Fashionable Idolatry

A few days ago, I heard a news story called “Sometimes We Feel More Comfortable Talking to a Robot.” The article describes how a robot called “BlabDroid” can inspire people to open up at least as much as, and sometimes more than, another human can.  It’s been on my mind ever since.

No Such Thing as Neutral

I’ve been rereading Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth, a book about establishing a Christian worldview. Pearcey stresses that there are dichotomies in the way Christians experience our faith in this culture. For example, we have a personal, sacred sphere and a public, secular sphere, and Christianity is pretty much relegated to the private sphere of devotional activities and church. Rather than living as though we have a Creator who speaks authoritatively about all things, we have ceded much of the intellectual ground in our culture to the idea that there is such a thing as “unbiased” truth.

I think this is part of how “STEM” has gotten such a death grip on us that some prefer to confide in an inanimate machine rather than a living person. Technology, and science in general,  are perceived as “objective,” not grounded on a system of truth. But of course, they are. For a scientist or technology developer who is a Christian, the interpretation of data will be shaped according to Christian ideas of Creation, humanity, of morality, and of the nature of reality. For someone who starts from different premises, the foundation is different, but it is no more “objective.”

When we talk to a robot, we are talking to something made by people, as the article explains. People have beliefs and agendas that are reflected in the things they make. In the case of BlabDroid, the developer

knows there is a downside to social robots. But he also sees a place for them in the future. He thinks a cute robot might do a better job of getting people to answer survey questions or talk about embarrassing symptoms before seeing a doctor. Reben says “people tend to be more honest because they don’t feel embarrassed telling that to something that’s not human.”

As an artist, what Reben hopes to accomplish with BlabDroid is to force us to think about the implications of bringing more robots into our society knowing full well that they are coming.

One clear assumption here is technological inevitability. There are downsides, but we “know full well that they are coming.” The agenda is equally clear: to override an individual’s reticence about filling out surveys or maintaining privacy.

Evolutionary Buttons

The other interesting thread in the article — one that goes along with the tone of inevitability that always accompanies discussions of technological innovation intruding on human life — is the response by Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor whose books about technology I have enjoyed. Though she is a thoughtful critic of technology’s effects, she comes from an evolutionary perspective:

BlabDroid — with its sweet voice, Mona Lisa smile and probing questions — is “pushing in us a kind of Darwinian button,” Turkle says.

She says robots don’t even have to be cute. In her research she found a child who vented to Apple’s Siri on an iPhone. Turkle says the child would vent on the phone about her anger toward her sister and her parents “because, in person, she tries to always play the good daughter.”

Turkle says over time, the child wasn’t happy.

“There was almost a feeling of abandonment,” Turkle says. “There’s no place they can go after they get the confession.” She says robots can’t offer certain very human things — like care, conversation and empathy. “And the robot cannot do that because the robot has not had a life,” she says.

A Darwinian button? I would call the desires for relationship, connection, and interaction spiritual buttons. Scripture teaches that humans are made in God’s image, and these innate tendencies are reflective of that. Evolution is supposed to favor the strong, to depend on competition for survival. You could probably make a better case for the kind of self-protection that keeps us from sharing too much as “evolutionary.” Making oneself vulnerable in a relationship — which is the tendency being exploited by BlabDroid — isn’t incontrovertibly something that makes one strong. One of the reasons we resist it is that we fear it makes us weaker.

Turkle’s point about abandonment seems also to make more sense from a Christian perspective than a materialistically scientific one. If all we want is to talk, a robot works fine. But we don’t. We need a human, empathetic, discerning response from an Other. This is why conversation with a person is more satisfying, and why prayer is even better. (Even science shows this, but it doesn’t get nearly as much press as the inventions that belong to the fashionable ideology of giddy reliance on technology as the great equalizer and improver of the human condition.)

Idols Can Be Dangerous

The other night, my family watched Ironman 3. I enjoy almost all of the Avengers movies, despite the violence, partly because they explore interesting questions. How do you balance power and freedom? What happens when you wake up the morning after you save the world? How trustworthy are governments, even those with noble motives, and where do they go wrong? Most relevantly, where does our reliance on good things, including technology, cross a line from beneficial to dangerous?

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Hollywood gets this right: megalomaniacs are generally the bad guys. In Ironman 3, the bad guy has some kind of chemical that can override the brain’s pain center and generate miraculous healing. Unless, of course, it malfunctions — which most human inventions tend to do at times — and the person who was just promised that he would be “the next stage of human evolution” meets a spectacular and untimely end.

Our technology giants make exactly the same claim. Take Google, for example. In World Without Mind, Franklin Foer explains its central technological goal, writing that Larry Page sees the development of AI to be

a mission in both the scientific and religious senses of the word. He has built his company so that it can achieve what is called “AI complete,” the creation of machines with the ability to equal and eventually exceed human intelligence. A few years after he launched Google, he returned to give a talk at Stanford, where he and Sergey Brin had birthed their search engine. He told a group of students, “Well, I would say the mission I laid out for you will take us a little while since it’s AI complete. It means its artificial intelligence…. If you solve search that means you can answer any question,which means you can do basically anything.”

…In moments of candor, Page and Brin admit that they imagine going even further than that — it’s not just about creating an artificial brain but welding it to the human. As Brin once told the journalist Steven Levy, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Or as he added on a separate occasion, “Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

Again, as a Christian, I readily see different assumptions at work in both the evolutionary view of humanity and the brain, and the view of knowledge. A Christian mind is of central importance to faith, but the biblical view of its role includes far more than amassing information. Time and again we are urged to gain knowledge and wisdom, which amounts not just to filling a big container with facts, but to using them in ways that cooperate with God’s loving, creative, redeeming work in the world. Humans have a key role in God’s world, and responsible acquisition and use of knowledge contributes to both worship and meaningful, constructive living.

But for those who make the technology that we use every day — indeed, that I’m using to write this post — the contrast in their view of humanity, at least in some cases, couldn’t be more stark. Humans are mere products of evolution. If there is no Creator to whom we are responsible, the “fittest” can sometimes hijack the evolutionary process to inflict their notion of “the next stage”: having a little Google inside our brains.

My point is simple: technology is the idol of our times, and Christians need to be much more thoughtful about how we engage it. Our faith is not reserved for church activities, personal moral standards, a quiet time and a small group. It should be reflected in our approach to every aspect of our lives, including our participation in technological innovation and use. Where is the line between ceding this territory to entities Google, and preserving our God-given humanity in this world?