool! Can be used for science, sermons, theology, history, medicine, etc! But, we must be careful.

How does the morality work when a car-ai crashes and the human driver could’ve prevented it? What if the AI makes a “difficult” decision to run someone over in order to prevent a worse crash, and what if, or not, the human prevents it from doing so and then something worse happens? Is he morally responsible?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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