Will the Robopocalypse Threaten Your Soul?

Last week, a Christian college in Matthews, North Carolina unveiled something unprecedented: a humanoid robot whose sole mission is to explore the ethical and theological ramifications of robotics.

Expectations, however, should be managed. The bot in question isn’t a clattering machine assembled in the bowels of Southern Evangelical Seminary & Bible College (SES), pre-loaded with algorithms that compel it to sin or repent on command. It’s a NAO robot, which anyone can purchase (SES reportedly paid $9300). NAOs are already being used in research ranging from bipedal mobility to autism. The two-foot-tall humanoid can walk, dance, speak, and, in this case, act as a kind of conversation starter, inspiring students to contemplate the more advanced models to come.

“When the time comes for including or incorporating humanoid robots into society, the prospect of a knee-jerk kind of reaction from the religious community is fairly likely, unless there’s some dialogue that starts happening, and we start examining the issue more closely,” says Kevin Staley, an associate professor of theology at SES. Staley pushed for the purchase of the bot, and plans to use it for courses at the college, as well as in presentations around the country. The specific reaction Staley is worried about is a more extreme version of the standard, secular creep factor associated with many robots.

“From a religious perspective, it could be more along the lines of seeing human beings as made in God’s image,” says Staley. “And now that we’re relating to a humanoid robot, possibly perceiving it as evil, because of its attempt to mimic something that ought not to be mimicked.”

Welcome to the strange intersection of theology and robotics, where discussions about the appropriate deployment of human-like machines cruise past life and death stakes, and into questions of immortal souls and divine will. It’s a topic that’s been addressed sporadically for years, though by an extremely small group of philosophers, theologians and artificial intelligence researchers. Anne Foerst, a theologian and computer scientist at St. Bonaventure University in New York, has devoted the majority of her career on this topic, and argued that social robots already have souls, by virtue of being invited into the greater human community. Others have used science fiction to examine the God-like menace and allure of intelligent machines. What sets SES apart is its robot. Even if the college’s NAO ultimately functions as a glorified prop, it’s the first attempt to add hardware to the burgeoning discussion.

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Is Time an Artifact of Being the Restricted Observer?

Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first exprimental results to prove it

When the new ideas of quantum mechanics spread through science like wildfire in the first half of the 20th century, one of the first things physicists did was to apply them to gravity and general relativity. The result were not pretty.

It immediately became clear that these two foundations of modern physics were entirely incompatible. When physicists attempted to meld the approaches, the resulting equations were bedeviled with infinities making it impossible to make sense of the results.

Then in the mid-1960s, there was a breakthrough. The physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt successfully combined the previously incompatible ideas in a key result that has since become known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This is important because it avoids the troublesome infinites—a huge advance.

But it didn’t take physicists long to realise that while the Wheeler-DeWitt equation solved one significant problem, it introduced another. The new problem was that time played no role in this equation. In effect, it says that nothing ever happens in the universe, a prediction that is clearly at odds with the observational evidence.

This conundrum, which physicists call ‘the problem of time’, has proved to be thorn in flesh of modern physicists, who have tried to ignore it but with little success.

Then in 1983, the theorists Don Page and William Wooters came up with a novel solution based on the quantum phenomenon of entanglement. This is the exotic property in which two quantum particles share the same existence, even though they are physically separated.

Entanglement is a deep and powerful link and Page and Wooters showed how it can be used to measure time. Their idea was that the way a pair of entangled particles evolve is a kind of clock that can be used to measure change.

But the results depend on how the observation is made. One way to do this is to compare the change in the entangled particles with an external clock that is entirely independent of the universe. This is equivalent to god-like observer outside the universe measuring the evolution of the particles using an external clock.

In this case, Page and Wooters showed that the particles would appear entirely unchanging—that time would not exist in this scenario.

But there is another way to do it that gives a different result. This is for an observer inside the universe to compare the evolution of the particles with the rest of the universe. In this case, the internal observer would see a change and this difference in the evolution of entangled particles compared with everything else is an important a measure of time.

This is an elegant and powerful idea. It suggests that time is an emergent phenomenon that comes about because of the nature of entanglement. And it exists only for observers inside the universe. Any god-like observer outside sees a static, unchanging universe, just as the Wheeler-DeWitt equations predict.

link.  paper link.

So, someone who is outside the universe, all observing, doesn't see squat.  um.  theological problem, maybe?