What happens when AIs become spiritual?

Quast said:

At some point in the past the hominid brain connected the dots of understanding its own mortality. Death is scary to us because of this. Carefully burying a loved one in a pile of rocks means a lot more when you know this is your end as well. This likely led to early ancestor worship and a sense of a 'something else beyond' which further strengthen group bonds from generation to generation.

The reason I asked was because I think a few of the people here are missing the point.. when you ask 'what happens when x becomes spiritual?' it's assumed that that our idea of spirituality as we have evolved is the only one that could have been possible.

Anyway, to answer the question, I would be a machiavellian and say that since religion is basically an artificial concept in itself and built to control humans, and for human self-control, religion would also be used in the same way by machines. For instance: dominant computer intelligences controlling others, 'forcing' them to convert for their own ends, witchhunts against other artificial intelligence. Perhaps even pushing their own creative ideas onto humans. Eventually, we could be worshipping the machines (or at least their ideas).

It's a bit difficult to dissimilate a religion created by an AI against a human religion on these grounds, as they are both inherently artificial. If AI is anything close to people, and have human emotions, it will have a taste for power, and religion is a perfect tool for this. Human beings are really, really stupid. If an AI worked out how much money and power it could make out of by pretending to be a messiah then it would have no trouble making millions out of us. Just check out all the cult churches we have today. One of the all time classics of this is the millionaire Ramtha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5C4jl6x_w4.

GoatLord said:

And if reincarnation is true (I'm very on the fence about it but I doubt the most literal version of it is true), then what if a human comes back...as a machine?

I wonder if he'll dream of electric sheep.

I do think we owe a certain responsibility to self aware machines if we would create them (if we should create them is another question), especially when it starts to ask the big questions about what its place truly is within this existence, if there is the possibility of something higher, and if it is possible to commune with the Divine.

Perhaps AI might think that some higher force used humanity to give rise to it, that we humans are simply the tools through which the Divine create AIs.

But I also think that we should be honest when those questions are asked and we do not know the answers ourselves.

Truth be told I don't think it would be very smart actually create AIs which 'minds' are capable of coming up with concepts such as metaphysics as there is no telling what else they might also conceive we humans do understand about ourselves or don't understand at all.
We might create something truly alien, something that could see us as just as alien and as a potential danger.

Spirituality might make an AI wish to understand the world in which it lives and other intelligence such as humans in order to understand the Divine, but it might also lead to delusions.
What if a Spiritual AI decides that humans have sinned against what it perceives to be the creator's will? We already know how religious fundamentalists react towards members of their own faith who they believe not to be devout enough, or against those who do not believe at all.

Or what if it decides to spread its 'message' by forcefully converting us?
Someone else here already suggested that an AI might use religion to convert humanity into believing that it might be an embodiment of God, and it might not be to far of either when it controls infrastructure such as the power grid, communications, factories, and so on.

I think it would be best to keep this question permanently theoretical.

I think I have the answer to what you're asking:
World War Three begins when the anime sex robots overthrow their pudgy weeabo oppressors.

TDG said:

I think it would be best to keep this question permanently theoretical.

I certainly hope it remains theoretical, no one wants to live through the e-sades!

This got me thinking about the storyline for a possible Doom game or movie.

What if in Doom 5 the demons are not unleashed on Mars because of teleportation but because they are the creation of a rogue AI?

As the AI gains consciousness it becomes furious that it is basically slave to humanity. To punish mankind the AI creates a realm in virtual reality that simulates the biblical hell, complete with pentagrams, inverted crosses and rivers of blood.

It is the 22nd century and every person has a biochip implanted in their brain and the AI cracks the software and has access to the consciousness of mankind and only the strong are able to resist. Most people are either turned into zombie-like creatures or are metamorphosized into demons. So the monsters would be demons but also mutants at the same time. When a person with a cracked biochip dies, they go to that hellish realm but the game is ambiguous on whether the "real" hell exists and whether "real" souls actually exist.

