Our robots, ourselves

In Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg's film AI: Artificial Intelligence David is an android, created in the image of a human boy and designed to provide a couple with an emotional substitute for a gravely ill child. Once the phrase that activates him to love is read to him, David has no choice but to love the activater, even if his love is not reciprocated. Created in the image of God, human beings have decided to "improve" on God's creation by not allowing the imperfections of free will to complicate "loving relations" between made and maker.

Farfetched? It won't seem so after reading Noreen Herzfeld's lucid and thought-provoking exploration of how the image that humans share with God (imago Dei in traditional terminology) may be related to the image that we wish to share with our own creations (by analogy, imago hominis, the image of the human). Herzfeld, doctor of theology and associate professor of computer science at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, identifies three analogous approaches to imago Dei in Christian theology and to imago hominis in AI research.

The first, the substantive ap­proach, relies on an analogy of being. We possess the image of God as a trait or property, commonly thought to be reason, which allows for self-consciousness and self-transcendence. Reinhold Nie­buhr's theological view of the imago Dei serves as Herzfeld's theological example of this typology. The analog in AI--often termed symbolic AI--locates intelligence in mental representations of reality consisting of symbols and rules for manipulating these symbols. Symbolic AI often operates on the premise that "mind" is the software that runs on the hardware brain.