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Comment by chrsw | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that in the eyes of this Pope or this church, natural born biological humans will always be closer to God or have a higher degree of sanctity than artificial intelligence, any form of technological machine, and presumably artificial "life"?

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AI remains a pile of transistors, no matter how convincing their output is, just like brains remain a pile of neurons, until there is a binding principle that rules them all. This binding principle is what gives us the inner moral compass. Greeks called it monad. Christians called it the spirit or the divine spark. These sparks can't be created except by the God himself, in his own image. Some old monads attempted to create these sparks by other means, to create life from matter in other words, but didn't succeed, although they've created a great variety of unholy quasi-lifeforms.

Yes.

But only closer to their god.

Artificial intelligence has no degree of sanctity at all, because it is dead matter. You have already been confused.

It might have rights despite not being sacred. Since nobody believes robots have an afterlife, I don't see why sanctity would matter, as long as their rights, whatever they be, are respected.

Dead matter does not have rights and can never have any rights.

What if it were alive? If you could not tell it apart from things that you consider alive? And why is being alive necessary to you for it to have rights?

These are things you have to understand in your heart, just like all the important things in life. I cannot communicate it in text to you, because the medium is limited. Meditate on it.

You like all of us have only a limited time of life on this earth, why would you throw away that incredible gift by pursuing untruths?

That particular argument could be used to justify any belief.

Justify? To whom?

The person to whom you were replying.

People be now thinking that calculators should go to heaven, for all the good they brought upon us.

Of course, humans were created in the image of God, according to Christianity.

Secular society is overwhelmingly confused on how it will treat robots.

Christianity has none of that confusion.

AI is created in the image of humans. One could assume a kind of transitivity here.

lol

Christianity is not one thing. I expect that if AGI becomes a real thing, there will be sects that are on the opposite side of that argument.

True, but the point is that they'd have a firm moral foundation for that opinion, as opposed to the secular position, which will be dubious either way, letting it play out in a culture war.

If you are asserring that only Christianity provides a firm moral foundation, I suspect people of many other faiths would disagree.

If it is really an AGI it will have its own set of opinions. It would be quite ironic if the AGI ends up believing that humans are in the image of God, against its own "believers".

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