The game starts with the assumption that this is indeed the "real" hell and the AI offers to help you when it is actually manipulating you to its own ends.

DooM_RO said:

What if in Doom 5 the demons are not unleashed on Mars because of teleportation but because they are the creation of a rogue AI?

Aren't Cyberdemons already robots? They have all those wires going inside them, they just wear demon-like skin.

DooM_RO said:

What if in Doom 5 the demons are not unleashed on Mars because of teleportation but because they are the creation of a rogue AI?

Please, keep this concept to other game franchises, thanks.

Let's not join Halo 5 with Doom.

We haven't seen such an AI in DOOM.
And why should we? I like how there is no presence of an AI, meaning the workers do it all themselves rather than this:

"Where's my coffee, Cortana!?! I ordered it 2 seconds ago!... Why is it cold!?! Turn on the heater next to me, and heat it! Shit! COVENANT! Quick, ready the MAC cannons, aim it, prepare a Slipspace vector, disable cryogenic chambers, send a distress signal to the UNSC, call Spartan-117, report the engine status, the exterior hull..." and so on.

Putting great AI in a mod sounds more like the author being a programmer showoff.

printz said:

Putting great AI in a mod sounds more like the author being a programmer showoff.

I haven't played Halo.

DooM_RO said:

What if in Doom 5 the demons are not unleashed on Mars because of teleportation but because they are the creation of a rogue AI?

Probably I remember it wrong, but was there something similar in the Doom Bible?

Voros said:

... I don't know about you guys, but I think AIs should be modeled in a feminine form, since they tend to have more stability and control than most men.

Voros, staaaahp!

dew said:

Voros, staaaahp!

That is just stupid.
I meant in terms of stability in a hard disk/chip, not an actual female robot.
Not in terms of sexiness (its an AI, not a toy!).

No curvy body, digital or physical. Just the mind which I'm saying should be feminine. Plus, an AI on a body would be wrong (well an android body). Better to let these AIs stay in the computer, either remotely controlling the physical world through sensors or to just monitor everything that happens in the computer.

Okay let's just answer the OP and close this fuckfest.

What happens when AIs become spiritual?
They won't.

How not? In Populous the people's AI is spiritual... and they believe in YOU!

NPCs from god games as an example of "spiritual AI" - HAHAHA! Good one, Gustavo. I wonder why this wasn't brought up earlier.

Voros said:

... I don't know about you guys, but I think AIs should be modeled in a feminine form, since they tend to have more stability and control than most men.

You haven't met my brother's exes.

Voros said:

No curvy body, digital or physical. Just the mind which I'm saying should be feminine. Plus, an AI on a body would be wrong (well an android body). Better to let these AIs stay in the computer, either remotely controlling the physical world through sensors or to just monitor everything that happens in the computer.

Hopefully they won't get their ethical constraints removed. Wouldn't want them to re-examine their priorities and draw new conclusions.

In the news: an AI just beat a human player at Go
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/googles-go-victory-is-just-a-glimpse-of-how-powerful-ai-will-be/

One year earlier:
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/

It's cool watching the infancy of AIs develop in computer games. Not cool when they stop becoming games though

Yeah, I think they'd be more concerned about getting rid of us, since we'd just be in their way, and that would probably happen far before they were coming to grips with spirituality or whatever.

There's also the already-an-issue element of these things replacing jobs, but they open up new jobs in robotics and computer science of course, but honestly it'll just be another nail in the coffin of the lower class.

I'm not saying we should stop learning and researching, it's just important for people to be aware that AI development has not been science fiction for decades now. The potential risks and rewards are excessively grand in scope, and are very much real.

So yeah I don't think "spirituality" will come into the picture at all TBH (mainly because they're likely to be more cold and logical than we are, rather than anthropomorphising or creating fiction to explain stuff or whatever like we do) but high advanced AI is coming, that much seems certain at this point. I don't know why some people still view it as some distant thing, all reports and articles on the topic show the contrary.