God and Man (and Machine)

The past year or so has seen an incredible explosion about "artificial intelligence" (AI). Much of the discussion has focused on potential threats to humanity from machines - job losses, Terminator-style dystopian fantasies about the rise of SkyNet. Hackers.

Some of these threats seem more real than others (spoiler: the machines do not have to replicate human intelligence; they just have to be good enough. So yes. Most of the jobs of today are in fact at risk.)

But one thing I find intriguing is something not discussed.

What do we owe our creations.

A few years ago, the film Blade Runner was released. It is a movie based on the dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by the science fiction writer Philip K Dick.

The (brief) plot-line is that there is a race of androids called "replicants" that have been engineered with narrowly circumscribed super-human skills. For various reasons, the machines are banned from Earth, in part because (I suspect) of the apparent threats that they pose to people. The anti-hero of the movie is a bounty hunter named Decker (played in the film by Harrison Ford). It is the job of "blade runners" to eliminate any replicants that alight on the earth. In the novel (but not the movie), it is revealed that Decker himself is actually a replicant.

A question posed by the movie and increasingly now in our AI-evolving world is, is it moral for blade runners to hunt and kill replicants? 

What do we owe our creations? 

I’ve not seen the original Blade Runner in several years, but the question of whether it is “morally right” to kill the replicants - and the more existential question about what rights the replicants themselves have - is a terribly complex one in my mind’s eye.

Now, I’ve read some of Philip K Dick’s work. The question of what defines humanity itself is embedded in the story. I don’t recall clearly whether the replicants are in the film are revealed to be fully human, cyborgs (cybernetic organisms - part organic and part mechanical), or fully robots. In the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the “replicants” are mechanical in nature.

It reminds me a bit as well of the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. In that story, also of a dystopian future, human beings have created machines that increasingly simulate human beings. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, the machines are designed to fulfil specific “needs” of people. There are workers, sex robots, and of course, the protagonist of the story, David, who simulates a child for a couple whose natural-born human child is in a coma.

Both stories, to me, raise questions:

What defines humanity? Is it our physical, outward appearance? Our sentience? Our ability to feel (or simulate) emotions and empathy? Is it simply our DNA?

What responsibilities do we as creators owe those things that we create? I think about this from time to time in an eschatological sense - as a believing Christian, we believe that human beings were created by God himself in His image. Other monotheistic religions have similar systems of belief.

If God made man, what does God owe mankind?

The people in both Blade Runner and AI have created nearly perfect simulations of themselves, placed them on the Earth, and have responsibility for them. In some ways, this is similar to the relationship between God and man.

In a purely practical sense, most people accept that it is moral to defend the helpless, and in Blade Runner, Roy (the leader played in the film memorably by Rutger Hauer) has killed a number of people. Some, it could be argued, in defence; others in revenge (e.g., Tyrell, the head of the Tyrell Corporation, who make the replicants). Others for no reason really given (Sebastian, who befriends Roy and Pris). Roy is dangerous to people, some of whom have nothing to do with the creation and mistreatment of the replicants. In this sense, it is arguable that killing Roy is a protective measure, and thus is defensible.

In a larger sense, the issue of whether it is moral to create sentient humanoids simply to serve as slaves with intentionally short lifespans, and who are aware that they will die in approximately five years, must be grappled with.

So it’s a morally ambiguous situation that, beyond asking whether it is moral to kill the replicants, one should ask what responsibility we have to those things we create.

Like it or not, and John Searle to the side, we are getting close to the point where we, like God Himself, are making arguably sentient beings in our own image. So I suspect we should begin to at least think about what our responsibility to our creations might look like.

Long Time Ago, When We Was Fab

Today was my birthday; human beings like to assign significance to events that, outside our need to put things into boxes, put labels on those boxes, and then put the labelled boxes on the shelves in our minds, really have little significance to the world. Dates are human creations that help us track and in some sense fashion a feeling of control. 

We like to say "today, I am a year older." 

In any case, this year was a "big" one, again owing to the arbitrariness of the way we sort and order the world. I am 55 - officially by some measures a "senior." Of course, 55 is not hugely different from 54 or 56, but as human being have five fingers on one hand, and ten in total, we exist in a base-ten universe, so 55 is seen as more important.

Am I "old" now? Not significantly older than I was yesterday, or even a year ago. Much older than when I wrote my first blog post 17 years ago.

I recently was in a discussion in another virtual forum, where I was asked when I first realized I was getting "old." Well, it’s said that age creeps up on you. In my opinion, this is not correct. Getting old is not something like a car overtaking you on the road.

It just….happens.

The forum offered what I found to be interesting answers, but I can say the first time I really felt like I was ‘getting old’ was when I was 43.

43 is a prime number, so it has no real significance in the way that 30 or 40 or 50 do. 43 was well after I graduated from college, had my first job, first home. It was after I got married and after my son was born.

Whilst all of those things made me fell like an adult, none made me feel old.

The clear, obvious emergence of mortality is the thing that jolted me into the reality of age.

When I was 43 years old, I received news that a friend from college, a good guy named Ben, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma. I am an epidemiologist, and had done some projects in this area, so I was aware of the numbers.

I remember writing here at the time about Ben and his diagnosis:

When our son was a toddler, his favourite book was an illustrated book of Mother Goose rhymes; among them was the tale of a Packet, captained by a duck. The fantastical ship in the story is "laden with pretty things." We read the book through together so many times that it became dog-eared and the binding eventually came apart. Even as a three-year-old, he could repeat the rhymes just by looking at the pictures.

I was thinking about this little rhyme this morning when I read the postings of an old college friend who last night went in for neurosurgery to remove a tumour from his brain. Ben, a classmate of mine, had been on the baseball team with me at Dartmouth as well as a singer in the Dartmouth Aires, a quite competitive a cappella singing group. Ben apparently had a seizure and was admitted to hospital, where the tumour was found.

Like Ben, I am 43 years old - not at terrible risk for mortality, but certainly entering the age where it is becoming obvious that we need to pay attention to our health if we are not already. Personally, I took up running 20 years ago following my first wake-up call - the death of my own father from cancer.

There is a less-than famous quote to the effect that in life, the only ship that is guaranteed to come in is a black one. Rich and poor; famous and obscure; powerful and powerless - we all await the same fate.

I had of course seen death before. As noted, my father died of lung cancer in 1994, when I was still in school. I had a classmate at Dartmouth who shot himself. Another drowned canoeing on the Connecticut River.

When I was in grad school, at one point I considered jumping off a bridge. So death was not really a strange or “old man” concept.

But these were different.

Ben responded to his initial surgery and treatment, but the cancer returned a couple of years later, and he was unable to beat it the second time.

More than a decade has now passed, and in the subsequent years, I’ve obviously gotten older. Age and knee problems have forced me to stop running. My son, then a young kid, grew up and is now in college in another state. My older brother died last year.

All of these make it clear that I am not young now.

But finding out the fate of my friend Ben, whom I remember as a young guy playing first base at Dartmouth was when I was awakened to the fact that I am getting old.