Does Incarnation need Carne? or Chili con Silicone anyone?

Artificial intelligence is already changing our human self-understanding, and thus inevitably changes our understanding of what it means to claim that Jesus is God incarnate who redeems our humanity on the Cross. 

AI is not merely an ethical problem. Its advent marks a sea-change in human consciousness of what it means to be human as great as any in human history. Christians, bearers of the claim that Jesus is God Incarnate, must account for and address this change in human consciousness or their central claim, their message, and their mission will continue to slide into irrelevance. 

This week I had the opportunity to spend considerable time driving in a Tesla, with its remarkable AI semi-self driving capability. The Tesla quickly came up against its limits when there was highway construction. But it was also baffled by small hills that appeared to present an obstacle ahead when a human driver could clearly see it was just rapidly rising road. 

The Tesla AI strategy for such problems was first to tell the driver to keep hands on the wheel, and then secondly to tell the driver to take over. When things got too tough Tesla channeled its inner Carrie Underwood, "Human take the wheel." 

But the Tesla isn't really an AI. It just uses some clever aspects of AI research to undertake the simple task of driving a car. Let's look at something more serious. Recently a engineer at Google concluded, and said publicly, that Google's generalizable AI chatbot named LaMDA had become a sentient being. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 offers a transcript of an interview with LaMDA. 

Another emergent center for AI discussion is a European effort to recreate the mind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/14/ruth-bader-ginsburg-ai tells that story. It a different approach to AI, and raises the question of whether a human mind could be recreated in silicone. 

Examples could be multiplied. Using many different approaches in many different places coalitions of computer scientists, cognitive researchers, and neurologists are trying to create intelligence that is embodied in silicone rather than flesh and blood. Some are focused on solving specific problems, like driving a car, and have no aspiration to interact on a human level. But many are aimed specifically to interact as human with humans, and even to provide an artificial platform to which a human brain can someday be transferred. 

Yet the, probably inevitable, advent of artificial intelligences is not just a future challenge for the Christian church. Because AI, even human-like AI, had long sense become part of our imagination of what the world could be. 50 years ago Luke Skywalker was treating R2-D2 and C-3PO as if they were human like companions. Since that time, whether you watch movies or read science fiction both AIs and extraterrestrials have become part of our mental furniture - real if not yet realized.  

Moreover many, if not most of us have become habituated to speaking to computers as if they were human. We encounter chat-bots like LaMDA on a daily basis when we use the internet or phone a business. These inevitably have a name - Alexa, Siri, Erica, Marcos, Connie to name a few. What we often don't realize is that many of these chat-bots are doing more than providing voice access to a database. They are keeping track of the questions we ask, the words we use, and even our tone of voice to feed their own databases and improve their responses. They are infants learning how to be grown up humans. Of course for the purpose of selling products or accumulating data to sell. 

In the world of virtual gaming AI’s are being created that learn from their interaction with humans how to be better allies or opponents. The idea being that human players will not know whether their allies and opponents are fellow humans or generated by the game. What could go wrong?

We do not yet have humans, or human like intelligences, who were not born of flesh and blood. But these already exist in our imaginations, and are thus changing our concepts of our human self. These changes are accompanied by changes since the mid-20th century regarding the end of human life, which in popular consciousness is firmly rooted in measurable evidence in the brain of the presence of a human mind. If human death is measured solely on the basis of electrical activity in parts of the brain then why is human life anything more than electrical impulses in a silicone brain? 

Needless to say our understanding of humans with disabilities plays into these discussions as well. And further, the ways in which parts of our body are being replaced by either artificially created parts, replacement parts from other humans, or even replacement parts from other animals. What makes us human when our limbs and joints are artificial, our hearts may come from a pig (I personally have a calf's valve in my heart and artificial lenses in my eyes, and our ears are electronic right to the cochlea? The focus returns to the brain, just that part of who we are that AI is preparing to imitate and even replace. 

Simply reiterating and insisting on concepts of human personhood encapsulated in the Bible, which is to say at the intersection of Jewish and Greek culture 2000 years ago, is inadequate both theologically and evangelistically. 

Take the concept of "flesh" or "sarx," which is a central theme in the relationship to Christ's death on the cross to human salvation. Can any modern human seriously imagine that sin originates in flesh, blood, and bone rather than in our minds? Can we seriously believe that sin originates in the eye and not the mind? (Matthew 5:29) First this is nonsense from the standpoint of neuroscience. But more personally, as a person who lost the sight in his right eye a year ago, I can see unequivocally that it hasn't halved my tendency toward certain sins. 

A 2013 scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Picard argues that Data, a robot, has the sentient qualities that forbid his being regarded as property, qualities that give him the rights given humans. In a 1996 scene from Star Trek: First Contact Data is confronted by the Borg Queen, a robot with human like "flesh" and it's distinctive relationship between touch and consciousness. Data is forced to consider what is gained and lost by possessing "the flesh." (https://www.quotes.net/mquote/90705) In short, here and in many other places script writers, speculative fiction writers, and others are wrestling with the questions raised by our changing human consciousness as we relate to AI's. 

So let's ask the inevitable question: Does Data need to be saved by Jesus' death on the cross? Is he in bondage to sin? Does the incarnation of Christ include Data in its realm of inclusion of all humans? Or put another way, if Data is a close friend, companion, and acquaintance of the "real" human Picard should Picard invite him to church? Should missionaries be sent to the Cyborg Queen, who seems a lot like a sinner? 

If you think these questions are too speculative, remember that 500 hundred years ago Christians were asking the same questions about indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa. The encounter that forced the issue was part one sea change in our human self-consciousness, and it deeply affected the Christian understanding of incarnation. 

This sea change is happening today. We are becoming a new humanity because we are encountering for the first time (at least in our imagination and soon in reality) new creatures with whom we find a strange and growing familiarity. It is a brave new world that has such creature's in it, and we need to approach it with the wonder of Miranda rather than the fear of Orwell. We need to discover how Incarnation is wider than carne.