From the Turing Test to the Eunuch Test

The Turing Test famously set the bar for intelligent machine behavior. If their conversation was indistinguishable from human conversation, they pass. Humans judge whether they pass, so it is highly subjective, if also compelling in its simplicity. The test is played out in a recent and remarkably austere film this year, Ex Machina.

Most AI researchers believe the Turing Test works well as a thought experiment, but fails miserably as the guide for research programs actually developing thinking, reasoning, learning machines with a deep understanding of the world.

So if not the Turing Test, then what? In religious perspective, robots raise basic and important anthropological questions. What and who are human beings? So the contemporary quest to imagine AI serve as metonymy for the larger identity-quest that is a mark of human striving for self-understanding.

In this sense, films like Transcendence, or Chappie, or series like Battlestar Galactica or Agents of Shield, offer imaginative space to ask some of the basic question: Who are we? If we become more than us, or different than us, are we still us?

They also raise basic ethical questions. How should we treat robots when they arrive, if they are like us? What if they once were us, but have transitioned their neural map to a digital domain? And then they change? How should we treat them?

Eventually, though, people of faith end up asking religious questions about robots. One of the more intriguing might be, Can they be baptized? Can they receive communion? One of my favorite novels that explores this perspective, but in relation to aliens rather than robots, is The Book of Strange New Things.

In this novel, it is not a missionary who takes the gospel to another alien race, but rather the alien race requests and demands that somebody bring the gospel to them.

Which leads me to introduce what I am calling the Eunuch Test. If you remember, in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 8, one of the apostles, Philip, encounters an Ethiopian Eunuch on the road home from Jerusalem.

"As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. (Acts 8:37-39)

The basic problem of the Turing Test--it puts the decision about the supposed "humanity" of the AI in the hands of humans. We get to be the judge. But wait for the day when an AI, an alien, any kind of stranger, approaches us, and asks to be received as human, and we are put in a completely different space. Rather than serving as judge and jury, we are invited to consider, "What is to keep me from accepting this being's own perspective and journey as valid and worthwhile?"

Notice it is the Eunuch, not Philip, who asks the question. What is to keep me? And Philip has no answer other than to drop everything and baptize the eunuch on the spot.

So this day may arrive, who knows, when an AI asks a similarly interesting question. And after all our hemming and hawing about what counts as human, and whether or not those created in the image of God, if they create something themselves that surprises them in its humanity, get to decide how human they are.

When the robots arrive, we'll have to take up our concerns directly with them. Don't come asking me my opinion. What is to keep them from...?

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For those interested in getting a lay of the land, consider reading these. But be warned, they offer a rather stark vision of the future.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/predictions-for-the-state-of-ai-and-robotics-in-2025/

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html