Wouldn't you stop believing in god after seeing this if you were a Christian? It just proves that we are just machines. Our feelings are just chemical reactions. All someone had to do was a bunch of math to make a program emulate a human.
People can create art.
Machines can create art.
Therefore, people are machines.
But it's true that lots of things have happened in science and engineering over time that have reduced humanity's sense of uniqueness and specialness. And some of those things have also been challenging for traditional religious belief. However, they don't necessarily disprove the religious belief, they just undermine certain intuitions that are highly compatible with it (like that a certain kind of human uniqueness must be a direct consequence of the divine plan).
> All someone had to do was a bunch of math to make a program emulate a human.
Christian theology says that, that "someone" who did it first was God. And,
> It just proves that we are just machines.
fits quite nicely with the idea that creation is subordinate to the Deity that made it.
Or, more snarkily, watch the Matrix.
How so? What is current AI doing that goes beyond the scope or intent of its programming? Are you arguing that DallE, Stable Diffusion and the like have developed souls?
>Or, more snarkily, watch the Matrix.
The Matrix is fiction, they didn't actually develop an AGI for the movies so invoking it in an argument about AI is as pointless as invoking Star Trek in an argument about post-scarcity economics.
There are stages between "literally only process if/else statements" and "has some nebulous concept such as a soul".
You don't define soul, yet you argue using it. And please defend how the algorithms in the Matrix aren't AGI. Do you think Agent Smith is a bunch of if/else statements? No? AGI.
And finally, fiction is an incredible tool for framing concepts. The fact you dismiss them as tools for discussing potential future philosophical concepts is disappointing.
In the theology of Antonio Rosmini, God places within humans the principle of universal being, by which we participate in the light of reason, which enobles us with the ability to think about concepts that are beyond our quite limited selves.
Of course, there is also something mysteriously wrong with human beings, such that our own efforts always betray the infinity of which intuitively conceive. This ought to give us pause as we try to create machines with human-like or super-human-like qualities.