About Learning to Live with Robots
| Authors | Hexham, Irving |
|---|---|
| Date | 1980 |
| Publication | The Christian Century |
| Vol / Pages | Vol. 97 No. 1 pp. 574-578 |
Type: Magazine Article
Tags: Artificial intelligence, atheism, Cybernetics, Ethics, personhood, Religion, robots, society, technicism, Theology
Abstract
Asimov's three laws of robotics in 1941 introduced ethical considerations into discussions about robots. His science fiction represented the vanguard of technological imagination at the time, but not all work depicting robots has assumed benign developments. Science fiction literature and film on robotics has elevated ethical questions: what is a person, and how does this differ from being a robot? What sorts of relations can humans have with robots? Also, what sort of technical control should we exert over both nature and society? Once the nature of this modern technological crisis is realized, we are faced with two alternatives. We can either reject sociotechnics and attempt to stop the development of technical civilization, or we can accept it as inevitable and begin to discover the meaning of humanity and divinity in such a universe. The most important task facing the church today is the development of an orthodox biblical theology adequate to deal with the questions of the sociotechnic person. Article also includes 10 limerick verses (Glorobots) on robots. [A, CJ]